My name is Ben Fetterman, and climbing mountains is in my blood. Growing up in Washington State, we visited Mt. Rainier National Park often, and I would dream of setting out for the summit like the mountaineers I would see leaving Paradise Lodge. Fast forward to high school and college in Maine, where rock climbing and climbing the local mountains of Western Maine and New Hampshire became a weekend routine. When I graduated from college, I continued to love the outdoors but stuck mainly to running and cycling, as those were the easiest activities to fit into my suburban life in PA and CT. 

 

The mountains became further out of reach as I became a competitive cyclist. After a major crash, my time and focus changed to climbing another type of mountain--the corporate ladder. As I ascended the management ranks of retail banking, reaching the executive level, I was working harder than ever, but my life was missing something. I was burned out, and felt like my life was on repeat of wake up, work, go home, sleep. I needed to "wake up" in a different way, to reclaim my time as my own, to pursue a passion I had put aside for a paycheck.

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All it took was a last-minute trip to Aspen with my wife. Traveling to Colorado meant hiking was on the agenda. My wife fell in love with the mountain lifestyle, and I felt a sense of coming home. We both came home changed people. We knew work wasn't the be-all, end-all, that there was more to life than spreadsheets and hitting arbitrary goals. We couldn't wait to plan future vacations around mountain vistas and to make chasing the "awe" in awesome our goal. That fall, we took another trip to Oregon and climbed on Mt. Hood, and I knew that the passion for mountaineering was reignited.

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All my life I would journal my climbing adventures. The past few years hand written journals became e-journals discussing the routes and weather, but also made connections to life and climbing. That's when the idea of this blog was born.  Follow along as I tackle summits with a new view on life! Climb On!