Sublime

The night had a cold, phantasmal beauty that intensified as we climbed. More stars than I had ever seen smeared the frozen sky.

This was one of those uninhibited dreams that come free with growing up. I was sure that mine about Everest was not mine alone; the highest point on earth, unattainable, foreign to all experience, was there for many boys and grown men to aspire toward. Thomas F. Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge

That we couldn’t go down only made easier that which we really wanted to do. That we might not get there was scarcely conceivable.

Trilobite had an amazing team of carefully selected volunteer subjects to undergo the trips. We called them ‘Explorers’

Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April.

I recognised the tell-tale indicators of summit fever, a disorientating condition where an individual becomes so obsessed with making it to the top of whichever 8,000-er they’re climbing that they forget the importance of executing the second part of the mission: getting home.

They had attained the top of the world, they thought. For Humboldt it was a supreme, indescribable moment. Nearly thirty years later, in 1828, when the surpassing magnitude of the Himalayas, long a subject of much conjecture, was verified by the first reliable instrument surveys, Humboldt was noticeably stunned. To a friend he wrote, “All my life I

As dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional landscape of phantasmal beauty.

At 6:00 A.M., as they skirted a steep rock promontory called the First Step, twenty-one-year-old Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old Hiroshi Hanada were taken aback to see one of the Ladakhi climbers, probably Paljor, lying in the snow, horribly frostbitten but still alive after a night without shelter or oxygen, moaning unintelligibly. Not wa