In verdure and bloom, spring brings a shrugging off of long worn ermine coats and an unfettering from the frozen shackles of ice and snow.

Mike falls to the ground...

In a gray brown autumn the clouds hung low in the damp air...

During the morning we lounged between climbs like lizards in the hazy sun...

When I am in the mountains, I need not dream about them, but they somehow still manage to invade my dreams. The line between dream and reality may fade into oblivion, but the line to the summit is clear as day.

That’s how I found myself in a sport climbing paradise leading 5.6 on jugs and bizarre chickenhead formations when I really wanted to be ruining my fingertips on 5.11 crimps.

The line between this world and, and what? Without knowing the line becomes both exhilarating and terrifying. Like the red button you mustn’t press - yet you can’t resist. We know no good can come of it, but still we persist.

He has earned it all, a guide’s badge and a company... He has everything every guide hopes for.

At four pitches up I’m miserable, the Fruit-Cup wall is a water fall and I’m a sitting duck.

Don’t ever trust a rope. I know you have, hell, I have too. But never trust it again. It will lie with its coils. It is bold and audacious, but so are the best liars...

Around three thousand meters it wears a thick white cloud skirt, but above that layer a thousand meters of seemingly virgin brilliant white slope ends in a partly stony suave summit.

I wonder how many more will be lost to this. All that have failed have been given the final kiss. Lives are scattered beneath the face, broken hopes of those who lost the race.

My Sportivas were a bit leaky and I felt a bit under-dressed...

I hope you don’t mind me mailing, but I found your address on the net and was wondering if you could help.

Me, my standards are even lower. I’m looking for someone to hold the other end of a rope.

When we were students, the mountains were an obsession, no, a religion for us...

The 'Electro-Goths' head into the tempest, tempted by unclimbed ice...

I didn’t set out to break the First Commandment of Ice Climbing: Thou shall not fall.

Right ski, left ski, right ski, left ski, again and again, I move, exhausted.

Every time I miss the thin ledge, every time. And now dense blue sky pushed around, hiding the ledge, and everything else, but it was wired, it was going.

We should have just turned around, Freddie. But we'd invested a lot of energy to get that far. Neither one of us wanted to admit that the best decision was to go home...

Here at our wind scorned, wintered mother's perch...

While I lowered to the ground, a local man took an extraordinarily keen interest in our equipment...

Fragments of a diary written in darkness, wearing gloves.

This may be the most breath-taking moment...

We were segregated resistors of a practice fed by the virtuality of Internet videos and foreign magazines...

We have perfected the art of the "Alpine Blitz."

The only thing you are looking for is some kind of perspective away from people who are concerned.

We both shouted expletives that began with "holy" and I quickly glanced back toward the rock to better position myself.

After mantling onto the ledge and clipping in, my partner hands me two nuts. “These both fell out,” he says.

The Scene: Approximately 2 PM at about 18,500 ft. above Denali's Orient Express.

Turning around? No sir!

Hands and face gnarled by a sun that has shone down and then back up for most of his life, pre-cancers pop up like bi-monthly crops to be frozen off at the mercy of his dermatologist.

Ames is having no luck waving down cars at midnight on Mexico-85 on a Friday in late August, and it’s because he’s using the one handed wave. I teach him the two handed wave with a headlamp in each hand, and in a few minutes a white minivan pulls over.

Ten feet above my last peice, I wedged my weary carcass in a left leaning airy chimney and looked for a place to die.

Admit it or not, the majority of us live vicariously through the stories of great climbs and epics and as armchair mountaineers we climb higher, faster, and two grades harder than in reality.

A tiny white void — a kind of cosmic tumbleweed bouncing north on the Ruth glacier, an isolated sphere of humanity in close orbit to the earth. I see only white, I hear my own deep breaths interrupted by great, rumbling crashes from either side of the invisible gorge like massive, curling waves against a rocky shore somewhere out there.

Chapped hands shook, sunscreen burned my eyes, the curve of the earth rolled out before us.

You reach the crux, scrub away the myth of "what if" and find fragile footprints, a small voice pulling you up.

But I cannot forget how you made it down too by your own navigation of the night sky, or how we embraced in the dark there at the base.

Tomorrow, early, he would push with all his strength for the summit, but tonight he would sway under the stars by a thread and ignore the world below.

If I end up with another climbing partner who turns out to be a “people person” I’m going to rip their head off.

We'd both wanted to do it. We lay there on the ground, shivering in the night air as much from fear as the cold.

Instinct darkens my mind, must keep going...

Another morning. Another hangover. Another solo journey to second peak.

From the top you can watch the whole universe below...

After last night I didn’t think we would see the sun for days...

Maybe it was a passage in Siddhartha that made me start listening to rivers speak...

The jeep descended and ground to a halt on a dusty flat near the riverbed. It was not going well...

Approach The air - grey and misty. The mountain - glued together by dirt. This drives us closer to the edge. We are breathless, speechless and serious. This is Paradise?

The sun's glow is beginning to rise on the Eastern Cascades, and it's time to go climbing.

Is this something everyone does? Or is it reserved for the truly pathetic?

If I had known how intimidating I’d one day find my wife I’d never have asked her out that day at Carderock Cliff...