What is Climbing all about?
By Wilfred Tok
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
WHAT IS CLIMBING ALL ABOUT ?
ROCK CLIMBING is the foundation skill of Mountaineering. It has came a long way since people venture into the great outdoor. As a mountaineer myself, I have been returning back to Mount Kinabalu for climbing and training for the past 10 years. Every visits to Kinabalu has been a fresh, different and rewarding experience. Sharing my passion to the people of Sabah is a dream that I hope to fulfill someday.
"It make you feel alive with every breath", a famous mountaineer once remarked.
Challenge the outdoor life, sheer exhilaration, and what have you ……. the list goes on. These are some of the answers when ask, what is attractive about Climbing or Mountaineering?
More and more people are discovering that he/she was right, and mountaineering is no longer the rather esoteric, unknown sport some 20 years ago. People's curiosity about mountaineering is understandable; it is hard work, even painful, quite often dangerous, except for the lucky elite, and rather expensive.
WHY, then do people want to do it? It's a fair question but there is no simple answer.
When so many of us spend a lot of our lives constraint by the commitments and complexities of modern life, the freedom which mountaineering offers is a great lure. It also helps to put worries of modern life into new perspective. After an extended period in the mountains, when you're back to civilization; one's feel that life in modern living seem to be of secondary important. Life is more complete, meaningful and a lot more simple on the mountain. Perhaps, people of the 20th century need that.... who knows?
Everyone has some ambition, to gain someone's love, own something special, reach the top of a career or even just to have enough to eat. When one wish is fulfilled another replaces it. So it is with mountaineering, and just as in all desires. The initial concept of an idea, the hopes, the plans, the small steps of success, especially after failure, are just as thrilling as when the dream actually comes true. Reaching the summit is not everything. Whatever the results, something is gained from simply trying to make it happen.
Mountains are all individual, like people, each has its own character, shape, composition of terrain, vegetation, animal life, type of rock, steepness and mood. Every side of a mountain is different as well, and again like their mood can vary, particularly with the weather.
There are not many opportunities to take decision which can mean life or death; driving a car is the closest most people get. I feel very strongly that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and those around us in order to care about our environment, and we need physical and creative challenge in our life, at whatever level, to be fulfilled. Mountaineering provides that challenge, but the challenge is to yourself not the mountain.
Sport is about finding out whether you can run faster, jump higher, work in better harmony as a team to score more goals. Most sports use competition as the challenge to push personal standards and at the ultimate level to break records. There is no such incentive of competition in mountaineering; no goals are scored or points won. You have to learn to push yourself through a desire to want to know more. This is what draws people back to the mountains time after time. Despite the fact that the odds of injury and survival must have be shortening, one has to go back.
"Life is short and there has to be a reason to live beyond purely surviving".
I believe that fate has a strong hand in our destiny, but always leaves us with a choice of whether to accept or refuse the challenge. There are many occasions when to say 'Yes' or 'No' makes a great difference in the future of ones live.... I am afraid that, rightly or wrongly, I have too much curiosity often to say 'No'.