Essay and original illustration.

“I imagine trying to capture this moment in a painting. Below us a different rope team walks a snowy ridgeline, dividing equal expanses of ribbed darkness and near-blinding white. Like us, they are small figures moving across the landscape, the first light calling them out in sharp relief. Like us, they straddle the line between risk and reward, joy and fear, memory and loss, light and shadow.”

Read the whole essay here (pages 10-11).