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In my younger days, I climbed Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and have been up there a number of times by car and also once by the cog railway (which I recommend avoiding as it's a miserable experience).

Only 6,288 feet but said to have the worst weather on earth. Not sure how true that it but it is pretty nasty up there - even in June. A typical summer day is 45-50 degrees and gale force winds. In winter, there's pretty much no way up or down the mountain except by Bobcat. Sort of like the movie "The Shining".

It's a fairly easy technical climb (depending on what trail you use) so you don't necessarily have to be in great physical shape to do it. However, many people making the climb have absolutely no business up there. Fortunately so many people are on the trails that if you get in trouble, you can get help pretty quickly.

Anyway, climbing Mount Washington that one time cured me of any notions of serious mountain climbing. These days, I just stick to flat trails with some hills. Spent a few hours this morning at Lover's Leap Park in New Milford, CT - that's enough hills for me!

I havent been up on Washington, but we had planned to do that climb, many, many winters ago. I've been up on a few of the others though. On a hot july day you're likely to run into snow on the way up some of these mountains, and they aren very tall mountains! They are however very differwnt from say the rockie mountains. If you want an inexpensive clue as to how everest might feel, try going from sea level to pikes peak, just climb a short distance up hill as fast as you can. Pikes peak isn't even as tall as everest, but for a sea level flat-lander, it's a taste. Base camp is around 16,000 feet. Some people aren't physically equipped to endure even that. It takes months of training at high altitude for a person's body to acclimate, and one of the ways it does so is to add new red blood cells to carry oxygen in thinner air. There's no way you can walk around the block daily at sea level and think you're fit for everest, but people try. These people who climb big mountains are not novices at climbing. They have years of training, and yet even they die. People who live there all their lives, die. Some people have a need to defy death. It can be exhilarating to succeed. All it takes for me is a triple loop rollercoaster. Once was enough! 😅🤣😂 The next time I want to see the world from a mountain top, I know a place in my own back yard (the entire usa is one's back yard).