Strange Places, a Story by Author Katie Ives

It feels strange to defend the human art of writing, yet with the rise of generative AI, I find myself having to do so—even at times among fellow climbers, though by nature, we love to create our own tales. Climbing is an act of storytelling with our bodies and our minds: narrative suspense rises as we sweep an axe across a snowy slab, searching for a hidden crystal or a small crack, anything, to hold our weight; a plot changes when we choose which way to go up a branching couloir; a crisis point appears with the slip of a foot or the burst of a storm; our partners’ characters reveal themselves during a dramatic or humorous epic; an epiphany emerges, unexpected, like a flash of light on a faraway peak.

Most of all, unlike the predictive text of AI, we deal in uncertainty. As writing professor Christiana Langenberg explained in the long-vanished print magazine The Climbing Art, whenever we embark on drafting a story or attempting an ascent, “We put ourselves in strange places—outside and in—before we know completely how we’ll get out.”

There is a familiar defense of style in alpinism: how we climb a mountain matters, not merely whether we reach the summit; otherwise, as the saying goes, we’d simply take a helicopter to the top. By forgoing the help of fixed ropes, supplemental oxygen, and high-altitude staff, alpinists hope to meet a peak on its own terms, to create something like a work of art, an expression of ideals, as the legendary Michael Kennedy wrote in Alpinist 26, “using the simplest of means to achieve the deepest, most beautiful and most complex of ends.”

As the use of AI spreads, writers, like free climbers, have also begun to speak of refraining from artificial aids. But style in alpinism and writing is about more than bragging rights—it’s not just so we can report that we completed a route in pure alpine style or that we free climbed it or that we wrote a story without any AI help, but because the experience of the pursuit itself is the goal. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in his classic book Flow, “The mystique of rock climbing is climbing…like the justification of poetry is writing… The purpose of the flow is to keep flowing, not looking for a peak or a utopia but staying in the flow.”

Csikszentmihalyi defined flow partly as “the optimal experience” that arises when someone becomes so immersed in an activity that their self-consciousness fades and the boundaries between themselves, their actions, and their surroundings seem to dissolve. A “climber,” he recounted, “focusing all her attention on the small irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely, speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock, between the frail body and the context of stone, sky, and wind.” A writer encounters the same feeling when they’re absorbed in the act of connecting dreams and memories, images and words to form the shape of a narrative. For someone in this meditative state, Csikszentmihalyi explained, only the present moment exists, and they can access higher states of creativity, performance, and joy.

Over the years, I’ve realized that how I experience flow in one realm reflects in the other. I compose a beat in a sentence that echoes with the sound of my footfalls in soft snow. I shift my weight intuitively on a wall the same way I revise a phrase for balance and grace. Like the poet David Craig, I’ve found a “seed bed” for “creative uses of language” in my climbs. “If you’re a climbing writer,” he observed in Native Stones, “you’re hard up against, almost inside, your subject; it’s inches from your nose and eyes.” High above my last protection, I’ve sometimes searched for details with a kind of existential urgency: an edge of granite large enough for fingertips to grasp, a glaze of ice thick enough for an axe point to hold. This heightened attention to specificity and nuance later suffuses my choice of words.

Holly Chen, a route setter and a climbing writer, once told me that she finds a similar style in both of her vocations. Arranging holds on a wall; she’s drawn to certain sequences that resemble characteristic patterns in her prose. With her routes and stories, she likes to evoke an impression of unity by starting and ending with related themes. Yet she knows she can’t control how a subsequent climber will respond to the moves—any more than she can be sure that a reader will interpret one of her essays the same way she did—all she can do is point them in a particular direction.

Late September 2024, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, Holly and I went on an alpine climb together that felt like reading a classic tale. The two summits of Notchtop rose out of the predawn dark like the turrets of a fortress. As we followed decades-old routes that spiraled up, around, and down the mountain, I felt a sense of stillness, light, and silence expand with each bend. On the hike out, the autumn dusk seemed to shine through solid rock and rising shadows, as if the world were becoming transparent and the spire we’d just climbed appeared on the brink of an imaginary land. No one would ever experience the story of these routes, composed by their unknown first ascensionists, exactly as they had—or as we had—ever again. Even if we returned, the light would be different, some of the newness (to us) would have faded, and we, too, would have changed.

While I can’t fully capture that day in words, it felt too unique, too personal, too sacred even, to be fed into AI and regurgitated as borrowed phrases. I’ve long believed that everyone should become a writer—that what matters most are not published or completed stories, but how the process of trying to write transforms us. When we encounter “vast mysteries” in the mountains and elsewhere, as the psychologist Dacher Keltner suggested in Awe, our egos grow quiet, we begin to feel that we are “part of many things…much larger than the self,” and we become more able to see “wonders” and “deep patterns” in existence. Storytelling can also give rise to this kind of awe: by piecing together chaotic events into narratives and connecting elements of an envisioned cosmos, we re-create a world.

I like to imagine a utopia in which all inhabitants get a sabbatical to write a memoir, preserving something of their life experiences and inner worlds for future generations. Instead of giving in to AI’s false promise of accessibility, I want to keep working to provide more resources, time, and opportunities for people to learn the craft of creative writing. I believe that finding a voice is not merely for a literary elite but for everyone. I, too, have a long way to go. But I know this search can represent one of the most arduous and wondrous ascents of our lives—a journey that can lead along uncertain and unmarked paths, where climbing, once more, can be a guide.

In Alpinist 59, journalist Ana Beatriz Cholo described how she began mountaineering partly to recover from trauma. During an Alaskan expedition with other women veterans, as she trudged across a glacier, memories and images rose with the rhythm of her footfalls: the way the wind shook the orange tree outside her childhood home; how her younger self wished she could escape into the lands of adventure books she read; how the snow crystals sparkled and crunched under her boots; and how she was now living a story she’d once dreamed. “The lead[er]…calls for us to stop and I reiterate her command,” she recalled. “My voice rings out, strong and clear as crystal, soaring across the glacier and into the coming night.”

I find my own voice only in the moment of climbing or writing, when I can attune my body and mind to the shapes of a cliff or the footfalls of words, to the swings of an ice axe or the rhythms of breaths. I find my voice only when I let go of whatever I think it might be, when I lose myself entirely and become merely what I perceive: a distant blue lake that shines, ice-like, with the fading light of autumn and day; the sensation of words and images drifting upward from somewhere unseen.

For me, it is like love. You must open yourself completely. Quiet everything in your mind except the cadence of creation, outside of you, inside of you. The beat of a flower folding and unfolding in the light. The sonar of a bat, its sound waves bouncing off forms, returning with stories of pine trees and fluttering moths. The invisible connections binding image and word, frost and stone, starlight and snow.

This story originally appeared in the February/March 2025 issue of Gripped.