“Mountains strip us layer by layer until our core is exposed, raw and vulnerable.” Whitney Clark is a professional climber who has established several alpine routes around the globe. She also spends a lot of time thinking about how to balance risk and ambition in the mountains. In this episode, Clark opens up about how she approaches decision making in the alpine—whether to bail or climb on—and how those moments ripple on into the future. In the second part of this episode, Clark reads her essay, "A Few Seconds," which first appeared in Issue 58 of Alpinist magazine.