Touch the Heavens - Or Die Trying

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/world/asia/mount-everest-summit-dead.html

("5 Mount Everest Climbers Are Dead and 3 Are Missing This Summit Season")

For some it is nothing more than a death march. A climb to the heavens that can feel like hell and can end in the end of one's life. And far too often does.

The peak of Mount Everest sits more than five miles above sea level. Oxygen is most scarce at this altitude. Each step as the summit nears must feel unbearably hard, like carrying both the weight of a thousand pounds and of one's expectations on your back.. 

The window of opportunity is brief here. Parts of April and May the only time ascents are permitted,  requiring both cooperating conditions and official approval from the government to challenge Everest.

The mountain can turn from friend to foe on a moment's notice. The weather changing from lamb to lion, the climbers unable to move up or down without the gravest danger, blinded by the snow or caught in its  frozen embrace. And even on the calmest of days, the obstacles are immense, like the vast chasms crossed only by placing a ladder from one side to the other, a walk so precarious it is virtually impossible to describe the fear that must then radiate through the body.

Some people save up their entire lives to be able to afford the cost of this climb and the team of Sherpas responsible for shepherding them from base camp to the top of the world.

There are fewer than 500 each year now allowed to travel this path. But most choose to go at nearly the same moment. When the elements all align, and passage appears most safe. Yet what this leads to is one of the most ridiculous and dangerous sights imaginable: a bottleneck in the last few hundred meters of the ascent, a snaking line of people waiting their turn to reach their destiny, looking more like they are standing impatiently waiting their opportunity for a store to open its doors and allow them in the day after Thanksgiving, then fifty or a hundred men and women perilously close to demise, weather and diminishing supplemental oxygen increasing menaces by the minute while they are compelled to do absolutely nothing.

Every year some do not come down from here. Freezing or falling to their death, left on this mountain until they can be dragged off when conditions allow, if their bodies can ever be located. Hundreds now part of Everest in perpetuity.

The possibility that this happens to any one of those coming face to face with this giant is not insubstantial. Some years approximately five out of every one hundred do not return to their families. The mountain claiming them as victim, repelling the intruders with the hubris to seek entry into a club for which no invitation has been extended.

There is certain exuberance, what must be an astounding rush of adrenaline for those attempting this feat. To stare death in the eye and still march forward. To conquer the paralyzing mental strain and the immense, intense physical one. To go where few would ever dare. To succeed in the hardest undertaking imaginable. 

Touch the heavens. Or die trying. Welcome to Everest.