The ankle held up. That surprised me more than it should have.
I rolled it once, day five, descending after the summits were already done. Didn’t slow me down. After eight months of treating that ankle like the main event, it turned out to be the smallest part of the story.
The bigger thing was the ground itself. Sheer drops on some sections, poles strapped to the pack, all four limbs on the rock. I don’t have a fear of heights in any dramatic sense. But that kind of exposure tests something in you regardless.
Two of the lads got properly sick the day we did three summits, including Toubkal, the highest one. Couldn’t speak for hours. They kept going anyway. One foot in front of the other, nothing dramatic about it, just refusal to stop. Humbling to watch up close.
In the evenings Jason would talk about why he keeps coming back to mountains like these. Not the physical challenge, or not only that. The people he meets along the way. A way of working through things he’s carried from his own life. A way of putting love somewhere.
We’d all arrived with our own private reasons for being there. Nobody talked much about what those were. But by the seventh summit, whatever the individual reasons had been, something had become shared.
We built a small cairn at the top. Each of us placed one rock and held someone in mind while we did it.
I thought of my parents. My grandparents, oddly enough, though maybe not so oddly. Friends I’ve lost recently. Andrew Brennan, who I was raising funds for out there, now living as a tetraplegic.
I thought of Kira. What we’re capable of building together. The life we could actually live, not the version that gets squeezed into the gaps around work. What we get to experience together while we still can.
It was a quiet few minutes. Nobody rushed it.
What it left me with is a sharper sense of values I don’t always get to live this directly. Acceptance. Curiosity. Respect. Camaraderie.
Two questions have stayed with me since. How do I get more of this without needing somewhere remote and untouched to find it. And separately, how do I make sure more travel like this actually happens.
There’s a third thing too. I came back with energy I haven’t had in a while, and I think it’s pointing somewhere specific. I’m ready to sit down and redraft the vision for my life and my work over the next few years. Not tinker with it. Properly redraft it. That space gave me that, which I wasn’t expecting going in.
