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"Finally towards spring there was the great glacier run, smooth and straight, forever straight if our legs could hold it, our ankles locked, we were running so low, leaning into the speed, dropping forever and forever in the silent hiss of the deep powder. It was better than flying or anything else, and we built the ability to do it and to have it with the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks. We could not buy the trip up nor take a ticket to the top. It was the end we worked for all winter, and all the winter built to make it possible."
(Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast)

Hard to imagine Hemingway and his wife as back-country skiing in the Alps in the 1920's, but they did!

I saw this on TAY and had to share.

CR

Hemingway got it.

Dig it.

Very nice, thank you!

Can we open this up to literary appreciation for the mountains? Mark Twain wrote some great stuff. This wasn't what I was looking for, but it's very nicely put:



- A Tramp Abroad

Yes! Thought about adding to this thread earlier. Rexroth has some awesome stuff, especially concerning the Sierra Nevada

"Your Birthday in the California Mountains" is one of my favorites

A broken moon on the cold water,

And wild geese crying high overhead,

The smoke of the campfire rises

Toward the geometry of heaven -

Points of light in the infinite blackness.

I watch across the narrow inlet

Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.

A loon cries out on the night bound lake.

Then all the world is silent with the

Silence of autumn waiting for

The coming of winter. I enter

The ring of firelight, bringing to you

A string of trout for our dinner.

As we eat by the whispering lake,

I say, "Many years from now we will

Remember this night and talk of it."

Many years have gone by since then, and

Many years again. I remember

That night as though it was last night,

But you have been dead for thirty years.

Plus this super awesome camping manual:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/camping/index.htm

I wonder if hemingway was laying tracks in petoskey michigan as a young ernest? Thats where I spent much of my formative years as a boarder.

While im not too much into literature, I love history. Gonna have to check and see if there is a connection between hemingway, and the kirchers and boyne mt.

Anatoli Boukreev, Russian mountaineer speaks of what motivated him to climb in the Himalayas;
"Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn."