Why climb a mountain because its there

Perhaps it was just a glib answer tossed off at the journalist who would never understand, but after I came home from my own war, for several years it seemed as if the mountains and the rivers were all that was really and truly there for me. My friends were gone, my trust and belief in the democratic values of the country that sent me off to war were broken, I could not get my head wrapped around who I was supposed to be.

But the mountains? The rivers? But could I have explained that to a journalist in my early years of trying to understand who I was as a climber when so much of whom I had been seemed lost and gone forever? There are military veterans returned from the last plus years of wars around the world, many still fighting battles in their heads. Many of us have pieced our lives back together, thanks in large part to adventure.

We have things to live for now beyond granite and sandstone and rushing water. Perhaps now the more important question is, why do we keep going back? Because life is supposed to be beautiful.

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Subscribe here. We were sitting on a pile of rocks at 27, feet on the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest—the Chinese side, away from the crowd in Nepal.

A couple hundred feet below us was the GPS waypoint that could solve one of the greatest mysteries of mountaineering. Was his body still there? Almost a century ago, while descending this ridge, Irvine and his climbing partner, George Mallory, vanished. Irvine was thought to have been carrying a Vest Pocket Kodak camera.

I scanned the terrain around me. A series of short, steep cliffs was sandwiched between snow- and rubble-covered ledges in an area of light-colored rock known as the Yellow Band. Fourteen thousand feet below, the arid plain of the Tibetan Plateau shimmered like a mirage. Explore Mount Everest and its surrounding area with these stunning degree panoramas. I had barely slept in the past 48 hours and was weak and nauseated from the extreme altitude. I was so tired, my oxygen-starved brain begged me to lie back and close my eyes.

But some vestige of clarity and reason understood that if I did, I might never wake up. A few small rocks clattered from above. I looked up to see photographer Renan Ozturk working his way down the ridge toward us.

His arm was wrapped around the skinny purple fixed line that was our umbilical cord to the summit, where we had stood several hours earlier. He skidded to a stop and plopped down beside me. Finally he caught his breath, and I heard his muffled voice through his oxygen mask. I nodded, unclipped from the line, and took my first tentative steps down the sloping ledge of rocks.

As a veteran climber and guide who had summited Everest multiple times, he knew that one bad slip on the loose scree and I could plummet 7, feet to the Rongbuk Glacier. Part of me agreed with him and wanted to call it off. After decades of mountaineering all over the world, including as a professional guide, I had promised myself never to cross any line where the objective risk was too high. After all, I had a family back home that I dearly loved.

But I ignored McGuinness, Lhakpa, and my own promise now. I had long known the theory that Mallory and Irvine might have been the first to scale Everest. But I had caught the fever to find Irvine only two years before, after attending a lecture by my friend Thom Pollard, an Everest veteran who lives a few miles from my home in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire.

He called me a few days later. The body had been embedded facedown in the gravel as if it had been laid into a slab of wet concrete. A severed cord tied around his waist had left rope marks on the torso, a clue that at some point Mallory likely had taken a hard, swinging fall. What struck me most was the way the left leg was crossed over the right, which had broken above the boot top, as if Mallory was protecting the injured limb.

Had Mallory been tied to Irvine at the time of the fall? And if so, how did the rope get cut, and why was Irvine not found nearby? Other details raised more questions. His wristwatch had stopped between one and two, but was that a. There was no picture of her on his body. There was also no trace of the camera, which has led many Everest historians to conclude Irvine must have been carrying it.

This makes sense considering he was the better photographer and would have known the British public would want photos of their Galahad—as his admirers had nicknamed Mallory—rather than his lesser known partner. The last person to see the pair was their teammate Noel Odell, who stopped at around 26, feet on June 8, , to turn his gaze toward the summit.

A thick, cottony veil had obscured the upper reaches of the mountain, but at p. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more. During one of these conversations, Pollard told me about Tom Holzel, a year-old entrepreneur, inventor, writer, and Everest enthusiast who has spent more than four decades trying to solve this mystery.

Back in , Holzel had led the first expedition to search for Mallory and Irvine with Audrey Salkeld, a preeminent Everest historian. But unusually heavy snows that autumn had kept their team from getting high enough on the Chinese side of the mountain.

At the time of this sighting, the only two people who had died this high on the north face of Everest were Mallory and Irvine. Unlike more seasoned members of the British team, Irvine had limited climbing experience, having scaled modest peaks in Spitsbergen, Wales, and the Alps, far from the giants of the Himalaya.

A gifted engineer and tinkerer, he had taken the oxygen sets apart and put them back together, making them lighter, less cumbersome, and less prone to breaking. My grandfather, coincidentally, attended Merton a few years after Irvine.

Archivist Julian Reid brought me the book, laying it on a protective foam pad. Irvine scribbled his last entry on the evening of June 5, when he and Mallory were camped at 23, feet on the North Col, a narrow snow saddle connecting the north face of Everest to the subpeak known as Changtse, where they were poised to begin their summit bid the next day. He complained to his diary that his fair skin had been cracked and blistered by the sun.

Have prepared 2 Oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning. When Irvine vanished, he was the same age as my oldest son. Before we could conduct our search for Irvine, we had to acclimate to the high elevation and test our secret weapons: a small fleet of drones.

On May 1, , our team sat around a folding table in the dining tent, perched at 21, feet on a stone platform at Advanced Base Camp, on the edge of the East Rongbuk Glacier. A plume of snow, like the tail of a white dragon, trailed off the summit for miles. Our plan was to fly the drones from the North Col the next day.

We were eager to test their capabilities at high altitude. But McGuinness was skeptical. He was right. He had to land it nearby to retrieve it. That night we huddled in our tent as the storm grew stronger. We were 2, feet higher now than Advanced Base Camp, and I had a racking cough and felt listless and slightly nauseous, as if suffering from a combination of the flu and a bad hangover. As my headache built, so too did the wind, until the tent fabric was flapping violently.

Sometime before midnight I heard what sounded like a taking off above our heads. We all know being in the mountains can make life better but what about climbing to the top of those mountains? Not only will you built incredible strength and endurance from climbing mountains consistently but you will also find that your diet becomes better. McDonalds are not readily available in the alpine thank goodness for that! You are also going to find that unhealthy food will not fuel you properly.

The work involved in hiking and climbing demands a proper diet. The altitude trains your lungs to become stronger and the struggle becomes less and less every time you hike. We all can see pictures of these places and we all can long to go to these places but actually doing the work to get to these places cuts many out of the crowd.

When you do make it to the peak you can rest assure that you are of the few who make it up there and can revel in the beauty and rarity of such a view. Hikers and Climbers are an awesome breed of people.

You will find these a few similarities between them: They are all positive, they are all strong and confident and they are all happy. Meeting people through alpine clubs, hiking groups and social media will be some of the main ways to find hiking partners.

Life long friends can be made this way because you generally spend a lot of time with each other. You also get to take in the most beautiful places with these people, which can bring people together in special ways. Mountains are so special; they have such magic to them.

Maybe it is the fact they are can be so dangerous or maybe it is because they make us feel so small. You might find that all the problems in your life dissolve when you are around them or that life slows down a bit.

All that I can tell you is that after spending time surrounded by them or climbing them you will feel the urge to come back. Climbing a mountain is the furthest thing from easy. Long stretches of constant vertical climbing can be the most exhausting and hardest thing you do. Not only the physical difficulties but also the mental difficulties will also test you. Exposed and tricky climbing and route finding can get the best of your mental abilities.

You will learn to never give up; to know that the reward will be worth the work it takes.