Get Hooked on Climbing

Greg Mortensen in his book, Three Cups of Tea, describes his first climbing experience. When he was eleven years old his father took him on his his first high mountain climb. “I gagged and puked my way up Kilimanjaro”, he said, and “I hated the climb. But standing on the summit at dawn,  seeing the sweep of the African savannah below me, hooked me forever on climbing.” What a great analolgy this is of where we all have been at one point or another in our lives.  We make our plans, we set our sites on our loftly goals and dreams, and our enthusiasm runs high.  Then we begin the climb to the summit of those plans and all of a sudden we “hate” what we are doing.  None of the effort seems worth it.  Somehow we manage to keep going and the the summit of it all appears and then  we are standing on the top.  The difficulty of the climb, the view from the top, and  seeing the valleys below, gives us  all the motivation we need to “get hooked on climbing.”