Over a lifetime spent exploring high altitude peaks, Reinhold Messner recognized a simple truth: “Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous,” he wrote. Messner, a legendary alpinist, put a not-so-secret-secret in simple terms: there is risk in pushing limits, and there are risks in the outdoors.
It is a lesson that never fails to shock us, no matter how many times we are forced to learn it.
At the start of this year, the international kayak community was devastated by the deaths of three talented young paddlers during an attempted first descent in Ecuador. Our virtual world flooded with condolences, remembrances, and thoughts on these young men, as well as the how and the why of their situation.
The questions of, “how” and “why” are hard to…