Nearly seven centuries ago, the poet we know as Petrarch, a hero of the early Italian Renaissance, scaled a minor Western alp. So the story goes. Even if he wasn’t the first to ascend Mont Ventoux as he claimed, and though the bald mountain is no Matterhorn, the climb itself proved noteworthy. An ancient shepherd, bearing conventional wisdom, advised him against the climb. Whoever, and for what purpose other than for finding a shortcut or fleeing hot pursuit, would want to undertake such a journey?

The modern answer “because it’s there” (also said of the summit of Everest and the surface of the Moon) would have made no sense to Petrarch’s contemporaries. Adventure was a novel idea. As Petrarch’s nineteenth-century champion, the art historian Jacob Burckhardt put it, “an indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him.” And this magnetic pull for a singular viewpoint and fresh, grand perspective culminated in the poet’s ascent.

The famous letter that the poet wrote about the novel experience to his father-confessor, however, has been cited as a turning point in the Western attitude toward the grandeur of nature and the audacity of personally connecting with the remote natural world. And let me say here, climbing Mont Ventoux also stands as a milestone in the history of strenuous play; play for its own sake. Play for the sake of audacious challenge.

Ventoux means “windy,” more or less. At its peak, higher than 6,000 feet, persistent high winds still scour the limestone bare. The summit serves as the site of the finish line of one of the most grueling stages of competitive cycling’s........

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