Mountaineering

My Summits:

Sometime in the first year or two after we moved to Camp Pendleton my college roommate, Marco Serna, sent me an email with a link to a Mt. Whitney webpage and suggested it would be fun to climb.  I read the website and for the next several years harbored a desire to climb Mt. Whitney, if none of the requisite experience or equipment.  Finally, as I was leaving Camp Pendleton to move to Monterey in 2005, I applied the trip-planning organizational skills developed through captaining two 24-hour bike race teams to bringing together a Mt. Whitney expedition.  I bought MTFOTH, the mountaineer's bible and read it cover to cover.  I read every website I could find about mountaineering in general and Mt. Whitney in particular.  Once we got on the mountain, especially above 10,000 feet, I found myself in awe of the deep blue sky, pure white snow, and excruciating pain of overexertion at altitude. 

That was when I noticed the "suffering multiplier", which is applied to the beauty, majesty, or enjoyment of an experience based on the suffering required of that experience (I would say this involves the economic concept of diminishing marginal utility).  So, if you drive to a scenic overlook, and it is beautiful, you get a multiplier of 1 (unless you had an eight-hour drive or something, I suppose) because it didn't take much effort to get there.  The more you suffer for an experience, the higher the multiplier.   Climbing a mountain applies a pretty good multiplier to the experience for me, because it hurts me a lot, probably because I don't live at altitude and don't have the time to do many training hikes.  On the other end of experience (things you don't want to do for fun) I believe this works as well.  But I digress...

References:

Buy and read Mountaineering, The Freedom of the Hills.  It is the quintessential introduction to mountaineering.

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Last Modified: 17 Mar 2008