Everest wasn't like any other mountain. Only one of ten climbers who attempt the mountain stands on the summit. And for every three climbers who do scale the mountain, one dies trying. The facts aren't welcoming. But you don't plan a trip to Everest believing those facts will apply to you.
I have always been fiery; I go after things. But what I learned from my mother is to step back and actually experience things that are happening. So for me, it's about meditating. My Everest is to have that become a real part of my life.
Everest is completely out of control. It's like crack.
I had always fantasized about going to the Pyramids, the Great Wall; I've always been sort of obsessed with the whole notion of Everest.
Reaching that windswept perch, I decided, would cleanse my spirit and heal my wounds. More than that, it would send me home with a title: The First American Woman to Climb Everest.
There is such a gauntlet of risk that you go through when you climb up to Everest.
Everest in his slippers. That's what he was like.
We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.
If the reason for climbing Mt. Everest is that it's hard to do, why does everyone go up the easy side?
The whole purpose of climbing something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain. But if you compromise the process you’re an asshole when you start out and an asshole when you get back.
Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.
This forms the nub of a dilemna 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.
We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.
Market studies suggest space tourism-a rubbernecker's trip to earth orbit-is likely to draw 50,000 passengers a year if the ticket can be pushed below $25,000. That's what tens of thousands of people spend each year on competing trips, such as round-the-world cruises on luxury liners and adventure tours to Antarctica or Mount Everest.
Early on May 23, 1997, from 28,500 feet on Everest, I witnessed the incredible shadow of the mountain, the penumbra, forming to the west as the sun rose behind me. The full moon from the night before was still visible. The bluish cast of the atmosphere can also be seen.
I was never comfortable with the risk of climbing in the Himalayas, or the amount of time in idleness that is involved in the Everest expedition.
I like to think of Everest as a great mountaineering challenge, and when you've got people just streaming up the mountain - well, many of them are just climbing it to get their name in the paper, really.
If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency.
I really haven't liked the commercialization of mountaineering, particularly of Mt. Everest. By paying $65,000, you can be conducted to the summit by a couple of good guides.
I have climbed Everest from the Nepal route and the China route. The other routes are too hard for me. So I don't think I can climb Everest again.
Many people have been getting too casual about climbing Everest. I forecast a disaster many times.
I tell the players that they can't relive any day in their lives and that they can't relive the minutes of a game, so they should make a great effort, a Mount Everest type effort, to live up to their potential. Success is a communal type thing, and if we win, then everyone can be considered successful and we can move uptown together.
The main thing is to be honest with yourself, know and recognize your limits and attain maximum achievement within them. I would for example get more satisfaction from climbing Snowdon, which I know I could, than from attempting Everest, which I couldn't.
You don't play triathlon. You play soccer; it's fun. You play baseball. Triathlon is work that you can leave you crumpled in a heap, puking on the roadside. It's the physical brutality of climbing Mount Everest without the great view from the top of the world. What kind of person keeps coming back for more of that?
There's no magic to running far or climbing Everest. Endurance is mental strength. It's all about heart.
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