Sharp End: Climbing Fast and Slow

[Photo] Greg Boratyn

Enduring Patagonia, Gregory Crouch's classic mountaineering tale, is full of the gothic music of storms. Gusts shriek across granite walls and vaulted ice. Fear rises from small notes—a dampness in the air, a stir of wind—to abrupt crescendos and desperate retreats. Long spells in base camp form part of the cadence of memory: intermezzos of sitting in a beech forest, listening to the roar of gales and reading stacks of books, until the icy towers seem to merge with the iron ramparts and lost souls in Dante's City of Dis.