Why Do People Climb? 

by Susan E.B. Schwartz

Not everyone in New Paltz, of course, is a rock climber.   You can look west from Main Street and be perfectly happy to admire the Shawangunk cliffs . . . from afar. 

Bringing up the reasonable question:  Why do people climb? 

It’s a question that climbers themselves grapple with.  In 1993, Climbing Magazine asked me to write an obituary for Gustavo Brillembourg, a college classmate who died climbing in Yosemite.  The effort soon grew into a full fledged article and forced me to take a hard look at the question.    

I think I hit on something — excerpts popped up in such diverse places as t-shirts for a Pennsylvania climbing school and websites for a rock gym in Seattle and the Scarlet Woman Lodge in Texas (followers of the law of Thelema, the website explains).

If you don’t climb, and wonder why some people do . . . if you do climb, and still ponder the same question, here is the story of Gustavo Brillembourg.  In it lies the best answer I’ve managed to come up with.

Behind every obituary, there is a story left untold. One of the more poignant is that of Gustavo Brillembourg, a New Paltz climber who died in 1993 while climbing in Yosemite.

Gustavo’s life was full and privileged.  After he died, The New York Times ran an article captioned, "Eulogy for a Lawyer and Mountain Climber. A Renaissance man who balanced a life of passionate interests is dead at 35."

Gustavo seemingly had it all — an unattractive but evocative and popular expression.  So why would he put it all on the line?

You could run down a tick list of his enviable assets:  high status career, high paying job, gorgeous talented wife —a world famous mezzo soprano opera singer, no less — adorable tow headed young son, loving and wealthy family, good health, good looks, good friends.  And the capper for a New Yorker — even a great Manhattan apartment.

Why would someone like Gustavo want to climb?  Need to climb?

From a wealthy and closely-knit Venezuelan family, Gustavo was born in Caracas and grew up outside New York.  Smart and driven, he went to Harvard and Georgetown Law School, and afterwards joined the prestigious law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardell.

A talented athlete, in high school, Gustavo won the state wrestling championship in his weight class.  But the sport failed to satisfy deeper needs. As a freshman at Harvard, he attended a slideshow of the Harvard Mountaineering Club.  His future course was sealed.

Immediately, Gustavo felt at home with other climbers, particularly one of the leading figures of extreme Northeast ice climbing, Rainsford Rouner. The two grew so close, that over the years, they came to consider themselves more as brothers than friends.  With Rainsford as his climbing mentor, Gustavo progressed rapidly in both ice climbing and rock climbing.  For someone who seemingly held all the pieces in life, Gustavo found the piece, that for him, had been missing.

Ever since Gustavo's earliest years as a child in South America, surrounded by the Andes, he was filled with awe of the mountains. Although not religious, he was deeply spiritual. In climbing, he found what he sought: the combination of intellectual and physical challenges, in settings inspiring awe at life's beauty yet offering refuge from its unrelenting practicalities and compromises. Gustavo would describe his favorite climbing areas as sanctuaries.

Even as he grew increasingly prominent as a corporate lawyer and his workweek routinely topped seventy hours, Gustavo made time to climb at least one day each weekend, even if sandwiched between client meetings and business trips.

Always, Gustavo also made time for his poetry. He began in high school, but like his climbing, his poetry was personal. He rarely showed his poems to anyone, even his wife, Fredrika. Often, the only time he had to write was after midnight, returning from another late night in the office. 

Even on his last flight to San Francisco, he sketched notes for a new poem.  Going through Gustavo’s things after his death, Fredrika found literally hundreds of poems in boxes. Climbing and the mountains figure prominently as themes or imagery.

For fifteen years, Gustavo dreamed of climbing the imposing Salathe Wall on Yosemite’s 3,000 foot high El Capitan.  Everything looked promising on this last climbing trip.  He was with his long time Shawangunks climbing partner, Rui Ferraira, who matched him well in ability and personality. As a moderate training climb, they smartly picked a twelve pitch route called the Northeast Buttress of Higher Cathedral Spire.

They were nearly finished, could almost savor that sweet feeling of topping out after a good, long day’s hard work.

Could almost imagine the jokes and smiles on the top.  The long hike down, sweaty, grimy, and happy. 

Then it happened. 

Gustavo was leading the eleventh pitch.  Only one pitch to go.  For reasons we’ll never know, he fell. 

It happened fast, without warning. 

He fell almost 100 feet, hitting ledges several times as he plummetted.  Tied into an anchor and belaying around a corner, Rui didn’t see what happened.  Although when it was his turn to lead, Gustavo usually was conservative and placed leader protection cautiously, this time seemed an exception. 

In climber’s parlance, Gustavo apparently ran out the pitch — didn’t place much protection in case of a leader fall.  The one or two pieces that he did wedge in the rock pulled out as he fell.

It’s easy afterwards to say he should have placed more protection. But that’s the decision for the leader.  Perhaps Gustavo figured that this was a climb well within his technical ability, darkness was imminent, the top so near, it would be better and safer to climb through.

Fate decided to be achingly cruel to Gustavo.  In the fall, he broke many bones, leaving him unable to move.  As he fell, he dropped the rack holding most of the climbing protection. 

In the dark, he and Rui were left without options for going up or down. Until it grew light, they were stranded on a narrow sloping belay ledge. 

As they waited for the first streaks of dawn to appear in the sky, it never occurred to Rui to ask what had happened or for Gustavo to explain. Rui was too concerned with coping with the situation at hand, Gustavo in too much pain.  After several hours, there on the ledge, Gustavo died.

Gustavo’s funeral in Manhattan was attended by seven hundred fifty people.  The church ran out of seats, so people stood outside jammed in the street. When Rainsford delivered the eulogy, he spoke poignantly of other tragic climbing accidents. 

During college, Rainsford's younger brother, Tim, died while the two brothers were climbing the Devil's Thumb in Alaska.  Rainsford had always blamed himself for the tragedy. And it was Gustavo who comforted him in the terrible period after Tim's death, and wrote a poem, The Fall, to come to terms with Tim's death.  Just as Rainsford flew out to Yosemite right after the accident with Gustavo’s family, hoping to offer some comfort.

As I worked on the article, I came to feel that I knew Gustavo well.  But we met, coincidentally and briefly, only once, in the Gunks one week before he left for Yosemite. Our lives only formally intersected with his death.  But for many years, they ran along closely parallel tracks.

It turned out we were at the same college, had friends in common, both tried traditional competitive sports before finding climbing, both moved to New York and entered the corporate world.  And both felt the need for artistic expression through writing. 

Like Gustavo, I grappled with my own ways to keep climbing, even as the effort grew harder and more complex, even as I too well knew the risks. On my fifth time rock climbing, I watched my climbing partner take a long, bad fall. It seemed inconceivable to me that such a good climber, on a route well within his ability, could fall like that.  Or that I could be watching death on such a warm, peaceful spring morning.

Which brings us back to the question: Why do people climb?

The answer for me was there the first time I climbed.  After the terror came astonishment—at a fantastically beautiful world I hadn’t know existed—and wonder. Everything in this new world was on a grander scale than the workaday urban world: the settings, the emotions and insights it inspired, and the issues it revealed, like the most basic ones of life and death.

After climbing I felt rejuvenated and stronger, better able to see past the jumble of daily stresses and demands to what is really important in life:  Courage. Grace. Humor. Humility.

I would never kid myself that Gustavo’s death was anything but tragic and unlucky.  But to me, the story behind Gustavo’s obituary is not that he died climbing, but that he lived so fully the rest of the time. 

Since I first thought about Gustavo’s life and death, thirteen years ago, a lot happened to me personally. While I now think both the answer is more nuanced than I originally wrote, I still embrace the basic tenet.

There must be safer, saner ways to restore the spirit than by climbing. But I haven’t found any yet.

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