I have an interesting obsession with Everest.
It’s not what you’d think. I have no desire to ever climb that damn thing. Genuinely. I mean, would it be cool to take a tram up there and see the sights? Or take a day hike? Sure…but that is essentially the ONLY way I’d ever make a trip up there, and that is never going to happen. Everest might as well be the moon.
I mean…I’d take a trip to the moon. But, not Everest. So, no. It’s not an obsession about climbing Everest.
I have an obsession with the people who’ve died climbing Everest.
It all started with that film from a few years back with Jake Gylenhall and Josh Brolin and that Australian actor that does so much work…about the deadliest day in Everest history when like 20 people died up there back in the 90s. It got under my skin somehow. Couldn’t stop thinking about it for a while after watching the movie. And then I bump into other Everest stories—tragedies, really—and I kinda get sucked in again.
I don’t know exactly what it is…just something really pulls me in, wanting to know what we know about what happened to those people who died and/or disappeared, what we don’t know. And there’s SO MANY stories of people who have died up there. People die on Everest every year. It’s crazy that so many still go up there to climb it.
Anyway…there’s a doc on Disney+ from Nat Geo about trying to find the two men who first tried to summit the mountain back in the 20s. In the first five minutes, they show footage of finding the body of one of them. Completely preserved. Skin bleached white. You can still see the pores on his back. And his leg is snapped in half, with rope burns around his torso.
He clearly slipped and fell. Probably dead instantly, but maybe not. I wonder about stuff like that. Was he conscious as he fell. Did he have to lay on the side of the mountain with a broken leg in the howling wind and bitter cold before he finally died? How did he slip? Was he trying to go too fast to get back to camp? Did it just happen out of nowhere?
It’s that stuff that nibbles at my imagination and I can’t stop thinking about for a while.
And it’s happened again 😛
Night night!