Writing Like a Mountain: Climbing Literature in the Anthropocene
By Katie Ives | Originally published in The Himalayan Journal 79 and a finalist for the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Festival Mountaineering Article Award
There's a canyon near my home that I like to visit on winter dusks, where the shadowed ice seems bluer and more luminous than anywhere else. I go there to climb while the last light of the day hangs golden in the narrow sky before vanishing behind the western hills.
There is a ritual to getting there: first the crossing of the river, where water roars through dark gaps between clumped mounds of ice and snow; then the traverse of a fixed rope along a steep canyon wall, where my crampons skitter on bare granite beneath soft drifts; and finally the walk along the frozen creek past quiet pines until the ice glows ahead with that unlikely, incandescent blue.
It is a short, low-angle ice flow, so I climb it several times, each time following slightly different lines — the ones like spiral staircases made of crystal, the ones like swells of gentle waves, and, for my final venture, the one like a silver web laid atop dark stone.
A reader once told me she’d imagined ice climbing as a tale of aggression, a story of people attacking a frozen waterfall, shouting in rage and triumph as shards fall around them, demonstrating how die-hard bold they are.
But ice climbers know that a fragile surface may require delicacy and precision, that swinging too hard only brings exhaustion or destruction. There is no violence here. Not in the strike of an axe or in the kick of a crampon, not in the meeting of sharp metal and pliant ice. There's only a sense of confluence between the steady rhythm of my breaths and the cobalt silence of this place.
There is no courage, either, only the feeling of letting go of my self, of merging into everything around me just as everything dissolves into night. My story is not about reaching the top or overcoming obstacles or fear — not any of the standard mainstream plots — but of deepening perception and unfolding awe.
I've wondered, since then, why many people assume that climbing is a form of battle — against an ice flow, or a canyon, or a mountain — or why they think that a climbing story should be about individuals trying to prove themselves in the wild, rather than lose themselves in a sense of something larger than they are.
As climate change threatens our planet's ecosystems and civilizations, an adversarial approach to nature seems more problematic than ever. In recent years, climbers have used journalism, photography, art, social media, and activism to promote awareness of environmental crises. It's more common, now, to hear of alpinists reporting from the frontlines of global warming, bearing witness to shrinking bodies of ice and crumbling rock walls, observing the threats of glacial outburst floods to local communities and the risks to water supplies for millions downstream of the Himalaya.
But creative writing can also play a role in shifting how we dream and how we love and what and whom we want to support. Legacies of old wars and conflicts still exist beneath the surface of many narratives. At times scarcely remembered, if at all, these vestiges reemerge in singular words or images like tips of floating icebergs, concealing vast and dangerous forms beneath. Accounts of climbs have frequently remained imbued with the language of colonial adventure, telling of conquests and assaults, of claims to be the first to enter blanks on the map and the first to discover unknown places. Protagonists (and their chroniclers) have often assumed they have the right to assign their own names to landforms — thus erasing the names and presence of Indigenous residents who have a deep prior knowledge of these regions, who guided the early European explorers, and who had even climbed to some of the summits centuries before.
Violent metaphors persist of crushing rocks and bagging peaks, of struggles to get past a mountain’s defenses. Descriptions of the development of cliffs and the untapped potential of still-remote areas reflect an ongoing preoccupation with exploiting natural resources, now commonly for personal fulfillment, self-promotion, recreation, brand marketing, and content creation.
Summit epiphanies morph too easily into the formulas of corporate speakers: endlessly replicated clichés of self-reliance and self-determination, of personal risk-taking and personal fulfillment, as if all that matters is overcoming personal limits and believing in yourself. An emphasis on grandiose individual heroism renders invisible the labor of the expedition staff who carried the loads or fixed the ropes — and the hazards that they faced. It ignores the struggles of factory workers who made the gear. And it neglects to mention the resources expended to ensure each climber’s success or to examine the impacts they have on mountain ecosystems and local communities.
As climate change enhances global dangers of wildfires, floods, rising waters, lost livelihoods, political conflicts, and forced displacement, old themes of privileged climbers leaving behind worlds of safety and security for the uncertainty and precariousness of the heights seem increasingly solipsistic and misleading, failing to acknowledge that uncertainty and precariousness are nearly everywhere.
In an age of large-scale environmental disasters, as the Indian author Amitav Ghosh has observed, "the uncanny" is no longer merely the realm of speculative fiction, but of everyday realism; instead of delusionary tales of individuals dominating nature, we need more timely ones that reawaken a sense of nature’s own agency, that help us recognize possibilities of sentience, wonder, and desires in the nonhuman world. We need stories that recall our interconnected fates and responsibilities, and that teach us to listen to the messages all elements of nature have to share.
During his youth, the future American environmentalist Aldo Leopold once shot a wolf, believing, back then, that fewer natural predators would result in more deer to hunt. But as he watched the "fierce green fire dying in her eyes," he realized both the wolf and the mountain would contest that idea. As wolves became endangered, he later observed, the deer population grew unchecked, stripping the hillsides of vegetation until only the skeletons of bare branches and the bones of starved animals remained. Because so many people haven’t learned "to think like a mountain," because they’ve only considered their immediate personal desires instead of the interwoven relationships of mountain ecosystems, Leopold concluded, "We have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."
Since my visits to the ice canyon, I’ve asked myself: What would it mean for more climbers to try to write like a mountain? We could start by remembering that Indigenous people around the world have long known to listen to the mountains' thoughts — such as the late Łingít (Tlingit) elder King̱eestí David Katzeek who performed music before Sitaantaagu (the Mendenhall Glacier), explaining, "You just hear [the glacier] talking to you, singing to you, reaching out to you, touching your spirit." We could pay more attention to Indigenous mountaineering authors such as Joe Whittle, an enrolled member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, who explains that Onondaga chief Oren Lyons, Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce) elder Allen Pinkham, and other Indigenous people use words such as "relatives" and "life sources," not "resources," to describe parts of nature, reflecting a more loving and reciprocal approach.
We could drop the generic jargon of trip reports that creeps into literary stories — such as obvious corner, mixed terrain, splitter cracks, fingerlocks — phrases that reduce infinite nuances of stone, ice, and snow to mere generic symbols, shorn of anything unique and natural. We could realize the inadequacies of AI: how its bots merely pull the most predictable ideas from previously generated stories, perpetuating outdated clichés and distorted facts, instead of supporting the original, critical thinking now desperately required. We could remember, instead, the joys and possibilities of engaging more deeply in the creative process of writing, of letting the rhythms of the landscape echo through us, awakening the wildly creative dreams we need in our increasingly unpredictable world.
We could recall how the nineteenth-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau dreamed of literature that allowed nature to speak, of words that rose like heaves of frost, phrases that unfolded like buds of flowers, and poets who harvested verses from the earth like plants, dirt still stuck to the roots. As climbers, we, too, could let our contact with mountains cling to what we write — in words that shine like crystals of snow, still trickling with meltwater and with light; in sentences that rise and fall like the curves of a ridgeline silhouetted against the twilit sky; in cadences that resonate like the thunderous cracks, eerie groans, and musical babbling of a glacier that make it sound alive; in moments when we feel as if the pulse of the universe is beating though the movements of our hands and feet, through the ripples of stone and ice.
We need poetry and prose that help us hold on to experiences of "vast mysteries" in the mountains, like the ones that psychologist Dacher Keltner described in his 2023 book, Awe: those instances when we realize we are "part of many things…much larger than the self," a cosmos of interconnected communities, ecosystems, and natural forces, "larger patterns — of community, of nature, of ideas and cultural forms — that enable our very survival."
What might arise from such writing is not any form of escapist fantasy or free-floating transcendence, but a spirituality that is embodied and en-earthed, one that speaks of the vulnerability of all bodies and all living things and of the depth of our own responsibilities — a message that lingers, numinous in our minds, like the light that seems to shine back from the heart of an ice flow, as blue and green as life.
In the creative writing workshops I teach for climbers, I've often told them they have a natural advantage as storytellers: ascent is an inherently story-generating act. Our rising bodies trace the shape of a traditional narrative arc — frequently defined as a "conflict, crisis/climax, resolution" — growing in intensity as we leave the ground and as we move past obstacle after obstacle toward the climactic point of the top before we arrive at the resolution of the descent and the return to the rest of our lives.
But I’ve realized this traditional arc itself can be a problem, encouraging a fixation on reaching a summit and on a conflict-driven approach to nature. As Jane Alison writes in Meander, Spiral, Explode: "So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life." There are shapes for climbing stories that might emulate, instead, the growth of deeper and wider bonds with the whole of a mountain and the earth itself — ones that might look more like the infinite branching of snow crystals, the spiral chambers of a nautilus shell, the uncurling frond of a bracken fern, or the gossamer strands of a spider’s web.
In Dreams of Lost Buttresses, a 2023 collection of speculative fiction by British writer Heather Dawe, the stories follow the patterns of natural forms as her climbers merge with the wild: one character learns to see how each detail of a cliff — "a sharp edge, a grey furrow, a rough cluster of crystalline quartz" — fits into larger "patterns of overwhelming harmony and beauty," until she is "no longer fighting the rock, but transforming herself to meet it." Another protagonist spends so much time bouldering alone among trees that she attunes herself to their slow, nonhuman cadence, and she comprehends, at last, their "deep thinking and slow time."
Likewise, in the 1977 cult classic The Living Mountain, Scottish author Nan Shepherd let the shapes of her tales reflect the intricate landscapes of the Cairngorms, as she trained her senses to experience the "total mountain": each grain of rock, each hue of flower, each shift in weather, each contour of ridge and ravine. Practicing "quiescence," rather than aggression, she climbed into the mountain, becoming part of it, instead of merely surmounting its summit: "I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan…. Simply to look on anything…with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being."
Current writers from a wide range of underrepresented groups have further reshaped and decolonized the genre, moving it farther away from the notion that mountains should — or even could — be vanquished. In one of his own stories, from 2018, Joe Whittle described an expedition with other Indigenous climbers. As mist and dusk drifted across a knife-edge ridge, and their feet slipped in loose drifts of snow, they chose to turn back. "We laughed at the irony that I would be writing a story about this adventure for Alpinist," he wrote, "and we hadn't even stepped into the alpine zone. In a way, that in itself is the story. I hope. Nothing about our time spent in the wild had any goal other than to be at home…. No achievement worthy of note among the annals of mountain conquests or extreme sports, but the breadth of that journey had given us a deeper understanding of the Sacred Circles that have spun with this land for eons; and thus a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world."
Cascadia Field Guide, a 2023 anthology by a diverse group of authors and artists, including members of Northwest tribes, relies on a multiplicity of voices, styles, and illustrations to reflect the varied whole of an ecosystem, featuring animals and plants — rather than climbers — as protagonists of mountain stories. Through its hybrid narratives, it allows readers to see the interrelationships and adventures within the nonhuman world, thus stirring more curiosity, empathy, and love. Among these characters, Devil’s Club — the thorny plant that appears as a dreaded antagonist in many Northwest mountaineers' tales — transforms into something wondrous, with "delicate pale barbs [that] glow," existing only in the wildest places, "known by many Native people…as a potent healer, and, as such, a sacred being." The marvelous Ice Worm, fantastical but real, lives inside glaciers with billions of its species, emerging to cross the slippery surface with "small, hooked hairs" instead of crampons, hiding from predatory birds by day, and grazing on pollen at dusk.
Twilight, in this book, becomes a symbol of threshold states, of "edges [that] mark the places where event and myth and legend rub together, where people move from one kind of story into another."
I used to wonder why, at times when loneliness and despair overcome me, I go to the hills and mountains by myself — surely the intense solitude of such places should make me feel worse, instead of comforting me. Since reading all these stories, however, I’ve realized that I'm not really alone. I’ve only once seen another person in the ice canyon. But sometimes, the tracks of a solitary mountain lion appear, leading me to the safest passage across the semi-frozen river. As darkness drifts through the canyon, Orion emerges above the ice flow like a companion. And with each climb, I feel as if I’m sinking deeper into the dream of the ice, becoming more and more enfolded within the world, weaving myself into a cosmos, into a sense of elusive presence that feels like love.
Somewhere between the twilit air and the blue-shadowed ice, I enter a still point, forget all grief and hopelessness. I abandon all the stories of my own, and all the ruminations of my mind, as I move from one narrative to others. I imagine the tales that only the ice knows: of its slow creation, drip by drip in the autumn; of the marks of axes and crampons soon filled in with newly frozen meltwater; of mountain lions and bighorn sheep that wander by; of the changing lights and hues cast by sun, moon, and stars; of snowfalls that leave behind a luminous stillness; of the fluctuations in temperature that cause a continual metamorphosis of its steps, ripples, curtains, and bulges, reforming, thawing, growing, shrinking, until its complete vanishing in late spring; of the fallow months of bare rock over the summer, before the next winter arrives and the ice is, once more, reborn. Until, one day, the last winter might end, and the ice might melt for the last time, never to return again.
Now, when I think of how I hope to learn to write like a mountain, words by the climbing scholar Amrita Dhar, composed for a collection on the future of alpinism, turn over and over in my mind:
"You see, a climb is a poem—in the full etymological sense of the word, from the Greek…(poiesis), making. It is a making of possibility itself, a creation of what a body can do, of where it can go, of how it can be…. What can poetry do in such a world? What can a climb? What does a good climb even look like in an unequal world? All I can venture to say is that it looks like a strange love, a kind of human and humane faith in our interwoven planetary existence…. It aims to make possible in the world something — however eclectic or seemingly small, but something — that bends the arc of history toward justice."
I have not yet found the climb and the poem that I might create with my body and my love, but I am still looking.
About Katie Ives
A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, a recipient of the H. Adams Carter Literary Award, and former editor-in-chief of Alpinist, Katie Ives (she/they) has written for The New York Times, Outside, and Adventure Journal, as well as many other outlets. Her book Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams earned a Special Jury Mention at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 2022, and one of her Himalayan Journal articles was a finalist for the Mountaineering Article Award in 2025. Katie is committed to supporting emerging storytellers, particularly those with less access to formal writing instruction.
