How Ueli Stieck Shows Us That Our Potential Is Unlimited

Life, especially for the average work-a-day sucker, lacks the awesome peaks that it was meant to include. Slogging away behind a desk, staring at blinking pixels as we maintain our virtual friendships and shuffle around ASCII codes and binary-encoded numbers 40+ hours a week in ergonomic chairs in temperature-regulated rooms, leads to little more than a tedious and, some might say, pointless, certainly monotonous, existence. 2 to 4 weeks out of the year we get to do something we want to but it's usually resting and relaxing, trying to recover from the drudgery that has become modern American life. Rarely do we remember to reach for the stars, to try and prove what we can do if we put our minds and our bodies to the test.

Humanity was created to constantly press the envelope, to push for bigger and better. To quote Chris McCandless in INTO THE WILD (the movie, not the book), "The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences." And even more, when those new experiences test us, shake us - maybe even give us fear for our lives, which is the same as the feeling that comes over us once we've pushed past safety and what has been done before, that adrenaline-filled focus and strength and self-worth that comes over us when we've gone over the edge, into land beyond the boundaries previously known - when we've felt that, accomplished that, lived to tell the tale, only then do we grow to find our potential, then do we become what we were meant to be, then do we become men.

One of the most concrete ways to find that feeling is by climbing a mountain.

There's the metaphorical made real of hitting the summit, the peak, with its jaw-dropping vistas and the very real fact that, once you've hit the summit, there's no higher you can go.

Then there are the challenges: physical exhaustion being the most basic; if hiking mountains taller than 10k feet all the dangers brought by lower pressure and Oxygen deprivation - High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema, Hypoxia, and so on. Then there's the very real danger of a misstep sending you falling off a cliff or pinballing off the jagged rocks below your dangerous precipice and dying an excruciating death full of self-awareness of your impending demise.

And when these challenges are present, there is of course the ever-present, and often more dangerous if only because it's more real, presence of mental challenge - getting your leg to move forward for one more step; digging the crampon in and not looking down at the sure death below you should your spikey feet slip; convincing yourself you're just physically tired and not experiencing altitude-induced symptoms of impending brain bleeding.

So let's get to Ueli Stieck. When I feel like I'm not living up to my potential but don't know what else I can do, when I need a reminder of the greatness of man and of the accomplishments he's made, of what's possible that was formerly though impossible, I watch this video below.

A little background, last year in Jackson Hole I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival's tour screening in Jackson. It was there that I first saw this whole movie, in a dark theater with alpine enthusiasts hooting and exclaiming as he pushed higher and higher without any ropes to back him up, freeclimbing this world-famous snow-and-ice-covered razor blade of a peak.

Mountaineers have been climbing and attempting to climb the Eiger, a peak in the Swiss Alps above Grindelwald, since 1858. The first attempt on the north face was made in 1935. These guys froze to death on a bivouac hanging off the cliff face on day 5 of their attempt. The next attempts, in 1936, resulted in more deaths from training for it, from avalanches, from weather, from freezing, so on. It wasn't until 1938 that Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, a German–Austrian team, made the summit of the north face. This first successful climb took 3 days.

Here's the man known as the Swiss Machine, Ueli Stieck, finishing a re-creation/re-do of his record-setting ascent:

Now go back to your work. And pull up a travel site. Check out the adventures. And go prove something to yourself and to the world. Because let's face it, we were meant to do more than sit at boxes punching squares to shit around pixels. And anything - LITERALLY ANYTHING - is possible in this life.

- Ryan