People ask why I spend so much time, effort, and discomfort getting to places I could just look at in a photograph. I never have a clean answer ready. The honest one is that the hills give something back that I can't find anywhere else.
There's a particular quiet that arrives near the top of a climb, when the noise of everything below has finally fallen away. It's not silence — there's wind, and breath, and the small sounds of the ground — but it's a kind of clearing. For a while the only things that matter are the next step, the weather, and the light.
I think that's what keeps pulling me out there. Not the summit itself, but the way the world gets simpler the higher you go. The trivial stuff burns off. What's left feels more honest, and a little easier to be grateful for.
I'm still working out how all of this fits with the rest of my life — with becoming a paramedic, with faith, with the people I come home to. But I've stopped trying to justify the walking. Some things you understand best by doing them again, and again, until the reasons stop mattering.