Expedition 9: A Fictional Mountaineering Journal of Silence, Storms, and Summit

Why I Wrote Expedition 9

I wrote Expedition 9 to explore what it might feel like to climb a mountain.

Not just the physical mechanics of it, but the emotional terrain: the fear, the trust, the exhaustion, the silence that presses in when the summit is still days away.

This story became a fictional mountaineering journal, told through the voice of Kahlia, a climber navigating Ama Dablam with three teammates, Jack, Adrian, and David. Their expedition is imagined, but the challenges mirror those faced by real mountaineers.

While researching this piece, I found myself pulled into stories like the 1996 Everest disaster and the bottleneck of K2, where climbers queue beneath a towering serac. Those accounts shaped the emotional atmosphere I wanted to capture, not fact for fact, but feeling for feeling.

Expedition 9 is part of Grit and Resolve, my broader creative project about endurance and uncertainty. It’s fiction, but it’s also a mirror: a way of imagining the kinds of questions that only mountains,or stories,can ask.

Inside the Journal

Told as a fictional mountaineering journal, the story follows a full ascent—from the quiet arrival at base camp to a summit push in freezing silence, and then back down again through something heavier than gravity.

Kahlia’s team faces:

• A glacier that groans beneath their boots

• The infamous Yellow Tower, where they must carve their own route

• A storm that shreds their camp and forces a descent

• A near miss that shakes the whole expedition to its core

But there’s no dramatic victory waiting at the summit. No flag. No fanfare.

Just breath. Cold. Presence.
And the quiet realization that the mountain doesn’t care whether they make it.

What Comes After

The final entry brings Kahlia home, not to a hero’s welcome, but to a quiet hut, a fire, and a mark on a map. It’s not closure. It’s something slower: reflection, gratitude, and the haunting sense that the journey isn’t over.

This fictional mountaineering journal became my way of exploring how we change when we come up against something vast, and how we carry that change back with us.

Read the Full Journal on Patreon

If this resonates with you, you can read the full Expedition 9 journal, entry by entry, on my Patreon.

Right now, Patrons get access to the complete story, just sign up for a free account. 

This is an ongoing experiment in storytelling. If you’d like to follow where it leads, I’d love to have you along.