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"Because we live in a technological age, we are often insulated from our deeper emotions, such as understanding death or perceiving the earth as an animate form. But the time I spent on and around Denali were years in which I abandoned much of the modern world and perceived the mountain and its surrounding wilderness as a living, breathing entity. This sounds half-crazed, I know. But it may have been a necessary means for absorbing these intense experiences about death. Perhaps my preoccupation on Denali with death curtailed normal romantic interactions. For ten years, I may have allowed myself to become intimate with a mountain. I make no apologies for this; it is more exposure than literary pretense affords, and I now feel fortunate to have lived a portion of my life as intensely as I did." —from the preface