On Risk and Ridges

This Thursday the 29th, author David Roberts will be giving a talk at REI based on his new book, "On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined". Seattlest is familiar with his stories mostly from those we know who have climbed much more than we can lay claim to--Roberts lost his first friend and climbing partner at the age of 18, and lived to witness 2 more climbing deaths by the time he was 22.

His earlier writing on the tradeoffs between risk and reward concluded that his thril-seeking was "worth it", but his more recent work has surprised many in the sport with something of a change of heart. We expect his talk will be less about bragadoccio-driven adventure stories, and more focused on dissecting the relationship between humans and risk: what drives us to take risks, how we implicitly calculate "odds" (often incorrectly), and whether the potentially short-term rewards are worth the risk over the long run.