Tilting Skyward
By Ryleigh Norgrove
It wasn’t a loud decision to climb the mountain. It was an easy choice to choose the difficult thing. It felt absolute. I would go.
Some choices arrive like weather, without reason or permission. You wake one morning and something has shifted. You find yourself moving toward the door, toward the thing that might unmake you. It is not so much resolve as instinct. I packed what I thought I’d need and left everything else in the sink.
Mount Adams, 12,276 feet.
I’d never been hiking. I’d never been backpacking. The Walmart boots weren’t waterproof. I brought a cook stove but forgot the fuel canister.
The logic was simple: move or be buried. I slept in the car at the trailhead, windows cracked, the cold licking at the back of my neck. The mountain waited outside, mute and enormous. The sky was flat grey. Undramatic.
Adams rose like a buried god’s shoulder, broad and glaciated. From a distance it looked gentle, rounded, almost drowsing, but up close it splintered into a maze of scree and ice.
At the base, something inside me steadied. The trees thinned. The light turned metallic. The mountain wasn’t beautiful, not the way people use that word. It was honest in its indifference. It offered no comfort and therefore no illusion.
This was the season when I thought about ending things. It came on like a slow erosion: days flattening out, the air going thin even at sea level. The days had grown paper-thin. I lived inside their absence. Sometimes I would catch myself watching the refrigerator light flicker and think, this is how things disappear, not all at once, but gradually, until what remains no longer resembles the thing that began.
The next morning, I would go.
The trail began soft and unassuming, an easy grade, until the earth shifted and language left. The air went metallic. My heartbeat sounded wrong in the cold—too loud and too human.
Below treeline the forest held its breath. The light came through the pines like wet glass, green and trembling. Everything that moved did so with purpose: insects, meltwater, my own shaking hands.
Maybe the body would remember what the mind forgot. Maybe motion itself was a kind of prayer. The sky looked close enough to touch and far enough that I didn’t try.
The slope reared up, glassed over in blue ice. The others had axes, crampons, intent. I had a bent trekking pole and the idiot grace of momentum. Each step felt borrowed from the next.
The wind rose and everything went bright: snow, breath, the sharp ache behind my eyes. My world shrank to a rhythm. Dig, gasp, repeat. I remember thinking this was what prayer must have sounded like before words were invented.
At the summit there was no revelation. No absolution. Only wind—feral, untranslatable—and the sound of snow shifting under its own weight. The light erased color. I stood there until my hands went numb, until the thought of descending felt like an act of will.
What stayed with me wasn’t the view or the altitude but the strange, stubborn fact that I had gone up there at all. Not salvation but something rougher. Contact. I had touched the threshold and come away scraped but breathing.
Later, I would think about the moment the trail tilted skyward, the small shift when walking became climbing. There was no decision then, only momentum. The sound of the wind changed, grew higher, thinner. The mountain gave no encouragement, no resistance.
It showed me what endures, the sky still distant, the ground still certain, and between them, the flicker of a life continuing anyway—fragile, uninvited, and, for now, still burning.
Ryleigh Norgrove is a writer of mountain stories and the people who carry them. This is her first piece for Dead Foot Collective.
