There is a conversation that happens every season in the base camps and refuge huts of every significant mountain range: a conversation about turning back, about the morning when the weather changes or the snow sounds wrong or something, less quantifiable, feels not right.
The climbers who have this conversation honestly, and who act on what it tells them, tend to return from the mountains. The ones who weight the sunk cost of the approach more heavily than the signal from the mountain disproportionately do not.
“The mountain will be there next year” is offered as consolation, but it is actually a diagnosis: the people who need to be told this are the ones who find it hardest to believe.
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