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Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season QUOTES

Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― , Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season

2 " 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. "

― , Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season

3 " The two climbers looked at each other, a glance that bored all the way down to Medvetz's DNA - not desperate or pleading or frightened but resolved, almost at peace. Here were two men, united in their obsessive enterprise, their trajectories intersecting for just an instant, but an instant that contained some fundamental understanding: the long journey full of failures and setbacks, injuries and disfigurement and pain, propelled by a commitment beyond reason. Here were two men in this inhospitable place, the wind raking across the ridge, the shadows lengthening - one departing his life, the other walking back into it.
"God bless you," Medvetz murmured. "Good-bye."
And then he faced down the mountain and resumed lumbering along the route, toward Brice and Brett Merrell and Mogens Jensen and all the others waiting for him in the world below. "

― , Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season

4 " 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. "

― , Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season