Many years ago, I climbed mountains actively.  I scaled peaks from California to Canada to Alaska, tracking a number of routes, always being awed at the challenge and splendor of it all.  So much to experience, so much to see.  And so much to know, to have opportunity, shorn of all creature comforts, to stare more deeply into the meaning and contingency of existence.  At one point, I believed I saw God.


     Most people climbing today do not see the adventure in such metaphysical terms. They climb to accomplish a goal, to reach the top, the touch the summit.  Unlike many a dedicated backpacker, caught up in the constant euphoria of the alpine moment, these climbers approach the mountain as a problem to be solved, an obstacle to be surmounted. It's just another day in the heights.
     When I read recently that the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, one of the most accomplished mountaineers in the world today, had fallen over three thousand feet to his death while climbing in the Himalayas, I stopped to think.  Like American Alex Lowe, one of the best climbers of his day, who perished in an avalanche while climbing in, yes, the Himalayas, in 1999, Steck died when he least expected to.  For him, it was simply another afternoon in the mountains.
     And now, like Alex Lowe, Ueli Steck is gone forever.  It's tragic, yet it's sublimle; he died doing what he loved most.
     Yet we wonder:  is this all there is?
     Farewell, Ueli Steck.  I hope one day, in the profoundly mysterious yet intimately real grip of the resurrection, I see you again.