I seek solitude, myself mainly introverted with an obtuse personality that seeps when comforted. A consistent head fog looms like clouds until I have time to converse with myself. With a busy life juggling friend groups, individuals, a significant other, and the mountain of busywork that comes with an individual's life, it all becomes very hard to be truly in solitude. Maybe that's why hiking skipped over most of my other hobbies, it was easy to do alone. Problem is that modern hiking and climbing culture has a lot of focus on community, of course I can refuse to participate but I try not to in efforts of giving it the benefit of my doubt. When I join in on these communities with their diverse established cliques I introduce myself (In my opinion the most boring part of any phase of a relationship), talk and gag with them, belay and be ask to be. Despite all this, I end up in glee the moment I'm able to confide in myself. From these kinds of thoughts, the outdoors provides different outlets of experimenting with your own solitude, typically at the cost of your safety. Auto-belays ,Top Rope Solo, Lead Rope Solo, Free Solo, Solo Through-Hike, Solo Mountaineering, all sound interesting to those who can't find a partner who's free or someone who prefers their own company. I felt as if this was the route I would take
When on the last stretch of my 1st summit of Mt of the Holy Cross, my friends and I stood silent on the delicate alpine terrain. At least for me, out of a combination of awe and exhaustion, there was spiritual peace to be found up on the alpine, there was solitude. Frail mountain flowers wavered in their nests of scree, marmots and pika squee and point, mountain goats prance and observe, clouds billow and race above the eyes giving a sense of exposure like none before, all of these senses lead me to a spiritual bliss where I am unable to speak. Even the antithesis of this, Raging winds and torrential downpour upon a jagged ridgeline, dense snow that muffles waves and catched you above the waist, and the fact its you against your objective leaves me with a sense of longing.I figured to be upon the alpine with respect is to be in solitude
And so there lies times in my life where the streets and planes are too loud, the chatter in a hall of people, smoke and sirens behind lame conversation wither soul. Dissociation of your environment as if the film keeps reeling the awkward complacency of everything that happened after interesting times. A need for detachment and a parlay for another trip. My winter has been stacked and my largest and most difficult solo trip was coming up, and however in my want of solitude, I had the feeling I'd be different. A feeling that had crept upon me under Upper Peninsula nights, not of nervousness, not of fear, but of Loneliness?
The plan was a winter expedition to summit that very mountain that revealed to me the essence of what solitude meant to me. Five days of supplies for five days of hiking, route finding, and scrambling. Yet despite my preparations, there lied the seed of doubt that I had experienced before. As night came the moonless dark watered this seed. What compels me to search for solitude but to only find loneliness at the dusk of a day's work. In definition the terms “solitude” and “loneliness” seem alike, but in the dark, in the small of the space I nestle in, I could really only feel alone. It's a testament to self actualize feelings once I have said or read them out loud, as if the cymatics bring minor feats of epiphany in neurons. It just so happens that its also a testament to a real mountaineering trip when you have to say to yourself out loud “What the fuck am I doing here”, this statement is almost never a question. I persevered and continued on for three more days, with ideal conditions and although lagging in pace it would have been possible to finish my winter summit by rationing my supplies. At the end of the third day I realized it was futile, unnecessary to summit. I would prepare a luxurious camp and comfort myself. Eager to get back home I scaled down in a day and got back to Denver.
Contemplating on the trip afterward left me with a singing brand of an impression. Maybe the antithesis to what I had thought I needed. A partner
Nineteenth-century mountaineering in the United States combined both a sense of national manifest destiny and a quest for personal transcendence. Less important was any particular sense of comradeship among climbers.
Climbers went out on their own, or with random associates, but the experience was an individual one. John Muir, who did most of his climbing solo, once declared, “No mountaineer is truly free who is trammeled with friend or servant, who has the care of more than two legs. Between 1900 and 1946, climbing took on an additional meaning: a social vision centered on the ideal of a “brotherhood of the rope,” the intense bonds of comradeship and trust that developed among climbers who relied upon one another for both safety and success. There were good reasons why, in the nineteenth century, no one talked about a brotherhood of the rope. Ropes were haphazardly deployed and sometimes, as in the fatal case of the Matterhorn climbers in 1865, represented as much a threat to climbers as a source of security. But in the first half of the twentieth century, the climbing rope became the most important tool and the moral core of the mountaineering endeavor. When Robert Underhill, who played a significant role in raising the standards of alpinism among his countrymen, wrote in 1931 that the climbing rope transformed “an individualistic into a higher social enterprise,” it was just two years after the stock market crash of 1929 and just ten years before Pearl Harbor.2
Like their fellow Americans, the greatest generation of American mountaineers confronted the challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War. For American mountaineers, the higher social enterprise of mountaineering offered the satisfaction of demonstrating mastery over a danger-filled natural world, “standing solidly together, under stress, for a common cause,” at a moment when the economic and political worlds sometimes seemed to be spinning, fatalistically, out of human control.