On the benefits of evening walks

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MCS AlexClimb Mountaineering School

Beauty is not an adornment to life, but proof of its authenticity

After descending from the pass, we set up camp on the gentle slope of a wide gorge. The group dispersed into their tents, resting before tomorrow's ascent, and I decided to take a stroll – without any specific goals in mind.

I simply wanted to stretch my legs after the arduous hike with my backpack, and also to satisfy my curiosity – to see what was visible beyond the neighboring ridge.

I had no one to join me – the climb up to the pass was strenuous and more conducive to lazy lounging in a warm sleeping bag than to any incomprehensible evening strolls through the surrounding gullies.

With about two hours left until sunset, I headed for the summit of the neighboring ridge. I was curious to see what new view would open up from the rocky, saw-toothed ridge that completely obscured the mountain panorama to the northeast.

After about an hour of climbing and gaining 700 meters of elevation, I found myself on a comfortable rock balcony—a narrow, gently sloping shelf that encircled the impenetrable rocky bastion of the summit crowning the ridge.

In the final meters of the climb, I felt the familiar sense of an approaching event—one of as yet unknown nature, but clearly destined to happen to me in the very near future. Having been a professional mountaineer for a long time, I've come to trust my intuition—if I'm imagining something, it's because I'm not imagining it. However, this applies not only to the mountains.

As soon as my line of sight rose above the obstacle blocking my view, I realized I had been right in both time and place.

Under the absolutely clear, deepening evening sky, in the perfect silence of the still atmosphere, a performance unfolded at that very moment, the likes of which have hardly been seen in any theater in its beauty, purity, and height of emotion.

Precisely because theaters are places of performance: actors can never achieve the sincerity and purity that permeates performances that require no director or actors.

15 kilometers of wide valley separated me from a secluded group of icy peaks, painted in the colors of the approaching sunset, as if deliberately gathered into a single compact massif—as if a brilliant jeweler had selected the finest diamonds to adorn a royal ring.

The perfect shapes of the ice ridges, edged with mirror-clear snow, echoed in this composition with every tiny detail, clearly visible in the crystal-clear mountain air.

The transparency of the atmosphere obscured the space—the air was so pure that it seemed you could reach out and touch those toy-like, perfect, fairytale-like silhouettes, beckoning with their deceptive tenderness.

Mesmerized by the sudden sensation of the approaching sunset, I sat down on a rock and lost myself in an incomprehensible moment. The next 40 minutes remain in my memory as one long second, the moment between two heartbeats.

I don't remember what prompted me to turn on the music—my phone is full of different tracks—but somewhere, at the edge of consciousness, I harbored the conviction that classical music beautifully underscores solemn moments.

I randomly clicked on one of my favorite, and at the same time most challenging, pieces – the opening chords of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto began to play in my headphones...

The perfect choice of soundtrack for the nirvana of a mountain sunset was spot on. The waves of this brilliant composer's work completely dissolved me in the moment – ​​this melody, with its heartbreak and confident, growing expression, became the perfect arrangement for a stunning performance.

On stage, before me, the only spectator, an indescribable symphony of shifting colors and looming shadows unfolded, imperceptibly smoothly, yet with each passing second, emphasizing more and more sharply the razor-sharpness of the ice ridges, the pristine purity, and the cosmic perfection of the peaks.

There was no mistaking it—it was a targeted smile from the universe, staring straight at me—at a microscopic, yet conscious and meaningful part of this world, perched on an inaccessible rocky cliff above an ocean of sunset colors, with headphones still blasting Rachmaninoff.

The music ended after about 40 minutes—I spent the entire time breathless, transfixed by what I had seen. The sunset ended, and the blue shadow of the descending horizon fell across the sky and the peaks.

I descended to camp in the dark, reassuring my friends over the radio, who were puzzled by my long absence.

I remember that midnight descent along the ledges of the old moraine well. Very pleased with my "loot," I leaped from stone to stone, feeling like a successful thief who had snuck into the treasury of an eastern emperor and stolen something the value of which, at the time of the theft, I couldn't even comprehend. This is an old story—perhaps 10, maybe even 15 years old... But today, when I feel suffocated by the overwhelming senselessness, I recall those 40 minutes on the clifftop, facing the sunset's glow glowing on the ice crystals... In the midst of the incredibly powerful chords of a brilliant melody. And meaning returns—as if the sun were breaking through storm clouds.

Text and photographs by Alex Trubachev

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