Why Mount Everest is the wild climb they can’t resist
(CNN)Camp 4 on Mount Everest, the final camp before the summit, is a place most of us will only ever see in photos: perched at 26,180 feet on the shoulder between the giants of Mount Everest and Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world, the place is utterly unlivable, blasted by winds that rip snow from rock and cast it into the surrounding air — air so thin it’s hard to take a step without gasping for breath.
From there, climbers look up at the 29,029-foot summit, less than 3,000 vertical feet away, and hope to see clear skies, and no wind cascading spindrift into the sky off the top of the peak.
Climbers (including myself) often feel that the mountains are a place where we’re most in control of what happens, believe it or not. If you make what you see as good decisions and can mitigate variables like avalanches, weather, and geology, there’s really no one to blame besides yourself if things go wrong up there.
I’m mostly OK with the risks I take in the mountains, but the idea of riding a motorcycle amid hundreds of drivers who are probably looking at their smartphones scares the hell out of me.
When people die on Everest, I know it’s coming: the headlines, the internet commenters, people judging someone’s life choices from a million different angles. I may not understand what their motivations were to try to climb the highest mountain in the world, but I understand why they climb mountains.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/24/opinions/mt-everest-deaths-why-climb-leonard/index.html
