It is “self against the self,” long before the involvement of any team dynamics. More often than not, upon our failure to reach our goals — finding ourselves locked down by ailment, bad weather, or otherwise bad luck — there is nothing to do but breathe, sleep, fiddle with gear, babble, or simply stare at your trail-soiled companion. You either find your soul in rallying the grit and fortitude for a second attempt, or terminate the endeavour altogether.

Our dreams are key to our adrenal adventures — picturing oneself on a challenging summit, overlooking a breathtaking ridge while hanging by a cold and sharp tool, on the morning after the achievement, soaking in the view of a sunlit cloud floor below. To those who understand the allure of the dangerous, and the powers of nature, dreams are our torture when trapped in our home or office setting. This much I’ve learned.

Those dreams attach themselves to experiences, of sorts. There is a particularly ironic satisfaction to be derived from the upward struggles of day-to-day life as we dream of risk, and risk “is the knife that pares away life’s trivia...” as Twight composes it. We dream of facing the unattainable, and attaining the absolute simplicity on the mountain. That's what we love. When climbing, the mind becomes free from confusions and we have focus. Vision becomes sharper, the audible things richer, and we're filled with the deep, powerful presence of life. So dreams take us to initiative; we learn by application, and individual spirit takes us toward resoluteness…and eventually over the threshold of The Edge.

It is perhaps a common mistake of many adventurers to recount their most difficult mountain encounters as definitive and perceivable. Does one ever truly come to know “the mountain,” when in reality it is the gatekeeper we are so avidly coming to know? Nature surrounds us, and we are its guests when on our adrenal missions. While on our undertakings to defy The Edge, if we were all in a state of total reality each time we “borrowed” a summit, we would halt in humility. To be in defiance of The Edge means just this — that we recognize the mountain as unconquerable in its essence, but in our pursuits to fulfill our adrenal appetites (and our desires to advance the human spirit), we are in fact only conquering…ourselves.