Into the Void

As far as books are concerned, I've been on a mountain adventure kick, re-reading Into Thin Air and just wondering at these people who put themselves through hell to reach the top of the world. Krakauer says that in the danger zone above 26,000 feet, the mind functions at a totally retarded pace. Couple that with the sheer physical exhaustion. I'm frankly surprised that there aren't more disasters like that summer in 1996. And then I think of my stint with altitude sickness in Cuzco, not even 12,000 feet and I felt like I was dying (the gastrointestinal illness didn't help). And yet part of me craves the utter maschochistic pleasure attained by these everest climbers, to know you can put your body and mind through the total wringer and still survive.

I also read Into the Void, which is about two climbers in Peru who embarked on an expedition almost exactly the opposite of Krakauer's. Where on Everest there were Sherpas and oxygen tanks and doctors and radios, these two guys just set out for themselves to climb one of Peru's toughest mountains, completely in the middle of the wildnerness, with no one to even know about or rescue them if trouble fell, which, inevitably it did. These guys were "only" at about 20,000 feet, but they spent days at this altitude, in sheer physically exhausting toil, along a path no one had dared take before. At one point, one of the climbers drops on his rope and shatters his leg into bits. His friend valiantly tries to lower him down, but at the last second has to make the agonizing decision to cut the rope and save himself from sure death as well.

The thing was, the guy who broke his leg wasn't dead, even though he was left for it. Instead he was hanging on a dangling rope in a crevasse, no food or water, in absolute screaming pain, and somehow he manages over an agonizing three days to hop and crawl his way back to camp, in complete delirium and dehydration. To read this book and what this guy went through, it's really testament to a character that desired, above all else, to live, even when the odds were nill. I just can't imagine that if I was in that situation I'd have the same drive, that I just wouldn't just give up to the cold and the stars and fade on out, taking the easy route.