It brings a lark to your hand

While waiting for simulations to run, I found myself wandering through Lowell’s page on paragliding. His collection of short treatises contains gems.

In closing I will simply observe that stepping into the sky, just once, is an unbelievable privilege. If we have sorta forgotten this, our friends and family haven’t. — Pete Reagan

It’s the intrinsic neurosis; I want to drop free of the danger and arc carefree turns on delightfully exposed glacier high above the world, it’s why I came, but I can’t. It’s turn after turn of, “Is that a crack? Will this bridge hold? Is that a slump? Where’s my partner?” I very much prefer to be on skis on glaciers, but it’s possible that I prefer to avoid crevassed terrain in general. Spending hours upon hours with my heart in my throat may just trouble me too much. Avalanches can be devious, cunning, and malicious, but they are not, to my sentiments, as random as crevasse hazard.

My family is starting to hint strongly that I should take this recent injury as a signal to stop soloing routes in the backcountry. Their point is well taken. Without a partner or the excellent rescue support that I received, pulling myself off the mountain would’ve been cold,  very difficult, and perhaps fatal if I’d taken a crevasse fall that night or the following morning. The probability that I would have severely further damaged my ankle  is quite high. What I can’t shake, however, is the deep sense that, if alone, the probability that I’d have gotten hurt is somewhat lower. Alone, I’d have made ~20 of our decisions differently, and may well have turned around well below the summit, it’s hard to tell. This is not to suggest that I disagree with our decisions as a team – I think we made a lot of good decisions and am comfortable with the choices we made – but alone, the insecurity I felt at several junctures would quite possibly have caused me to turn about and head home. It’s impossible to know anything in a morass of probabilities.

Among many things, even though it was irrelevant to my injury, I’m left with the sense that perhaps I should abandon skiing the great glaciated peaks. They are the obvious next step for me, and I can only ski the fine lines on Adams so many times before becoming dully bored…

It’s not good to dwell too long on thoughts like these. They’re more than a little toxic. Back to work or distraction.