Posted 3/14/2010 1:11 am
There's nothing up there to make it worth the suffering either. Pure risk for nothing. Not even any women to impress. Of course there's the odd belay babe but they're hairy armpit hippies..
Posted 3/14/2010 1:12 am
If you get Rheinhold Meissner's All Fourteen Eight Thousander's there's this incredible picture where he has to walk over one of those to get to K2. The photo and incident was deeply criticized by the victim's family..
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/dead-everest-2.jpg
The petrified, frozen remains of climber George Leigh Mallory lie on a slope of Mount Everest. The lost mountaineer's remains were found 75 years after he and fellow climber Andrew Irvine disappeared in 1924 trying to reach the summit.
Up there it's the Death Zone, where every ounce of a person's effort is spent on just breathing and getting one foot in front of another. People can't be arsed to be removing bodies when they themselves are that close to succumbing. People really can't imagine it.
One of the Wiki articles I just read said they build those rock pyramids over them because of birds. Doesn't mean it's true, of course, but it's what they said. It was in one of the stories about the big 1996 incident.
