For dedicated mountain climbers, making the trek to the summit of Mt. Everest is the ultimate challenge. It could be the adventure of a lifetime… or the end of it.
The grim truth is that for every ten climbers who go up the world’s tallest mountain, there’s one who doesn’t make it back down.
More than 200 people are known to have perished in the mountain’s appropriately named “Death Zone” (>26,000 feet above sea level). And because it’s often impossible to retrieve their bodies, many of them are still there, providing useful landmarks for other climbers.
Holy crow! Macabre, indeed. I would like to think that under more normal circumstances (i.e., not experiencing hypoxia, disorientation and exhaustion) climbers would have stopped and made more of an attempt to help the strugglers. Windsurfing, anyone?