Jeff Lowe
For me, one of the attractions simply is the variety of interests that climbing serves. In the Himalayas, it's the traveling, the different cultures you experience, the friends you make around the world. On the wall in the gym, it's the feeling of fitness, it's more exciting than pumping iron and motivates you to keep working out.Collection: Fitness
The idea of metanoia returns again and again in my life. The purpose of life is to see what you do when challenges come your way, and the value in that experience is seeing how you handle those challenges.Collection: Experience
I used to think aging was a scam, a total abdication of your self. Well, aging's not a scam, but quitting is.
More than five decades of hands grated by cracks. Whole body aching from long days of big-wall hauling. Tiny tents, bivy sacs, snow caves lashed by hurricane sleet. Frozen fingers and toes. Migraines and altitude malaise. Not knowing what's to come. It doesn't have to be fun to be fun.
I never did end up getting any skills that are marketable in a traditional sense, but I have used my knowledge of the mountains, and I have no regrets.
I have always felt that no climb is worth losing the tip of a little toe.
I mean any fool can hurl themselves at a climb that is beyond their abilities to safely negotiate. You may get away with such an approach nine times, but the tenth time you don't come back.
Being willing to risk it all for any given climb will inevitably end at some point in disaster.
Many climbers use the term 'objective hazard; to denote something they aren't to be held accountable for. I held myself accountable for the mistakes I made over the years.
I was great at testing products at 20,000 feet, but talking them up to buyers? No, not really.
Eight-man teams drilling expansion bolts in rocks? Sorry, that's not climbing - that's engineering.
I've always pushed my body way too hard, gone days without eating at 20,000 feet, and caught every exotic bug that didn't kill me.
I always thought if I died in the mountains, it would put an asterisk on my climbs.
The challenges of adventure, rock climbing and alpinism trained me well for dealing with the slow neurodegenerative malady I'm experiencing.
You can base your life in fear or you can base your life in love. Fear leads to negative results even in times that are basically good. On the other hand, love powers the universe.
I've chosen to live my life in love and that has made even the most trying times beautiful experiences.
I think part of my business problems stemmed from a feeling that I had to be more than a good climber, that I had to do something more 'meaningful.' And that may come from my father.
I could have saved my marriage if I had chosen to. But when I was forced to take a new look, I realized, 'Hey, it's not what I really want - it's a weird thing, but climbing is still at the center.'
I think I know now that you can't do this sort of climbing and have a domestic side. You're not a practicing father if you're not there. You're maybe a visiting father.
For me there's no future. All I'm interested in is now.
My awareness left my body and ego, and went on a grand tour of the cosmos.
I will still probably die of aspiration-caused pneumonia. I can go along breathing well, then I might aspirate on something, develop pneumonia and be gone in a week.
A friend once told me that I was always so manipulative, 'a silver-tongued devil,' as he put it. I was never aware of it.
I used to think that my business mirrored my climbing - if I wasn't failing at something, I just wasn't trying anything hard enough.
Mom would pack our lunch and send us off with no supervision. There were enough of us so that if she lost a few, there would still be plenty left.
It went way beyond just sex with Catherine. It was more like recognizing a time of shared destiny of our souls. We were both born to climb, and we each glimpsed the possibility of the perfect partner in the other.
Hunters get lost all the time. There's just an outcry against climbers because a lot of people don't understand climbers and they think they're crazy.
Climbing is a cross between an athletic or sporting endeavor and the spiritual. I hope it remains that way.
I can see the time coming when I won't need to be out there in the upper pyramid of climbing, but the things you gain from a lifetime of climbing are worth communicating.
Climbing is wildly diverse, ranging from the rock-climbing wall at the local health club to the cutting edge of major Himalayan Alpine ascents.
I may have had some symptoms as early as 1998 - dizziness, vision problems, balance. Anyway, it's been a progression, it hasn't stopped since I first noticed it. Each year there is a considerable decline.
I hate big shots of adrenaline. It means you don't have enough margin.
I'm not a big adrenaline junkie.
Sometimes I spent more time planning a climb than doing it.
We as mountaineers have had a leading role in the destruction of the mountain wilderness environment that we practice our sport in.
Wall climbing is an offshoot of the more traditional sport of mountain climbing. It is very difficult; one must combine a great deal of stamina with the ability of a world-class gymnast.
I've been mistagged. I like ice climbing, but I do a lot more rock climbing. Ice is just more mysterious and changeable than rock.
I still value the adventurous side, confronting the mountain on its terms, more than I value actual success in terms of getting to the top. That has very little meaning to me.
The kind of climbing I like is fast and as free as possible of gadgetry.
You have to have a lot of experience and confidence and a willingness to go down when things aren't right and try again. That's when people in the Himalayas get hurt, when they don't have the knowledge or willingness to retreat when necessary. There's no place for a macho attitude in the Himalayas. It's what gets people killed.
It's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. The greatest risk of injury is knocking off a piece of ice with your pick and having it fall on your forehead.
The climb will go. Get rid of the rope. It's only distracting you.Collection: Rope
If you're concentrating on climbing , you can't be concentrating on money and cars and houses and wives and boyfriends. And when you come back to deal with them, you have a better view of their reliative importance. Climbing puts things in perspective again.Collection: Climbing
The architecture or look fo a line is really important to me, and often ice can add something to the look of the wall. A dry rock wall is often not very dramatic. You add ice and snow and the features stand out in greater relief and it looks much wilder.Collection: Wall