One of the best and brightest Yosemite climbers I have known wouldn't take on a partner who carried a camera.  This deeply introspective man, whose life revolved almost wholly around his mountain experiences, wasn't concerned with money or notoriety.  He knew only too well that all he would ever have to show for his efforts were his memories.  They gave him solace, especially when he felt a need to define his identity and his reason for living.  When he seriously asked himself, "Who am I?" or "What do I really know about the world that doesn't rely on second hand information?"  he turned to the truths he had found in the mountains, to the high points of his experiences.
- Galen Rowell, Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape

A climb is style to begin with. Style doesn’t stop with the climb. Style is everything. Style is what you do with the climb after you are done. Not just the climb itself. The way you live your life, I suppose. I have this fear that if you publicize it, it is bad style to brag. There is a style of doing something, and doing it quietly and not telling anyone. And that is related to that exact same style of how you did that route. Without using fixed ropes. Trying to do it in the cleanest style. You couldn’t divorce one from the other. It was all one and the same experience.
- Charlie Porter, legendary climber and arctic explorer. Heron Dance interview.

  

Journal Note: After My Interview Of Charlie Porter

Driven.
Exploring the limits.
Accepting few limits.
Pursuing life
With energy
Full speed ahead
Damn the torpedoes.
Take no prisoners.
Let the devil
Take the hindmost.

First ascents
Many of them solo
Of huge, sheer rock faces
In Yosemite
In the 1970s.
Still a legend.

New Dawn on El Cap.
He dropped his haulbag
Low on the route.
Sleeping for nine days
In slings on the rockface
Without a sleeping bag.
In the cold.

Climbing with style.
The second solo summit
Mt. McKinley
The Cassin Ridge
Twenty pounds of equipment
He made his pack and tent himself.
Thirty-six hours.

Mt. Asgard, Baffin Island
A vertical cylinder of granite
That rises out of the icecap.
A month long hike and climb
He froze his feet.

He spent a year
In a folding kayak
Living off the land
Canoeing 1,800 miles of fiords
Around Cape Horn
Researching old Indian
Campsites and portages
For his own information.

Now he has some boats
In Patagonia
A scientist with no degree
He taught himself
Archeology--ancient Indian cultures.
Paleo-siesmology--earthquakes.
Glacial geology--catastrophic climate change.
Tectonic geology--intrusions, transform faults.
He rents the boats
To pay for his science.
He does the science
For satisfaction.

“Will I ever be the world's greatest archeologist? 
”No.  No way. 
”But I am striving for it. 
”I will have done it with a style that no one has done it before.”
Coming in the back door. 
And in the end having people say:
”Hey, you really know what you are doing.”
That's was his reward, in the end. 
In the end.