If you’re going to say it or push it I believe it’s important to have done something, to have lost as well as gained, to have earned the broadcast frequency rather than your position having been an accident. This is Talk + Action and the sum is always greater than its integers. Those who actually know a thing and DO something with it, who work for it and use it, and eventually learn from it, now those folks are interesting. They have wisdom to pass along.
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I talk a lot. I’ve hawked products. I was selective and tried hard not to pimp anything that didn’t align with my own values. Sometimes I wrote ruthless, honest reviews of products that I was paid to use because few products are ever as good as their marketing. Anyway, the point of that talking, writing, teaching, and training has been to open eyes, reorient thought, to change what people expect of themselves, and how they behave. I’ve always believed it important to share knowledge, and wisdom, the experiences that could help others live their lives, perhaps differently. That’s real, and useful influence, NOT what’s mistaken for it. The collective illusion is shockingly prevalent, and difficult to resist. It infiltrates the psyche, affecting individual self-image and behavior too.
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marktwight.substack.com
Concentration is exclusion. It’s a necessary element of success. And while focus eliminates distraction, it sometimes becomes a trap, a telephoto lens that prevents us resolving subjects or material outside of its narrow view. Success rewards the means of its achievement, which can quickly become habit, also a trap. I have always believed it important to balance one’s physical and intellectual capacities, and embrace the learning and knowledge particular to each.
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For us to balance the diploma or exhausting, self-guided journey through the classics at the library we should fit a pipe, build a fence, plumb a house, fell trees, clear land, plant seeds, harvest crops, climb a mountain, defend a loved one, serve our community, write a book, give a speech, and live as an example that inspires others to strive and improve, to do and grow. Action is a sober counterbalance to academics, and serious consequences can be the gift that pushes us to a higher level of thinking and doing.
marktwight.substack.com
marktwight.com
Sometimes our social conditioning makes us believe that if we admit to being ignorant, to not knowing something, others will think less of us. I’ve learned that the opposite is true, especially if we are sincere in our inquiry, if we demonstrate that we are willing — and able — to learn. Over and over again, when I have asked questions, when I have tried to alleviate ignorance instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, I have learned valuable lessons, some of which changed my life.
There have been technical teachings, and also lessons about belief in Self and capability, and investing in both. If you truly believe in your project use your own money to make it. Of course, this is a greater risk but the outcome may also be greater; if you use someone else’s money you will never own, and never control what you make. Believe in your own value because investors will only do so for a percentage of the take.
marktwight.com/speaker
marktwight.substack.com
I feel very fortunate to have spent the last couple weeks sharing emails and phone calls with Mark Twight.
I was 24 the first time I deployed. I spent six months in a three-story concrete block of a house, a few hundred feet from the Gulf of Aden. The “gym” we had was in an open-air courtyard—ten-foot walls, concertina wire. Rusty plates and kettlebells cooking in the sun and a pull-up bar that rocked back and forth with each repetition.
Someone there handed me a paperback copy of the book “Kiss or Kill” — told me they’d recently spent time training with the author, Mark Twight. A few hundred pages later, I bought a plane ticket to Seattle with the goal of climbing Mt. Rainier.
Twelve years later, in the fall of 2025, I came across an essay written by Blair Speed titled Sobriety. The title deserves its place but to me, it felt more like a love story—having more to do with patience and grace and the non-linear way we make progress in life.
I was two-thirds of the way through before I realized it was written about Mark Twight.
The author and alpinist who’s made first ascents in Alaska, the Alps, and the Himalayas. Who started Gym Jones and spent years training tier-one units, accomplished athletes, and movie stars. The same Mark Twight whose writing inspired me to climb Rainier.
When I reached out to Mark, he suggested we conduct the interview in writing. “Send me your questions,” he wrote in an email. “I’ll answer them and then we can talk.” I agreed, and only afterward felt the pressure that came with it—Mark is a serious writer, someone who, “agonizes over sentences and words,” as he writes in one response. I needed to write questions worthy of such effort.
I eventually sent my questions and he sent his answers and afterward we had a long phone call. He seemed curious and thoughtful. We talked military TRANSITION and brain injury, spiritual experiences, and he shared a few stories from his years working with the SEAL teams in the early 2000s—spending time on Denali with a few individuals who are no longer with us.
Interview link in bio.
#writing #climbing #adventure #substack
After @stevehouse10 and I recorded a two-part podcast for his "Voice of the Mountains" series we reconvened to record a conversation for the Équipe Solitaire podcast. In this short clip he describes visiting the Charakusa Valley for the first time in 2003 (after having attempted Masherbrum). At that time, "apart from the 1981 Japanese route on K7, and one on K6 no other routes had been climbed on the highest summits ... some rock routes on the lower peaks, including the 56-pitch, 5.11 route on Spansar Brakk done by Peter Croft and Conrad Anker in 1998, had been done but that was it." And he was there to climb alone, in the good company of local porters and base camp staff.
First, he soloed a new, 4000' route on a previously unclimbed peak that he named "Haji Brakk", 5950m, and then made three attempts to solo a new route on K7 (which he completed the following year).
Listen to the entire podcast at marktwight.substack.com
When we met 35 years ago I didn't know Scott Backes would be my climbing partner and dearest friend for my entire adult life. We have grown and changed over those years, of course, but the search for meaning and self-mastery we bonded over remains. We aren't clawing at it as our younger selves did but holding it more tenderly; searching, conscious, aware, observant, and tolerant. We have less road ahead than behind and that feels OK, settled. I'm grateful for our friendship and also for the music that's been integral to the bond made when we first tied into the rope.
Growing up, I did not understand the power of music, that it could steer and echo emotions, motivate and console, or that it can condense communication. Music carried us up and guided us down the mountains. It has driven and solaced as we turned our lungs inside-out to prepare for those climbs, and played quietly while we sat in the valley learning to assimilate what we had just come through. Scott and I developed our own verbal shorthand based on lyrics, and used it to center each other when things got out of control in the mountains or as social commentary if we didn’t want bystanders listening in.
Decades after a shared soundtrack cemented our friendship the music brought us together once again, carried us over and through the timeline of our lives, leaving a braille of goosebumps across my forearms as a reminder that it has always been with us, and always will be.
Read "Souls in Isolation" at marktwight.substack.com
"Tying in to the climbing rope is a powerful physical gesture, a declaration of trust, and of submission to what nature and the mountain might offer, of facing all of that together. We can never know what tying the knot that first time could mean in the future, or understand how strong the bond might be, how it may endure. Sometimes we treat the act casually and sometimes we honor it, recognizing all that it symbolizes, and all that has passed along the rope between the hands and hearts at each end of it."
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In a new essay on Substack titled, "The Rope Between Us", I write about my partnership and the deep, enduring friendship that grew out of our first meeting, and the first time we tied-in together to go climbing.
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We recorded a podcast as well, broadcast on Substack and Spotify. marktwight.substack.com
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Photo above: 53 or 55 hours into the Slovak Direct on Denali, @stevehouse10 and I showing signs of the fatigue. Photo by @backesbivys
We’ve done and lived a lot together and apart. When @backesbivys came to visit me in Chamonix in the spring of 1992 he shared a story of singing the chorus of this song loudly on the airplane. His headphones kept him from knowing how loud … apparently the lady in the seat next to him was somewhat unnerved by the man bellowing, “Tomorrow begat tomorrow!” right next to her. And damn we tried to do some climbing that merited such a soundtrack but it was crap weather for weeks, I think it rained in the valley on 24 or 25 days of his month-long visit. We got skunked. But a year later we took good, sweet revenge.
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Check out my Substack page for writing, photographs, podcasts and sometimes, video.
It’s not about fitness but instead necessary commentary
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During my reading and conversation related to the present state of social affairs I came across a story penned by Dr Seuss, whose 65 year-old observation so accurately describes our modern world. Even though my cynicism has evolved toward cautious optimism I wasn’t ready for such incisive commentary. Sociopolitical beliefs can become a distinct identifier just as easily as the mark of a star on the belly of a Sneetch, and human nature is quick to associate such distinction with “unique” and “superior” while simultaneously othering others.
As a thought experiment, I took this children’s story of prejudice and division and spiced it up with a little puppet-mastering and rampant commercialism. I replaced Sylvester McMonkey McBean with the imaginary love child of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and the story became a peculiarly accurate biography of our current era. Seuss’ tale does conclude happily, with all of the Sneetches united by the recognition that they were more similar than not, and no mark or uniform could elevate one group above another.
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Read it here:
marktwight.substack.com
From the essay:
“That I’m alive to write makes it my duty to do so. That I could step away from the thing that made me and reinvent myself once, twice, and then again means I should write about it because sometimes, what a young man needs to read is that it can get better, that we can and do, and that who we are is not necessarily who we will be, fixed, rigid, and fenced in. Sometimes a young man needs to read that other men have felt just as unanchored, misunderstood, angry, and deeply sad.”
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Read it on Substack:
marktwight.substack.com
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Listen to the @uphill_athlete podcast:
uphillathlete.com/voiceofthemountains/episodes/
Or wherever you listen to podcasts
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The Responsibility to Remain
Every generation has its icons. In alpine climbing, Mark Twight was one of ours. He was the provocateur. The punk. The voice that shattered the romance of mountaineering literature with prose as cold as the routes he soloed. He cut through the sport’s orthodoxy with his writing, with his ethics, and with his refusal to hide the emotional toll behind a heroic veneer. He was never trying to be a role model, but for generations of climbers, he became one anyway.
For years, Mark represented the edge of difficulty, of risk, of what could be said out loud. He called bullshit on our conventions and called forward a deeper honesty. Through his book Kiss or Kill, through his climbs, through his Gym Jones era, he embodied intensity in a way few others could. His climbing was brutal and beautiful. His writing was raw and self-revealing. And his reputation became larger than the man himself.
But men change. And often, they deepen. Here is a question for you. Does @wfmft have a duty to remain? Let me know in the comments.
Part two of our conversation is live. Link above. Photos by the versatile @blairspeed
Voice of the Mountains Podcast — Season 2, Episode 9: “The Responsibility to Remain” Part 2 with guest Mark Twight is now live 💪🏼
Mark Twight recalls surviving an avalanche on Nanga Parbat, his evolution from elite alpinist to Gym Jones founder, and the through-line of chasing human potential across every chapter of life.
🎧 Listen now on uphillathlete.com/voiceofthemountains or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
#VoiceOfTheMountains #UphillAthlete #LifeInTheMountains #SlovakDirect #Redemption
