“I’d often heard this kind of language—the vocabulary of addiction—not just in the climbing world but among many who pursue dangerous activities like BASE jumping, wingsuiting, ski mountaineering, big-wave surfing, and so on. I marveled at the power of such pursuits to override our hardwired instinct for self-preservation. How close one needed to stand—or fly, or ski, or surf—to their own mortality was, to me, a question of infinite fascination with no correct answer.” Nick Heil in Outside: The Tragedy on Howse Peak.