If someone had said to me only five years ago, “Let’s go climb three miles up a mountain in the snow,” I would have laughed heartily, flipped him off gleefully, and went on my merry way. But there, on the third day of our trip, I found myself doing just that. I suppose it began with what might be considered a misunderstanding. Two people, while making their Match.com profiles both marked the box that said that they liked hiking. However, that word, “hiking,” has many different connotations. For the woman, “hiking” meant something along the lines of “a nice jaunt through the forest occasionally, preferably with a picnic lunch at the end.” For the man it meant something like, “hauling ass up steep mountains, the more perilous the better.” You can see where the misunderstanding comes from. However, as it has been said, love will make you do crazy things. But I don’t just mean love of each other, which was certainly my motivation at the beginning, but love of the thing itself. It is amazing to me, but I have actually begun to fall in love with the feeling that I get from the hard work and rewards of a really good climb. However, at times, the fact that this relationship I have with climbing mountains can be a love-hate relationship is exposed. Continue reading “An Unlikely Mountain Climber”
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