Lincoln Hall is Dead Lucky

"I was tired but content and wasted no mental energy on anything superfluous. I was doing what I needed to do at each particular moment, until I reached the point where there were no moments, only the continuum of my passage along the rubble-strewn trail. I made no attempts to put myself in this state; I just found myself there. It felt like the landscape was including me--as if the barrier between the living and the nonliving, between life and death, had dissolved. My enjoyment was no longer of the magnificent day or of the mountains but of an altered sense of reality, a disconnection from the flow of thoughts that normally had me planning, thinking, analyzing. I had stepped into a simpler state of being."

In this passage from Lincoln Hall's 2007 book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, Hall describes the sense of peace that can come along with mountaineering, one of the aspects of this dangerous sport that won his heart over 30 years ago.