Ice/Alpine

"If you can bang a pin in with your ice axe without anyone yelling at you and you packed the whiskey 'cause it is the only thing that won't freeze, you're probably alpine climbing."    — Christian.

"Get into good physical conditioning by training (unless you are English)."    — Chouinard's advice for ice climbing.

"All ice is dangerous.
Grade 4 pillars are pumpy.
Grade 5 pillars are pumpy and dangerous.
Except for certain rare days of triple-high biorythms and favorable planetary alignments, grade 6 is beyond reach."    — Dougal McDonald.

"As in any alpine region, the weather is changeable, protection questionable, route-finding bewildering, rockfall frequent and descents tedious. In short, it's everything you could ever ask for."    — from the Canadian Alpine Journal, 1993.

"Er, I say, are you going to be able to get me out ?."    — Eric Shipton while inside a Patagonian crevasse.

"Alps /n./ cries for assistance, most commonly heard in alpine areas of Great Britain."

"Snow bridge /n./ card game played on a glacier. As in other alpine endeavors, tricks are common, and there is always a dummy."

"Terminal moraine /n./ the last glacier you'll ever climb."

"1 - High pain threshold
2 - Bad memory
3 - I forget the third."    — The three attributes of a good (mountaineer/ice climber/big waller).

"APPARATUS:
97 Ice Axes,
5 Cases Dynamite,
7 Cans Nitroglycerin
...."    — From Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad" (1880), a snippet of the gear list for the ascent of the "Riffleberg".

"Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac..."    — Yvon Chouinard.

"Bivouac /n/ French for 'mistake'."

"In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these."    — Paul Harvey.

"10 March... 0 hours climbing. Write 5 pages to my mother in law. Getting desperate."    — Dave Johnson's journal entry while stormbound in Alaska.

"I have always thought that heroism must be rarer at dawn than in the evening — I often observed the fact in alpine huts: in the evening everyone is praying for fine weather the next day, and when the next day comes they wish that it was raining."    — René Dittert.

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave 5 minutes longer."    — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"— You guys going up ?
— Yes, yes, we go up
— You may be going a lot higher than you think !"    — Don Whillans, to a Japanese party, while retreating off the north face of Eiger in a storm.

"One thing to remember on the Eiger, never look up, or you may need a plastic surgeon"    — Don Whillans.

"Greg, we gotta do this thing tomorrow. We're almost out of booze."    — Jim Donini to Greg Crouch beneath Mt Bradley on the Ruth Glacier.

"— We are going to make it...
— I don't think so, but we will finish in style..."    — Clint Eastwood, The Eiger Sanction.

"Summits in the Alps go through 3 steps:
• impossible !
• the hardest climb of the Alps
• a lady's walk"    — George Leigh Mallory.

"You put up with the grind of work or school as long as you can or is required. But then, one day, the phone rings one too many times, or the line at the gas pumps seems unending. The air smells bad. The food foul. 'Enough of this' you cry. You grab your ice tools and are gone."    — Duane Raleigh.