In reply to UKC Articles:
a rough and moving article. many thanks, natalie & team!
it’s wild, in a way, how even if you’re purely a boulderer, you get used to certain conversations around loss in rock climbing. even though it mainly affects people who climb big walls, free solo, go on expeditions, are outright alpinists, and so on. there’s still that feeling of kinship – they’re one of us. and while the circumstances and decisions leading up to their death have no direct analogue in our lives, we know how some of our decisions seem completely outlandish to others. it must have been a bit like that, for them.
but this hits different. it has all the same elements of kinship, but none of our ways of making it make sense work. he was one of us, senselessly caught up in the violence a too powerful madman’s ego trip imposed on his life from far away.