Eiger Dreams

To Gill, maintaining an inner calm during moments of extreme stress is one of the ultimate goals in climbing.

“When I first recognized the tremendous force of a mainstream perspective,” Gill continues, “the tremendous force that a climbing community can exert upon your climbing experience, I realized that I wanted to experiment with climbing, that I wasn’t interested in making my climbing fall into a category, walking in someone else’s footsteps, or obeying a set of informal rules, even if unwritten rules. I decided that an easy way to avoid the restrictive mainstream perspective was to climb in solitude. I simply found it to be very, very difficult to experiment while climbing with other people, or even while staying at a climbers’ campground. When I climbed in solitude I discovered that I had marvelous inner adventures.”

Well,” he explained as he stood shivering in a blizzard, reeling from nausea and a blinding headache while attempting to repair a broken radio antenna, “it’s sort of like having fun, only different.”