Against the Advice of Reasonable People 

The narrow couloir stretched high over our heads, branching this way and that like a white vein through vertical granite walls. We craned our necks to follow its dizzying ascent, hoping to catch a view of where, and if, it topped out. No such luck. Thousands of feet above, the white ribbon disappeared behind a veil of swiftly moving clouds. My rational brain told me the couloir ended somewhere up there; but another part of my brain, the one chock-full of an unhealthy imagination and wayward idealism, hoped that strip of snow reached infinitely into the sky.

“What do you say?” my partner Chris inquired from our perch on the glacier. “You want to put an axe in that thing?”

I simply nodded, still awestruck. The couloir, in my mind, was flawless: a sustained fifty-degree pitch, never wider than a semi-truck. I wanted to do more than put an axe in that thing. I wanted to carve my signature the entire length of it with