Ten years of hiking buddies: we climbed every kilometer-high peak in the province
One hundred three mountains, ten years, four iron rules: don't rush, don't overreach, leave no trash, never change the summit-photo pose. "We weren't climbing mountains. We were climbing ten years."
Da Zhou and I signed our partnership agreement on a rainy summit.
We met ten years ago in an outdoors chat group. The first hike we did together we caught a rainstorm. On the way down, on mud, we hauled each other along, crawling and sliding, as undignified as it gets. At the bottom we collapsed in a pavilion, looked at the mud on each other, and burst out laughing at the same time. When we stopped, Da Zhou said, "That's the kind of person who makes a good partner." I asked why. He said, "Someone you can be a mess with and still not fall out with."
Right there we agreed to climb every peak in the province over a thousand meters, one by one. The provincial mountaineering association lists a hundred and three. It took us ten years. We finished all of them.
Ten years, a hundred and three mountains, and both our lives got packed into them. The year Da Zhou's company laid him off he climbed seven. "When you get to the top you understand. Work is like going up, going up is like work. Neither is easy, and you can come down from both." The year my father died I climbed three, walking empty ridges, saying to the mountain the things I had not said. He got married and we took his last single photo on a summit. The year my daughter was born he took me up the shortest hill near my home. "Altitude doesn't matter. Leaving the house is what matters."
Ten years of partnership ran on four iron rules.
One: don't rush. If someone's year is going badly and they cancel, you don't ask why. You invite them again next time.
Two: don't overreach. Nobody toughs it out for the sake of face. "Walk as far as you walk. Coming down matters more than summiting." That rule saved Da Zhou once. He had hidden a knee injury; halfway up I saw his gait was wrong and made him turn around.
Three: leave nothing behind. Our principle is that you carry out what you carry in, and you pick up other people's trash when you see it.
Four: the summit photo, same pose for twenty years. Standing side by side, no peace signs. "We're not here to sightsee. We're here to live."
A hiking partner is not a travel companion. It is someone you have sweated with, been rained on with, held up, and sat silent beside on a ridge. That kind of friendship twists two lives together, one mountain at a time.
The day we finished the hundred and third, on the last summit, we laid out every photograph from ten years: a hundred and three of them, a different background in each, two smiles getting older. In the first we were just past thirty, thick-haired. In the last, Da Zhou had gray, and I was wearing reading glasses.
Da Zhou counted through them and said, "Look at this. What did we even climb?"
I said, "Ten years."
On the way down we ate at a farmhouse restaurant at the foot of the mountain and fought over the bill. The owner watched us and laughed. "You two have been friends for ten-something years, haven't you? I can tell from the way you fight over the check." Da Zhou said, "Thirty years." She didn't believe him. "Thirty years of friendship and you still climb together every week?" Da Zhou said, "It's because the friendship is that old that we have to climb together. Sitting around trading memories is the past. Climbing together is what's still going."
Our list has a second volume now: the thousand-meter peaks in the next province over, more than a hundred of them. Da Zhou says we keep climbing, until we can't, and then we switch to electric scooters and watch from the bottom — wherever the mountains are, that's where we'll be.
In the end
"Partner" became a fashionable word these past few years: a partner for meals, for travel, for the gym. It is a light word, easy to pick up and easy to put down. Ten years of hiking shows what else it can mean. You agree on something, and then you show up for it year after year, until your two lives have been threaded into a single book, with a mountain named on every page.