Ascent_A Peak Marcello Adventure by Roland Smith

Author:Roland Smith [Smith, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, young adult
ISBN: 9781328830265
Goodreads: 37686690
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2018-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

I’ve been up for hours. Alessia and Nick are asleep in their tents. Hiro has kindly lent me his tablet for the night so I can study it.

One thing we haven’t discussed during this impulsive expedition is who is going to actually lead the climb. We don’t need a leader here in the rainforest, but on the mountain, someone is going to have to call the shots. I’m not volunteering for the position, but I am thinking about who should fill this role as I slap insects writing this.

I’m probably the most experienced climber among the three of us, but Alessia isn’t far behind. She has drive. This climb was her idea. And she is way more adaptable than Ethan and me. She always goes with the flow, no matter how torrential it is. What she lacks is an edge. Hiro appears to have it. Josh definitely has it. Every climb leader I have ever met has an edginess to them. I don’t have an edge, not yet anyway, and neither does Ethan. He’s a lot older than Alessia and me, but he’s more of a blunt instrument than a sharp razor. He’s a good climber, but he came to climbing later in life, using it as a means of doing something wacky like snowboarding down McKinley with wolves at his heels.

I’m beginning to think that none of us has the skills to lead our little team, and looking down at the photos, I’m beginning to think that we shouldn’t climb Hkakabo Razi at all.

As we struggled through the tangle, I thought the reason people didn’t try to summit the mountain was because it was so difficult to get to. Now that I’ve seen the photos and videos, I’ve realized that this isn’t true.

My best climbing skill is not climbing. It’s figuring out how to climb something. A weird way to look at the world, but I’ve been doing it since I was five years old. When we lived in Wyoming, Mom would be driving us somewhere, then suddenly leave the highway in our four-wheel-drive truck to bump over a washboard track for miles. She would stop in the middle of nowhere, grab her binoculars, and scan a nasty-looking cliff or a towering rock formation.

“Climb it,” she’d say.

She didn’t mean for me to actually climb, although I would have if she’d let me. She wanted me to plan a route to the top and explain it to her. If I made a mistake in the imagined climb, she wouldn’t tell me where I had gone wrong. She would tell me to try again. Sometimes over and over, until I got it right. If it got dark before I figured it out, we would leave and come back the next day, or several days in a row, until I had done it. She didn’t allow me to take a photo of the problem, insisting that my eyes were better than a camera lens and my brain was a better recording device. When we got back to our cabin, I would sketch what I remembered and stare at the drawing for hours.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.