The insistent beep of the alarm dragged me from my cocoon of down to face the grim reality of a pitch-black tent coated in interior frost, 10,000 feet up Mt. Rainier. 11:30 pm. Time to climb.

Between altitude and anxiety about the climb to come, I'd gotten less than 2 hours of sleep. I was now facing the prospect of peeling myself out of my sleeping bag, dragging on my stiff and frigid outer layers, and braving the howl of the wind outside the tent, which promised a temperature well below freezing. Bumping the tent walls produced miniature frost blizzards. The laces on my plastic boots were frozen into modern sculpture. I twisted and struggled with layer after layer of protective clothing, and still I was shivering. The prospect of climbing Rainier at this hour was not just unappealing; it was downright appalling.

So why do it? Mountain climbing is often an exhausting struggle to drag yourself just a few feet higher, a few steps more, searching for that tantalizing summit. The gear is expensive, the trials and tribulations too numerous to count, and the consequences of a mistake could mean your life. What sane and rational person would do this to oneself?

That question has been there for as long as people have climbed. You can't explain climbing, or rationalize it in terms the greater populace of non-climbers is likely to understand or sympathize with. Sometimes you can't even explain it to yourself. But in spite of the aches and pains, blisters and frostbite, altitude sickness and just plain exhaustion, you keep going back.

I've often wondered about this as I haul my 30 lb. training pack up 1,000 feet of stairs each day. I've thought about it as I watch most of my disposable income sucked into the coffers of REI. IÍve given it serious consideration bowed under the weight of pack, rope, ice axe, helmet, crampons, shovel and snow picket, my harness jingling with carabiners, and my knees buckling as I attempt to jump the yawning depths of a crevasse. And I think about it each time I see another fatal climbing accident in the news.

Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it's difficult. And that's part of what makes it attractive. But you could get that bungee jumping off the Aurora Bridge. What sets climbing apart is its absolute purity. The farther upward and inward you go in the mountains, the clearer your thoughts become. Everyday life, with its tangle of worries, responsibilities and clutter, peels away like a gaudy costume. There are no more houses, no traffic noises, no voices. Just the wind through the trees and the rush of the river in the background. And as you climb higher, as you step from the meadows and head up into the snow, the last vestiges of your life below are left behind. Now there is only the sharp black and white of glacier and rock. You are a Lilliputian in a land of giants; a tiny insect crawling up the side of an immense white beast. Seracs tower above you and crevasses gape below your feet, waiting to swallow you whole. It is as far away from your normal life as the craters of the moon.

The effort and agony of climbing are part of its purity. It is a journey that scours away the inessential, leaving you empty and light and free. What may seem like insanity at first blush is, in fact, a rational choice in the midst of an irrational world. And when you finally descend, whether or not you reached the top, you walk back to your life somehow cleansed. Each climb becomes a pilgrimage of sorts, a renewal of the part of you that can so easily become lost or obscured in the daily grind. It reminds you of life's essentials, of your own frailty, and of the invisible umbilical cord that draws you back to the mountains - time after time.