I Took a Step Over a Crevasse. I Didn’t Expect to Find Myself on the Other Side.

The June 2025 Writing Contest asked writers to describe the most important move of their lives in 500 words or less. The following submission won second place, a $100 cash prize, and a one-year Outside Digital subscription.

I don’t remember the color of the sunrise that morning on Rainier, only that it never touched the shadows beneath the snow bridge.

We’d been climbing since midnight, our boots chewing up hours of glacier in darkness, our headlamps slicing halos into ice. The mountain had a stillness I’d seen before—the same stillness on my mother’s face when I told her I was leaving home. She’d stared at me, unmoving, as if that might somehow stop the inevitable. I was 17 then, a daughter of refugees pressed into sacrifice. Now I was 27, a guide-in-training on a rope team with three clients, still trying to prove that I belonged in rooms and mountains that weren’t built with me in mind.

The snowbridge came after a long traverse. Wide enough to suggest safety, narrow enough to lie. Below it: a yawning crevasse, deep as memory, dark as the ocean between my parents’ homeland and this one. The team stopped and looked at me.

“Your move.”

The clients waited behind me. I didn’t look back. The rope between us was taut with expectation. I tested the edge of the bridge with my boot. The snow hissed softly, as if exhaling a warning.

In Vietnamese, there’s no clean way to say “I love you” without sounding like you’re apologizing for it. There’s only implication: Have you eaten? Do you have enough layers? Did you get there safely?

This move, this step—this wasn’t the summit. This wasn’t even the crux. But it was the moment that cracked something open. The moment I stopped waiting for certainty. The moment I stopped needing an invitation. The moment I went from known to unknown, trusting that I would be okay.

I took the step.

Weight shifting over the void, crampons skittering for grip. The bridge bowed slightly but held. I didn’t look down. Not because I wasn’t afraid, but because I was. Because I’d been afraid my whole life of falling short. Of taking up too much space. Of being too soft, too queer, too Asian, too much in a world that mistook quiet for weakness. But that morning, the mountain didn’t care. It asked only for presence. For momentum.

And I gave it.

On the other side, I planted my axe and turned to belay. My team crossed one by one, not knowing that my heart was still dangling somewhere midair. I smiled at them, said, “Good job.” Just like my parents used to say when I brought home perfect grades. Pride and pressure, folded into two words.

One year later, I still think about that step. Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was mine. Because it asked me to be more than careful—it asked me to trust the other side, just as my parents did all those decades ago. And I said yes, not with words, but with action.

We didn’t summit that day, with bad weather conditions. But that bridge, that step, that move?

That was everything.

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