MOUNTAIN CLIMBER: ALISON HARGREAVES 1962 – 1995 Better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand as a sheep – From birth to death you craved a single high – a supreme moment – to be roped through swooning air, lashed to the crag’s rock face, hanging there – intense speck of consciousness in the vertigo of space, hallucinating peaks and summits. Climbing is my job. It’s what I do. But the altitude is too great for most of us, too dry. The oxygen’s sparse, we die for breath. Even the mountain buzzard drops to lower depths. Twenty five thousand feet above pragmatic lives you lie, stretched under the numbing avalanche, under the catatonic stars.8_without.html
 
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