After scanning its face again and again,
 I began to scale it, picking my holds
 With intense caution. About half-way
 To the top, I was suddenly brought to
 A dead stop, with arms outspread
 Clinging close to the face of the rock
 Unable to move hand or foot
 Either up or down. My doom
 Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
 There would be a moment of
 Bewilderment, and then,
 A lifeless rumble down the cliff
 To the glacier below.
 My mind seemed to fill with a
 Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
 Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
 Forth again with preternatural clearness.
 I seemed suddenly to become possessed
 Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
 Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
 The rock was seen as through a microscope,
 My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
 With which I seemed to have
 Nothing at all to do.

I recently picked up a wonderful book titled ‘The High Sierra of California’. The book contains woodcut prints of the Sierra Nevada by Tom Killion in the manner of the Japanese masters Hokusai and Hiroshige. The beauty of the prints is further brought out by notes, commentaries and poems by Gary Snyder. The poem really brought out for me the fine line between control and diaster that a mountain climber deals with, along with the waves of panic he has to stave off to get to the top. That it is about John Muir’s first ascent of Mt Ritter is of added significance.

Gary Snyder’s biography:

Snyder was born in San Francisco, and brought up in Oregon and Washington State. He received his BA in anthropology at Reed College, Portland, in
1951. His subsequent career has been a remarkable combination of the academic and the contemplative, spiritual study and physical labour. Between working as a logger, a trail-crew member, and a seaman on a Pacific tanker, he studied Oriental languages at Berkeley (1953-6), was associated with Beat writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac, lived in Japan (1956-64), later studied Buddhism there, and won numerous literary prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize (1975). He now teaches literature and ‘wilderness thought’ at the University of California at Davis.

– http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/life.htm

— Kaustubh Rau