The mountain also taught me a new meaning of friendship that I have carried with me all these years. In the Valley of Tears we were able to strip ourselves of what, almost incidentally, usually obscures the real essence of a person. Up there we had no costumes or masks. We were human beings disconnected from everything that often gives us consistency. It didn’t matter what family we came from or whether we were good or bad students, or how old we were, whether we were good at sports or not, whether our social lives were glamorous or boring. All of that had been left in another place, another
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