Yeah...
I need my fingers.
His life would be much better if he lost about 8 letters from his first and last names on his next trip to the top of Mount Everest.
Ahh, the great outdoors!
Mt. Everest has been turned into a corpse strewn garbage dump. Less dead bodies and trash on K2.
This story bothers me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
“I’m all thumbs.”
There is a Dallas doctor who dang near died up there. He lost a few fingers and toes. He’s either retired or dead by now.
I get enormous joy and satisfaction joy out of many simpler, far safer things in life.
But that’s just me.
I’d be lost without my middle finger.
From “Into Thin Air”:
“As an avid student of mountaineering history, I knew that Everest had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921—approximately one death for every four climbers who’d reached the summit…”
Bad odds, but given enough time and money, man will always find a way to harm, maim, or kill himself.
8 down and 12 to go.
Reinhold Messner, probably the greatest mountain climber who ever lived, only has three toes left. Frostbite in the Himalayas claimed the rest (and it didn’t slow his climbing in the least).
Ranulph Fiennes, legendary arctic explorer, and who also summited Everest at age 65, self-amputated the tips of all the fingers on one hand because frostbite had rendered them necrotic but his doctor wouldn’t perform the medical amputation on Sir Ranulph’s timetable.
If it weren’t for the thrill of the risk they’re taking, people like this wouldn’t do these things.