Mountains and Volcanoes

Or, how framing the narrative makes all the difference

I’ve had two separate experiences in the mountains in the last month, and it seems to me that the difference between my emotional reaction(s) to them is worth pondering. As I’ve thought about these two experiences that elicited very distinct reactions from me, it’s become clear to me that it all hinges on how you manage expectations. To put it in a way that’s more in keeping with what I’ve been writing here these past fourteen months, it’s about how you frame the narrative.

Both my experiences were led by guides, but my mission here is not to compare and contrast the guiding but to examine my reactions. So I’m only going to refer to these as Experience #1 and Experience #2.

Experience #1: Planned four years ago and postponed multiple times, as with so many things during the pandemic, this was a trip to achieve a mountaineering goal that seemed within reach for both me and my husband, with the proper training. (Since I’m only going to write about my own reactions, I’m going to just use the first-person pronouns from now on.) The goal would have been a psychological stretch for me, as in recent years I’ve taken to getting a bit nervous around heights and narrow places. Physically, I felt confident I could do what would be needed of me, and in fact I was looking forward, year after postponement year, to what would be this Big Test. It should be clear by now to anyone who’s followed The Entropy Hotel that I tend to go from Big Test to Big Test (tests I set for myself because I find I function best as a creative person and as a writer when I have these physical endeavors to give my life shape). I felt I needed this particular Big Test as it would be bigger than anything else I’d ever done. And it would truly challenge me psychologically to move through a couple of spots on a mountain that would involve some meaningful–to me–exposure.

So I trained specifically for this goal in the winter of 2019, and again through the winter of 2020, and again through. . . you get the picture. To be honest, my winter training became a little less enthusiastic with each iteration, but I still felt (and I think I was right) that I had the physical side of this potential achievement within my grasp.

But as the time approached, and specifically as we began our guided adventure, I felt quite clear that I was not ready. Not only psychologically, but more in terms of the physical risk I was willing to undertake—which may in fact come down to the same thing. I felt I was a bit of an impostor, someone playing at being the mountaineer I’d need to be to really belong on that route on that mountain. And that’s not a good mental place to be in if you’re going to try do do a Big Test.

It turned out that the guides seemed to feel the same way about all six of us in our climbing group, and so the goal we had set out to achieve was taken off the table. We still had chances at two other summits. Alas, in each case, we were turned back by weather.

I never got the Big Test I’d been hoping for–not in the perhaps inappropriately difficult original goal, and not in the two other options either. As the trip wound down, I didn’t know what to do with myself, emotionally. I felt at loose ends, and frustrated, and aimless. I went on a solo easy hike on the last day and moved as fast as I could, nearly turning it into a trail run, just to tire myself out a little bit. And that’s when I realized something: I don’t crave adrenaline, like the proverbial adrenaline junkie. I crave exhaustion. What I love about the Big Test is the way it offers the crest of a wave of fatigue that can take weeks (or months) to build, and then subsides. That pattern of building and subsiding, effort and comfort, is something that’s been central to how I go through life since as long as I can remember. I was the kid who enjoyed being outside and getting super cold and uncomfortable, because then I could take comfort in the coziness of coming indoors. Hence for me, the Big Test serves as a kind of gravitational pull that shapes the tide of my ebbing and waning comfort.

In Experience #1, I missed my chance to have that exhaustion and relief. But here’s the thing: on the face of it, that experience could easily have offered that emotional response. There were tall metal ladders to climb up and down in crampons. There were steady very high winds. There was frostnip. There was an abrasion to my right cheek from the scour of wind-driven ice. There were 12,000 feet of altitude and the smelliest but also weirdly most scenic refuge-hut “toilets” I have ever experienced. It was the narrative–my own parsing of the experience–that wasn’t shaped right. And yes, the guides in question had a role in managing expectations. But ultimately we have ourselves to blame or give credit to for our own psychology. And I didn’t frame the narrative for myself as well as I could have at the time.

Experience #2: This, too, was going to be a Big Test in that I would be doing an activity I am extremely comfortable in but in a setting unlike anything I’d done before: ski touring up (and down) volcanoes. That experience has just ended, and I find myself utterly elated with every aspect of it. Unlike with Experience #1, I never felt I might be an impostor. I embarked on the adventure with confidence, and that confidence bred the excitement that could shift smoothly to the elation I feel now.

The experience also, it turned out, involved one Big Test. On the second ski day of the trip, our group ascended higher and higher up a volcano under blue skies but steady wind–wind that grew stronger and stronger, especially at a point where turning back would involve much greater difficulty than continuing up. [Side note: when you skin uphill on skis, or hike up in ski boots equipped with crampons while you carry your skis on your pack, the transition back to skis for descent can be tricky. It’s not necessarily something you want to do while perched on a 32-degree slope of snow.] At one point, while waiting for our group to gather up again, we had to lie against the slope of the volcano, face down against the icy snow, while the wind pummeled down at us from the summit.

With the wind so loud we could mostly only signal to each other, we resumed moving in something called the alpine crawl, which is exactly what you might imagine: crawling straight uphill, crampons digging into the ice and ski-pole-gripping fists punching into holds. Eventually, on a flat spot, we were able to leave our ski-loaded packs behind and continue crawling to the summit. When we reached the top, we gasped in some surprise lungfuls of volcanic gasses, took some photos while sitting or lying face down on the snow. Following hand signals in the raging wind, we then made our careful way back to the packs, put on our skis, and headed down.

As this was early in our trip, I didn’t question our safety in that situation. I simply thought that this was the standard expectation–that our outings every day would be tough, steep, challenging like this. I also assumed that everybody else (for whom such trips were not new) was calm about our progress, and so I too felt calm. (I mean, let’s be clear: I didn’t move an inch without focusing on every muscle involved, but I wasn’t really afraid.) I took comfort in our guide’s statement at one point during the ascent that conditions were “miserable but not dangerous”. 

I’ve gone into detail on Experience #2 to make a point. Because my expectations were managed–by myself and by the guide–I had a frame for the narrative. And that frame was: you can do this and it’s fine, it’s just going to be uncomfortable, and it’s going to be epic–and it’s going to earn you a ski descent on a volcano in gorgeous afternoon light on a blue-sky day. Even though our first few turns were on a surface of mottled bulletproof ice, and the ice added its noise to the roar of the wind, and we had to ski at first crouched low so as not to be blown off course–even though there was all of this, I was absolutely deliriously happy. Instead of anxiety and fear, then redirection and disappointment, as in Experience #1, I had confidence and calm and elation.

So, how can we frame our narratives to give us the best chance at elation instead of disappointment? Can we use Big Tests to create for ourselves waves of fatigue/discomfort that we can ride into relief? And–an important side to this–how can we watch out for narratives that don’t help us, even when they’re framed as positive? For instance, that day of crazy wind on the first volcano, there were risks, and it is possible we should have turned back. An injury in those conditions would have been difficult. The length of the ascent did push us into twilight by the time we reached the base. It could have gone badly. In that situation, perhaps the better narrative was not my steady trust in onward (and upward) progress, but another turn back like those in Experience #1. In the mountains, it has to be possible to construe turning back as success.

But we didn’t turn back and I have zero regrets or second-guesses. My narrative that I was safe was perhaps touching right up against the very edge of another narrative that I was at great risk. (A slip could lead to a fall, could lead to a broken leg, and so on.) I think when we take on any Big Test-like endeavor, we are dealing with this fine line between narratives. And it’s fear that drives which side of the line we end up on. Fear can be irrational, sure, but it can also be simply another form of wisdom.

We can’t ever really know whether the fear we heed or the fear we ignore is correct. Sadly, often tragically, the putative correctness of our psychology has little to do with the real consequences of our actions in Big Test situations.

This makes it all the more important, I think, to be as realistic a narrator of your own story as you can, in physical contexts but also in creative ones and plain-old life ones. To have a clear-eyed yet evolving understanding of what’s your limit, what’s your Big Test, what’s going to offer you the exhaustion you need (if you roll that way), and what’s the comfort you require. It’s good to be a bit imaginative with our aspirations. Otherwise they wouldn’t be aspirations. But the real challenge is to see the truth of a situation as best you can–and then find where the Big Test is for you that you can surf safely into elation.