I have been climbing in conditions like that and consider myself fortunate to have experienced it and to have lived through it. The song is great too.
Awesome! I met Kurt Diemberger at a slideshow he gave just a couple of years after the K2 disaster. He ended with an eloquent memorial to his climbing friends who perished, saying he and they were all doing what they loved.
Thanks for this thread, and the song!
Joni Mitchell is a musical genius. I know that word is overused today, but she deserves it. I include her lyrics and prose along with the music. They are welded together as finished pieces of melody and melodrama. I was just listening to her album Hejira from about 1977. So many good songs to hear on it. “Coyote, Amelia, Furry Sings the Blues, Hejira and A Song For Sharon.
Joni cannot sing in public anymore, having been stopped after a brain aneurysm in 2015. She uses a wheelchair too.
Even the Queen of folk rock, with her unusual acoustic chords, her pure harmonies with just the right touch of discordance is but a fragile human, like the rest of us.
Fated and spiritually fey.
Persons who risk the lives of their rescuers and sherpas for their own self glorification are better dead.