This episode, The Dirt Bag Diaries, is brought to you by Patagonia, makers of high-quality clothing and gear, for outdoor sports, world travel, and daily lives within harmony with nature.

Visit them on the web at Patagonia.com

Okay, so here's the situation. I'm standing just beneath the 10,000-foot summit, the north-sister, in central Oregon.

I've just successfully summited, but I'm definitely not happy.

I'm standing on the left side of an ice-gulley, the width of a school hallway. I need to get to the other side.

And typically, that wouldn't be a big deal. You'd be wearing crampons, you'd have an ice axe in your hands, and you would take a few careful steps across the ice, look over your shoulder, and think, wow, I wouldn't want to fall there.

But there's a problem. My crampons and ice axes are on the other side of the gulley. Right where I left them strapped to my backpack when I climbed the final 100 feet of rock to the summit.

They're no more than 10 or 15 feet away. In the last 10 minutes, I've managed to stack bad ideas on top of half-assed logic held together by laziness and haste.

I've just hosed myself in the biggest way.

I've got my left foot wedged in the small crevice between the snow and the rock wall. I'm holding onto the wall with my left hand, leaning out, way out, and hacking steps in the snow with the tip of the sharp trying the rock.

I'm going to have to make three very, very delicate moves across the gulley before I can grab the other wall.

The strangest thought bubbles up through the fear. I think to myself, this is kind of like locking your keys in the car in the middle of nowhere.

You can see the keys on the front seat, but you can't get to them. It's like that only worse. Like you've locked yourself out of the car.

The keys are sitting uselessly on the front seat, and something big and scary is chasing you.

Those are the thoughts that are going through my head as I commit to the traverse. In each hand, I've got a sharp rock in the hopes that I might be able to stop a fall.

I breathe deep, lift my foot, and instantaneously feel the other skate from beneath me. The rocks scrape like nails across a chalkboard, I can feel them burrow into the flesh of my palms.

For a moment, it feels like I might stop the fall, that I'm stronger than gravity, and then the rocks fly from my hands and I'm sliding.

The walls blur, my fingers claw at the ice and rock, and then I'm airborne.

In the time it takes a synapse to fire, I take it all in. The long tongue of ice, the cliff, the yawning crevasses on the glacier 2000 feet below, the evergreen hills of western Oregon.

And somewhere beyond that, my home in the flatlands, my wife typing away at a keyboard at the kitchen table.

I realize that I'm about to answer the question we've all asked ourselves. What is it like to die?

At one point or another, we've all cited percentages or experience levels and shrugged away risk.

...