K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain

K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.

That’s leadership: lead by example, lead from the front, inspire people to follow your lead.

Any “story” can be told in dozens of different ways. For that very reason, I believe, every time you go back and reexamine an important chapter in your life, you learn something new about it.

There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business.

By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest.

It reminds me of a very wise saying about mountaineering that my wife, Paula, repeats often: “Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t.

Morally, however, we had had absolutely no choice but to abort our summit try to help Thor and Chantal get down the mountain. That’s why I find it so hard to stomach all the accounts in recent years—especially on Everest—of climbers ignoring others in trouble for fear a rescue effort would sabotage their own summit bids.

After two hours of the hardest

the men placed willow wands every 50 feet or so to mark their route—as I did in 1992, but as no one bothered to in 1986 or 2008, an oversight that contributed to both tragedies.

Mountaineering will never be a safe activity and would not be worth doing if it were.