Mountain climbing is extended periods of intense adrenaline, interrupted by occasional moments of sheer terror.

Yep, I climb mountains. Who else wants to join me?

Mountaineer Ed Sklar says, “Climbing may be hard, but it’s easier than growing up.“

So right now, my playgrounds are “14 & 15ers.” Mountains with altitude over 14,000 and 15,000 ft.

Maybe, just maybe, you haven’t really lived until you are swaying and scrambling for footing on a crumbling ledge an inch wide while fighting vertigo and panic looking straight down at a thousand foot sheer drop.

Mountains named Columbia, Princeton and Whitney have provided me more than a fair share of adrenaline and sheer terror.

The biggest adrenaline rush for me, so far, was a solo summit without technical gear of 14,077 ft. Mt Columbia on her, as one guide book calls it, “very steep and unpleasant” west slope.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngaje Ngai’, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.“

Perhaps Jack Keruoac in the Dharma Bums provides an answer to the leopard’s quest: “Pain or love or danger makes you real again….”

I suppose that is why I climb mountains, because I’m a child in a man’s body wanting to be real again.

Again in the words of  Kerouac, “to me a mountain is a buddha. think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.”

Words pale in describing the intense feelings at the top of these mountains. You stand there, heart pounding like thunder, sweat dripping like raindrops, body shivering with ecstasy—on top of the world.

And for the briefest of moments, you feel real again.

Mountain climbing does that for me. I’m sure its something different for you.

Question: What about you? What makes you feel real?

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