Everest Summit Quotes

If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

The only thing you'll find on the summit of Mount Everest is a divine view. The things that really matter lie far below.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

Alone on the summit of Mount Everest.

Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.

When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

How to get the best of it all? One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end - to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. . . Is this the summit, crowning the day? How cool and quiet! We're not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished. . . Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No. . . and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction. . . fulfilled a destiny. . . To struggle and to understand - never this last without the other; such is the law. . .

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.

That fine line between bravery and stupidity is endlessly debated – the difference really doesn’t matter.

I have been seriously afraid at times but have used my fear as a stimulating factor rather than allowing it to paralyse me. My abilities have not been outstanding, but I have had sufficient strength and determination to meet my challenges and have usually managed to succeed with them.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske,

It was like I'd climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, "Whoopdedoo, I made it," and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I'd already climbed it. I didn't want to...but, then, what other choice was there?

I had set myself an unattainable ideal. Such human skill I could summon wasn’t enough for the job. I felt the suicidal despair of all who longed to do what they couldn’t, what only a few in each century could – whether blessed or cursed in spirit. No achievement was ever finite. There was no absolute summit. No peak of Everest to plant a flag on. Success was someone else’s opinion.

You climb only because the mountain allows it. If it says wait, then you must wait, and when it allows you to go, then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might. Listening to the mountain and having patience on it are the keys to survival.

We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.

The most powerful weapon in the world is, Question.

You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God. Matthew 5, v.2 (The Message Version)

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.

The more you give, the more you get.

Mountains are both journey and destination. They summon us to climb their slopes, explore their canyons, and attempt their summits. The summit, despite months of preparation and toil, is never guaranteed though tastes of sweet nectar when reached. If my only goal as a teacher and mountaineer is the summit, I risk cruel failure if I do not reach the highest apex. Instead, if I accept the mountain’s invitation to journey and create meaning in each step, success is manifest in every moment.

The oxygen at the summit of Mount Everest is the same oxygen that has been delicately knit within your lungs; the elements at the bottom of the ocean are dotted like wildflowers along the surface of your skin. Let this reassure you – at the highest and lowest points of life, you were made to endure. You were made to survive.

the only thing you'll find at the summit of mount everest is a divine view, the things that really matter lie far below it

All power lies in free expression.

If you don't give, you don't get.

Expression is saying what you wish to say, Impression is saying what others wish to listen.

Expression is the truth, impression is a lie.

Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

And maybe that was it, after all: to reach that point so close to our own extinction that it made every mundane detail of our lives numinous again.

We all have our own Mount Everests to summit.

Anyone wanting to reach the summit must lift his spirits to its heights

Then, for a moment, silence dominates the path to the summit of Everest. If the furious race of monsoon winds blasting the outlines of the Nepalese mountain range can be considered silence.

This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. As Chris Kayes pointed out, the mountaineers who died climbing Everest in 1996 did successfully reach their goal; they ascended to the summit. the tragic unintended consequence was that they didn’t make it back down alive.

Following Sikhdar’s discovery in 1852, it would require the lives of twenty-four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained.

Because it's there. -George Mallory, one of the first climbers to attempt Everest, when asked why he wanted to climb it. (He disappeared into a cloud near the summit in 1924, where his body was found in 1999.)

If I walk on the narrow edges of life, I do it because I choose to. If that edge breaks under me, I accept that as a consequence of my choice. I cannot blame others for what happened. Nor do I expect that those who accompany me on that edge, if they do, should carry blame for my decisions. I make a choice and I live or die by it. Death is not the intention, but is accepted as being a possibility, given the risk of the activity. Don’t pillory my companions for my choices. I am simply glad they were there to accompany me as far as they could.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske,

Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon.

Third, and perhaps most important, the turnaround time is a reminder that the real goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain.

Within those margins is Denali, a 144-square-mile mass of rock, snow, and ice that rises abruptly from a 2,000-foot plateau, soaring 18,000 feet from base to summit, the greatest vertical relief of any mountain on Earth, with the exception of the Hawaiian seamount Mauna Kea, the bulk of which lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. In comparison, Mount Everest, though 29,029 feet above sea level, rests on the 17,000-foot-high Tibetan Plateau and rises just 12,000 feet from base to summit. A similar plateau boosts the Andes; without those geologic booster seats, those peaks all would lie in Denali’s shadow.

March 1996, Outside magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

Near the summit of Mount Everest up in the Death Zone, on the edge of the North Face, there's a cave the climbers called old green boots, climbing towards the summit some Mountaineers like the stopped and pay their respects to the Indian climber who lies preserved in the ice, exactly where he perished 21 years ago in 1996, with his green boots marking his grave.

If it were discovered that Mallory had, in actual fact, set foot on the top of Everest, obviously it would make some difference to Tenzing and myself. For 33 years, we have been regarded as the heroic figures who first reached the summit of Everest. Well, now I guess we'd be just downgraded a little bit, to being the first two men who reached the summit and actually got safely down again. Which brings up a point, of course. If you climb a mountain for the first time and die on the descent, is it really a complete first ascent of the mountain? I'm rather inclined to think, personally, that maybe it's quite important, the getting down. And the complete climb of a mountain is reaching the summit and getting safely to the bottom again.

. . .There is nothing to complain of. . .we had a gorgeous day for the climb, almost windless and brilliantly fine, yet we were unable to get to the summit. So we have no excuse - we have been beaten in fair fight; beaten by the height of the mountain, and by our own shortness of breath. But the fight was worth it, worth it every time, and we shall cherish the privilege of defeat by the world's greatest mountain.

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad . . . Three things these men have in common: faith in themselves, great determination and endurance. *

When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities. This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark. Bruce.

Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter. But a number of idealistic mountaineers continued to insist that a gifted athlete blessed with rare physiological attributes could, after a lengthy period of acclimatization, climb the peak without bottled oxygen. Taking this line of reasoning to its logical extreme, the purists argued that using gas was therefore cheating.

For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o’clock Thursday afternoon he’d reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher. “To turn around that close to the summit …,” Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. “That showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran’s part. I’m impressed—considerably more impressed, actually, than if he’d continued climbing and made the top.” Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on our summit day—in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest—and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.

After Guru Rinpoche subdued Tseringma, he pursued her four younger sisters. One by one, they repented and became Buddhist deities, moving to mountains of their own. Miyolangsangma patrols the summit of Everest on the back of a tigress. Now the goddess of prosperity, her face shines like 24-carat gold. Thingi Shalsangma, her body a pale shade of blue, became the goddess of healing after galloping on a zebra to the top of Shishapangma, a 26,289-foot peak in Tibet. Chopi Drinsangma, with a face in perpetual blush, became the goddess of attraction. She chose a deer instead of a zebra and settled on Kanchenjunga, a 28,169-foot peak in Nepal. The final sister—Takar Dolsangma, the youngest, with a green face—was a hard case. She mounted a turquoise dragon and fled northward to the land of three borders. In the modern Rolwaling folklore, this is Pakistan. Guru Rinpoche chased after her and eventually cornered her on a glacier called the Chogo Lungma. Takar Dolsangma appeared remorseful and, spurring her dragon, ascended K2, accepting a new position as the goddess of security. Although Guru Rinpoche never doubted her sincerity, maybe he should have: Takar Dolsangma, it seems, still enjoys the taste of human flesh.

In late July, Boukreev obtained his copy of the Krakauer article . . . Boukreev and Adams listened as the article was read aloud. When Krakauer referred to him, Boukreev leaned forward, trying to understand the words and their meaning: 'Boukreev had returned to Camp IV at 4:30 p.m., before the brunt of the storm, having rushed down from the summit without waiting for clients--extremely questionable behavior for a guide. Boukreev looked around the table, wondering if the people around him had heard the words as he had. 'Scott authorized my going down, to be ready to go back up. This was the plan. It worked. I don't understand why he would write this.' As Krakauer's article continued, he implied that had Boukreev descended with clients, they might not have had the problems they did coming down, and that suggestion was devastating. 'I had no idea that the weather was a potential problem until I was well down the mountain. My concern, as was Scott's, was that the climbers' oxygen supplies were going to run out. I did the job Scott wanted me to do. If I had been farther up the mountain when the full force of the storm hit, I think it is likely I would have died with the clients. I honestly do. I am not a superman. In that weather, we all could possibly have died.

As an avid student of mountaineering history, I knew that Everest had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921—approximately one death for every four climbers who’d reached the summit—and that many of those who died had been far stronger and possessed vastly more high-altitude experience than I. But boyhood dreams die hard, I discovered, and good sense be damned. In late February 1996, Bryant called to say that there was a place waiting for me on Rob Hall’s upcoming Everest expedition. When he asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with this, I said yes without even pausing to catch my breath.

The eight-man expedition was pinned down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a life-threatening altitude-induced blood clot. Realising that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain's steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25,000 feet, a climber named George Bell slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever after simply as The Belay.

I have always loved the quote from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” Looking back on my life, I can see that I have never had a crisis that didn’t make me stronger. And here was all that I loved before me: great risk, but also great opportunity. I had never felt so excited. Neil was already preparing to come back up. Mick, so fortunate to be alive, was staying firmly, and wisely, at base camp. But for me, my time had come. That evening, camp two was again full of friends. Neil and Geoffrey were there along with Michael and Graham, Karla and Alan. But the weariness of coming back up to camp two again oozed painfully from Karla’s gaunt face. She was utterly exhausted, and you could see it. Who wouldn’t be after three months on Everest, and having got within four hundred feet of the summit only days earlier? Tomorrow the biggest battle of our lives would begin.

In 1996 the disasters on the mountain had robbed Neil of the chance to go above camp four. Two years on he was here again--only this time the summit was within his reach. He felt strong and waited anxiously for Mick to arrive. They would need to be together to manage the last ridge and the Hillary Step. Something told Neil that things were not going right. As the precious minutes slipped by, as he waited for Mick and the others to reach him, he sensed that the dream that had eluded him once was going to do so again. Somewhere along the way, there had been a misunderstanding between the climbers over who had what rope. It happens at high altitude. It is a simple mistake. But mistakes have consequences. Suddenly, here, at four hundred feet beneath the summit of Mount Everest, it dawned on them all that they had run out of rope. They would have no choice now but to retreat. Continuing was not even an option. Neil stared through his goggles at the summit: so close, yet so very far. All he felt was emptiness. He turned and never looked back.

Few experiences rival a serious climb for bringing us into close contact with our own limitations. Part engineering project, part chess game, part ultramarathon, mountaineering demands of us in a way that other endeavors do not. After my trip to Cholatse, I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art or even, in its purest form, rugged spirituality—a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to “become what we are capable of becoming.” This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak—Rainier, Cholatse, Everest—the more it fires the imagination.

Since we were on Everest, many other climbers have succeeded on the “big one” as well. She has now been scaled by a blind man, a guy with prosthetic legs, and even by a young Nepalese teenager. Don’t be fooled, though. I never belittle the mountain. She is still just as high and just as dangerous. Instead, I admire those mountaineers--however they have climbed her. I know what it is really like up there. Humans learn how to dominate and conquer. It is what we do. But the mountain remains the same--and sometimes she turns and bites so damn hard that we all recoil in terror. For a while. Then we return. Like vultures. But we are never in charge. It is why, within Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky--lest we forget. This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain, and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it. If the peak hints at you to wait, then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might. The weather can change in minutes, as storm clouds envelop the peak--and the summit itself stubbornly pokes into the fierce band of jet-stream winds that circle the earth above twenty-five thousand feet. These 150+ mph winds cause the majestic plume of snow that pours off Everest’s peak. A constant reminder that you have got to respect the mountain. Or you die.

Many people find it hard to understand what it is about a mountain that draws men and women to risk their lives on her freezing, icy faces--all for a chance at that single, solitary moment on the top. It can be hard to explain. But I also relate to the quote that says: “If you have to ask, you will never understand.” I just felt that maybe this was it: my first real, and possibly only, chance to follow that dream of one day standing on the summit of Mount Everest. Deep down, I knew that I should take it. Neil agreed to my joining his Everest team on the basis of how I’d perform on an expedition that October to the Himalayas. As I got off the phone from speaking to Neil, I had a sinking feeling that I had just made a commitment that was going to change my life forever--either for the better or for the worse. But I had wanted a fresh start--this was it, and I felt alive. A few days later I announced the news to my family. My parents--and especially my sister, Lara--called me selfish, unkind, and then stupid. Their eventual acceptance of the idea came with the condition that if I died then my mother would divorce my father, as he had been the man who had planted the “stupid idea” in my head in the first place, all those years earlier. Dad just smiled. Time eventually won through, even with my sister, and all their initial resistance then turned into a determination to help me--predominantly motivated by the goal of trying to keep me alive. As for me, all I had to ensure was that I kept my promise to be okay. As it happened, four people tragically died on Everest while we were there: four talented, strong climbers. It wasn’t within my capability to make these promises to my family. My father knew that.

Whatever doesn’t kill you only serves to make you stronger. And in the grand scheme of life, I had survived and grown stronger, at least mentally, if not physically. I had come within an inch of losing all my movement and, by the grace of God, still lived to tell the tale. I had learned so much, but above all, I had gained an understanding of the cards I had been playing with. The problem now was that I had no job and no income. Earning a living and following your heart can so often pull you in different directions, and I knew I wasn’t the first person to feel that strain. My decision to climb Everest was a bit of a “do or die” mission. If I climbed it and became one of the youngest climbers ever to have reached the summit, then I had at least a sporting chance of getting some sort of job in the expedition world afterward--either doing talks or leading treks. I would be able to use it as a springboard to raise sponsorship to do some other expeditions. But on the other hand, if I failed, I would either be dead on the mountain or back home and broke--with no job and no qualifications. The reality was that it wasn’t a hard decision for me to make. Deep down in my bones, I just knew it was the right thing to do: to go for it. Plus I have never been one to be too scared of that old imposter: failure. I had never climbed for people’s admiration; I had always climbed because I was half-decent at it--and now I had an avenue, through Everest, to explore that talent further. I also figured that if I failed, well at least I would fail while attempting something big and bold. I liked that. What’s more, if I could start a part-time university degree course at the same time (to be done by e-mail from Everest), then whatever the outcome on the mountain, at least I had an opening back at M15. (It’s sometimes good to not entirely burn all your bridges.)

I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing on the steep hills and cliffs around the island’s coast. It was at times like these that I found a real intimacy with him. It was also where I learned to recognize that tightening sensation, deep in the pit of my stomach, as being a great thing to follow in life. Some call it fear. I remember the joy of climbing with him in the wintertime. It was always an adventure and often turned into much more than just a climb. Dad would determine that not only did we have to climb a sheer hundred-and-fifty-foot chalk cliff, but also that German paratroopers held the high ground. We therefore had to climb the cliff silently and unseen, and then grenade the German fire position once at the summit. In reality this meant lobbing clumps of manure toward a deserted bench on the cliff tops. Brilliant. What a great way to spend a wet and windy winter’s day when you are age eight (or twenty-eight, for that matter). I loved returning from the cliff climbs totally caked in mud, out of breath, having scared ourselves a little. I learned to love that feeling of the wind and rain blowing hard on my face. It made me feel like a man, when in reality I was a little boy. We also used to talk about Mount Everest, as we walked across the fields toward the cliffs. I loved to pretend that some of our climbs were on the summit face of Everest itself. We would move together cautiously across the white chalk faces, imagining they were really ice. I had this utter confidence that I could climb Everest if he were beside me. I had no idea what Everest would really involve but I loved the dream together. These were powerful, magical times. Bonding. Intimate. Fun. And I miss them a lot even today. How good it would feel to get the chance to do that with him just once more. I think that is why I find it often so emotional taking my own boys hiking or climbing nowadays. Mountains create powerful bonds between people. It is their great appeal to me. But it wasn’t just climbing. Dad and I would often go to the local stables and hire a couple of horses for a tenner and go jumping the breakwaters along the beach. Every time I fell off in the wet sand and was on the verge of bursting into tears, Dad would applaud me and say that I was slowly becoming a horseman. In other words, you can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again a good number of times. There’s life in a nutshell.

This too shall pass.

Time is the beginning & the end.

Wireless coverage can even be found on the summit of Mount Everest, the highest-elevated and arguably one of the most hostile surfaces on the planet. Wherever there is a wireless connection, you will inevitably find someone using a mobile device.

a simple but stark criterion: the number of climbers who successfully reach the summit compared to the number who die on the mountain. For Everest, the ratio turns out to be seven to one. For K2, which has the reputation of being the hardest and most dangerous of the high peaks, the ratio is a little over three to one. But for Annapurna, it’s exactly two to one. For every two climbers who get to the top, one climber dies trying.

If the fitter climbers had been able to move at their own speed that day there would probably have been a process of natural selection. The front runners could have summited early, within an acceptable time frame and it would have become obvious that those who were at the back of the line were not going to get safely to the top and back. What, in fact, happened was that the climbers, particularly in Rob Hall's team, were forced to stay together, which held back the faster climbers. Everyone was now moving at a slow, dangerous pace. It inevitably meant there would be bunching at the choke points.

Tragically, of the first five women to reach the summit of K2, three died on the descent and two were later to die on other mountains.

23. Honour The Journey, Not the Destination As a team, when we came back from Everest, so often the first question someone would ask us was: ‘Did you make it to the summit?’ I was lucky - unbelievably lucky - to have reached that elusive summit, which also allowed me to reply to that summit question with a ‘yes’. My best buddy Mick found the question much harder, as a ‘no’ didn’t tell even part of his incredible story. He might not have made it to the very top of Everest, but he was as near as damn it. For three months we had climbed alongside each other, day and night. Mick had been involved in some real heroics up high when things had gone wrong, he had climbed with courage, dignity and strength, and he had reached within 300 feet (90 metres) of the summit. Yet somehow that didn’t count in the eyes of those who asked that ironically unimportant question: ‘Did you reach the top?’ For both of us, the journey was never about the summit. It was a journey we lived through together; we held each other’s lives in our hands every day, and it was an incredible journey of growth. The summit I only ever saw as a bonus. When we got that question on our return, I often got more frustrated for Mick than he did. He was smart and never saw it as a failure. He’d tell you that he was actually lucky - for the simple reason that he survived where four others that season had died. You see, Mick ran out of oxygen high up on the final face of Everest at some 28,000 feet (8,500 metres). Barely able to move, he crawled on all fours. Yet at that height, at the limit of exhaustion, he slipped and started to tumble down the sheer ice face. He told me he was certain he would die. By some miracle he landed on a small ledge and was finally rescued when two other climbers found him. Four other climbers hadn’t been so lucky. Two had died of the cold and two had fallen. Everest is unforgiving, especially when the weather turns. By the time I was back with Mick, down at Camp Two a couple of days later, he was a changed man. Humbled, grateful for life, and I had never loved him so much. So when everyone at home was asking him about the summit, or sympathizing with him for narrowly missing out, Mick knew better. He should have died up there. He knew he was plain lucky to be alive. ‘Failure had become his blessing, and life had become a great gift to him. And those are great lessons that many never learn - because you can only learn them through a life-changing journey, regardless of the destination. Consider the billionaire who flies into the South Pole for an hour to ‘experience’ it, compared to the man who has toiled, sweated and struggled across hundreds and hundreds of miles of ice, dragging a humble sledge. You see, it is the journey that makes the man. And life is all about our growth, not our trophies.

Before I climbed Everest, I saved up to make an attempt on a peak called Ama Dablam, one of the classic and more technically difficult climbs in the higher Himalayas. For many of the weeks I was there, I climbed alone, plugged into my headphones and utterly absorbed in each step, each grip. I was in tune with myself. I was in tune with the mountain. It was just the mountain and me. During those times, I really had the chance to push my own boundaries a little. I found myself probing, being willing to push the risk envelope a bit. I started to reach a little further for each hold, finely balanced on my crampons, taking a few extra risks - and I made swift, efficient progress. I was exploring my climbing limits and loving it. When I reached the summit and watched in awe as the distant peak of Everest came into view, ten miles to the north, I knew I had the skills to scale that mountain, too. William Blake said: Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street. He was right. We need time and space and adversity to really get to know ourselves. And you don’t always find that in the grind, when your head is down and you are living someone else’s dreams. Wherever you are in your life, it is possible to find your own challenge and space. You don’t have to go to the jungle or the Himalayas - it is much more a state of mind than a physical location. Mountains of the mind are around us all everywhere. And it is when we test ourselves that we begin to know ourselves.

It is a long way to the summit, according to de experts the most dangerous part it's not ascending to the summit...

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.

One of my adventure-loving friends invited me to join him on an attempt to summit Mount Everest not long ago. It sounded exhilarating, but when I learned that up to 3.9 percent never make it home, I had to pass.

Base Camp, We need advice. ... We've run out of Earth

He was appalled to see the expedition so casually misreported. Like everyone else in the team, Hunt thought that the issue of who had stepped on the summit first was absurd but he was also irked by repeated references to Tenzing “having guided” the British team. The Everest victory was the result of teamwork and everyone had played a role.

It is far easier to convince ourselves that we can’t do something than it is to convince ourselves that we can.

This was a key moment in the expedition. In years to come, the crack would become known as ‘House’s Chimney’, K2’s equivalent of the ‘Hillary Step’ on Everest. Future generations of climbers would marvel at the skill, and guts, of the man who first climbed it.

Breaking Everest by Stewart Stafford On this Everest of déjà vu, We broke up in avalanches, Rote tumbling and tedium, Dead stares at the bottom. Climbers phoning in motion, A poke for the All-Seeing Eye, Pack mules heaving baggage, Tense on the musical ski lifts. Even with three tiny travellers, That peak hosted no summits, Cast-off hairshirt strait-jackets, The wound-licking began afresh. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

On summit day especially, the dilemma you face was to be ambitious, but not greedy; to be bold, but not reckless; to be confident, but not arrogant.

To me, it was absolutely certain that Rob would not lead our team for the summit that evening, even if the winds calmed. We debated the issue in our tent, although it wasn’t much of a debate. Beck, Doug, and I were convinced we should wait.

Did I have the courage and strength to turn around so close to the summit after six weeks of extreme physical and mental effort?

Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in. As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world. Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us. As he approached, the wind began to die away. The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red. Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers. I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here. There truly was some magic to this place.

It took me quite a while to begin to recover physically from Everest. The thick, rich air of sea level, in comparison to the ultrathin air of Everest, was intoxicating--and at times it felt like too much. Several times I fainted and had quite bad nosebleeds. As if from oxygen overload. Above all, I slept like a baby. For the first time in years, I had no fear, no doubts, no sense of foreboding. It felt amazing. Everest had taken all my heart, soul, energy, and desire, and I was spent. The way I was after SAS Selection. Funny that. Good things rarely come easy. Maybe that is what makes them special. I didn’t feel too guilty about taking a little time off to enjoy the British summer and catch up with my friends. It just felt so great to be safe. I also did my first-ever newspaper interview, which carried the headline: “What Makes a Scruffy 23-Year-Old Want to Risk It All for a View of Tibet?” Nice. Before I left I would have had a far slicker reply than I did afterward. My reasons for climbing seemed somehow more obscure. Maybe less important. I don’t know. I just knew that it was good to be home. The same journalist also finished up by congratulating me on having “conquered” Everest. But this instinctively felt so wrong. We never conquer any mountain. Everest allowed us to reach the summit by the skin of our teeth, and let us go with our lives. Not everyone had been so lucky. Everest never has been, and never will be, conquered. This is part of what makes the mountain so special. One of the other questions I often got asked when we returned home was: “Did you find God on the mountain?” The real answer is you don’t have to climb a big mountain to find faith. It’s simpler than that--thank God. If you asked me did He help me up there, then the answer would be yes. Every faltering step of the way.

We were now receiving daily very accurate weather reports from the Bracknell Weather Centre in the UK. These gave us the most advanced precision forecast available anywhere in the world. The meteorologists were able to determine wind strengths to within five knots accuracy at every thousand feet of altitude. Our lives would depend on these forecasts back up the mountain. Each morning, the entire team would crowd eagerly around the laptop to see what the skies were bringing--but it did not look good. Those early signs of the monsoon arriving in the Himalayas, the time when the strong winds over Everest’s summit begin to rise, didn’t seem to be coming. All we could do was wait. Our tents were very much now home to us at base camp. We had all our letters and little reminders from our families. I had a seashell I had taken from a beach on the Isle of Wight, in which Shara had written my favorite verse--one I had depended on so much through the military. “Be sure of this, that I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth.” Matthew 28:20. I reread it every night at base camp before I went to sleep. There was no shame in needing any help up here.

It is always strange looking back at a time that has had such a profound impact on one’s life. And when it comes to Everest, I see two very clear things: friendships that were forged in a tough crucible, and a faith that sustained me through the good, the bad, and the ugly. I survived and reached the top of that mountain because of the bonds I had with those beside me. Of that I am in no doubt. Without Mick and Neil, I would have been nothing. Down that dark crevasse, I also learned that sometimes we really need one another. And that is okay. We are not designed to be islands. We are made to be connected. So often life teaches us that we have to achieve everything on our own. But that would be lonely. For me, it is only by thinking about our togetherness that I can begin to make some sense of what happened on that mountain: the highs, the lows, the fatalities, the fear. Such things have to be shared. Looking back, it is the small moments together that I value the most. Like Neil and myself on the South Summit, holding each other’s hands so that we could both stand. It was only because our friendships were honest that, time after time, when we were tired or cold or scared, we were able to pick ourselves up and keep moving. You don’t have to be strong all the time. That was a big lesson to learn. When we show chinks it creates bonds, and where there are bonds there is strength. This is really the heart of why I still climb and expedition today. Simple ties are hard to break. That is what Everest really taught me.

My Everest story would be incomplete if I didn’t give final credit to the Sherpas who had risked their lives alongside us every day. Pasang and Ang-Sering still climb together as best friends, under the direction of their Sirdar boss--Kami. The Khumba Icefall specialist, Nima, still carries out his brave task in the jumbled ice maze at the foot of the mountain: repairing and fixing the route through. Babu Chiri, who so bravely helped Mick when he ran out of oxygen under the South Summit, was tragically killed in a crevasse in the Western Cwm several years later. He was a Sherpa of many years’ Everest experience, and was truly one of the mountain’s greats. It was a huge loss to the mountaineering fraternity. But if you play the odds long enough you will eventually lose. That is the harsh reality of high-altitude mountaineering. You can’t keep on top of the world forever. Geoffrey returned to the army, and Neil to his business. His toes never regained their feeling, but he avoided having them amputated. But as they say, Everest always charges some sort of a price, and in his own words--he got lucky. As for Mick, he describes his time on Everest well: “In the three months I was away, I was both happier than ever before, and more scared than I ever hope to be again.” Ha. That’s also high-altitude mountaineering for you. Thengba, my friend, with whom I spent so much time alone at camp two, was finally given a hearing aid by Henry. Now, for the first time, he can hear properly. Despite our different worlds, we shared a common bond with these wonderful Sherpa men--a friendship that was forged by an extraordinary mountain. Once, when the climber Julius Kugy was asked what sort of person a mountaineer should be, he replied: “Truthful, distinguished, and modest.” All these Sherpas epitomize this. I made the top with them, and because of their help, I owe them more than I can say. The great Everest writer Walt Unsworth, in his book Everest: The Mountaineering History, gives a vivid description of the characters of the men and women who pit their all on the mountain. I think it is bang on the money: But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad… Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance. If I had to sum up what happened on that journey for me, from the hospital bed to the summit of the world, I tend to think of it as a stumbling journey. Of losing my confidence and my strength--then refinding it. Of seeing my hope and my faith slip away--and then having them rekindled. Ultimately, if I had to pass on one message to my children it would be this: Fortune favors the brave. Most of the time.

Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in. As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world. Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us. As he approached, the wind began to die away. The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red. Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers. I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here. There truly was some magic to this place. The radio suddenly crackled to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly. “Base camp. We’ve run out of earth.” The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, but all that just fell apart. I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking. “I just want to get home.” The memory of what went on then begins to fade. We took several photos with both the SAS and the DLE flags flying on the summit, as promised, and I scooped some snow into an empty Juice Plus vitamin bottle I had with me.* It was all I would take with me from the summit. I remember having some vague conversation on the radio--patched through from base camp via a satellite phone--with my family some three thousand miles away: the people who had given me the inspiration to climb. But up there, the time flew by, and like all moments of magic, nothing can last forever. We had to get down. It was already 7:48 A.M. Neil checked my oxygen. “Bear, you’re right down. You better get going, buddy, and fast.” I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony. I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask, and turned around. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again. *Years later, Shara and I christened our three boys with this snow water from Everest’s summit. Life moments.

On the morning of April 18, a group of Sherpas and other Nepali climbers started out across the Khumbu Icefall, an unstable maze of frozen towers and crevasses that is the deadliest stretch between the base of Mount Everest and its summit. One thousand feet above them, a glacier estimated to weigh as much as 30 million pounds groaned, shifted, and crashed down the mountain.

there was joy in getting his blood pressure down . . . joy in climbing Mount Everest . . . joy in reaching the summits of six more of the world’s highest mountains . . . joy in building a profitable company providing houses that people could turn into homes . . . joy in learning to fly. But he will also tell you there has been no joy as great as giving from what God has blessed him with so that he might bless and serve others. That’s the true and ultimate purpose of setting and reaching goals.

Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That’s why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.

I continue to train. The depths still beckon me. On that dive in 2016, when I turned 102 metres down, although my eyes were closed I could feel the pull of untold volumes of water yet below me. What am I still chasing, one might ask, in that submerged realm? Shakespeare spoke of the lure of ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’. If George Mallory, who perished somewhere near the summit of Everest in 1924, had been a freediver, he would have justified himself with the words ‘because it’s everywhere’. My first teacher, Umberto Pelizzari, dived to ‘look inside’. These concepts have all rung true for me, too. As did the insight of the elderly Bahamian lady who was asked why she thought I dived, and replied: ‘He wants to see what he is.’ I don’t have to go deep — sometimes I dive just to be, as Mervyn Peake says, ‘at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge’. Long after my final record or my final competition dive, I will continue to frequent that ‘world of wavering light’ where it all began, for me and for life as we know it. I dive to go home.

Edmund Hillary was the first man to summit Mount Everest, and it took a while before his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, received the recognition he deserved for summiting Everest alongside Hillary. In many respects, John and Pieter have been Tenzing to me. John is the Sherpa who was by my side for almost every step of my professional coaching career. I have never reached a summit by myself.

Some people think that with nowhere higher to climb, reaching the top of Everest is the end. But it is just the mid-point. The real journey begins in the long, dangerous descent that lies ahead.

Nine hours of surgery to salvage his bladder so it might work half as well as it did, if infections do not consume him. His prostate cut from his thin boy body, seminal vesicles too, rendering him unable to know a certain intimacy but familiar with the incontinence of the old man he probably will never be, his injuries likely to shorten his life by at least two decades. If he survives the next breath. If he ever wakes. And this surgery came only after another that was more vital. Seventeen hours of delicate, intensive surgery on his lower spine, two cracked vertebrae fused together using bone from his hip, the shrapnel from a bullet lodged too close to his spinal cord to risk removal. His gallbladder gone, as well as a lymph node. Feet of small intestine excised, the lower lobe of his right lung damaged, leaving him with such diminished capacity that playing on the jungle gym will be tantamount to summiting Everest. My boy’s body parts incinerated somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. All this just his bodily damage. Who can know the damage to his soul and mind?

The summit of Mt. Everest is made of marine limestone which means the highest point on earth was once at the bottom of the sea.

On the highest mountains on the planet, where every additional ounce might determine the difference between victory and defeat, they brought along dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in their rucksacks. Two thousand feet below the summit of Mount Everest, inside a tiny tent pitched along a murderous ridge, a British climber named Eric Shipton tried to read, by flickering candlelight, Thorton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey , a novel which questioned the meaning of life in the face of the sudden and deadly collapse of an ancient rope bridge in eighteenth century Peru.

We’re on the roof of the Serenity Plastics Works—the highest point of our universe for our entire lives. Every time you look up, there it is. Eli puts it into words. “This must be how it felt to stand on the summit of Mount Everest for the first time.

The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.

Every story, in a sense, is a mystery. It asks a question in the setup that will be answered at the climax. Usually, a problem is introduced or a situation that needs to be resolved is presented. This situation or problem raises a question in our minds, such as “Will the detective find the murderer?,” “Will these two beautiful young people fall in love and get married?,” “Will the mountain climber reach the summit of Everest?,” “Will the woman get promoted?,” “Will the man get cured of his terrible disease?” Once it is raised, everything that happens in the story relates to that question, which keeps coming up throughout the story. With each turning point and each setback and each step forward, the question is repeated subconsciously. At the story’s climax, there’s an answer, which is almost always “yes.” Will the detective solve the crime? Yes. Will the lovers get together? Yes. Will the mountain climber reach the top? Yes. But since we don’t learn the answers until the end, we remain interested in what will happen along the way and how the objective built into the central question will be accomplished. Once the central question has been asked, the setup is complete, and the story is now ready to unfold.