I too am intrigued. In a similar way, I am intrigued by the astronauts that stood on the Moon and looked at the Earth. Something about the loneliness. The isolation. The inhospitable environment.

Yeah I know that climbers take O2 bottles. But setting that aside for a moment.... I notice that airplanes are required to use O2 and pressurized cabins at altitudes over 10,000 feet. That's about four miles below Everest's summit. The "death zone" is thought to start at somewhere around 20,000 feet. With every step, every minute, above this altitude your body is in the process of dying. So, it becomes something of a race. That zone starts about TWO MILES in elevation below the summit.

In-frickin'-credible. Still, I understand the men that go for it.

If you really want to be impressed, read the early climbing books , such as Everest, southwest face by Chris Bonnington. Savage Arena, by Joe Tasker . Or any of Reinhold Messener's books. You will look at this new breed of climbers in a whole different light.

Reading "Into Thin Air" convinced me that I have no business even thinking about summitting Everest.

I always thought I'd summit Mt. Rainier until one day I went up to Camp Miur (Rainier's "base camp"), and before I got back down I thought my left knee was going to explode. Probably not a good idea to go for the summit when it feels like shards of broken glass are behind the patella.

I did have the great priviledge of meeting Lopsong, Scott Fischer's #1 sherpa. The first time he left Nepal was for Fischer's funeral after the events documented in Krakaur's book. Scott Fischer was a friend of a friend, and I took Lopsong up for a flight in my little Bonanza around the Seattle area, over both the Olympic mountains, and Mt Rainier. He kept looking at his watch because it had an altimiter feature. Over the top of the Olympics was not much above sea-level in his perspective. I offered him the controls, but he refused. It was an honor to meet such a great guy.

Sadly, he was killed a few years ago with two others in an avalanche.
The mountains are very unforgiving.

Saw the final episode last night. Good stuff. What amazes me is these guys try this more than once. Tim the Biker Dude actually wants to return next year.

I've done a lot of easy mountaineering, with the hardest being a hike to the top of Mt. Whitney with an 85 pound pack. As someone who doesn't like cold weather too much, I have no interest in suffering on Everest.

Remember that thread last summer about the dying guy on Everest who was just left their to die, and the controversy of it? Well, it was actually the very members of the team that was featured on the TV show who left him there. But if you saw the show, you know now what they were up against, and had no choice but to leave him to die. The Lebanese climber who first found him, Max Chaya, is obviously a good man. Again, he had no choice.

It is interesting to see an environment so severe that Tim might be literally within a stone's throw of the summit in clear weather.......and be unable to make it.

I think the majority of these guys have severe inferiority complexes and need to have something to tell the friends what they have achieved. I can guarantee all of them are divorced or single, allowing them to pursue their dream and coming back failing to reach the top, $40,000 poorer, and missing body parts. What about the guy that spent the last two episoded justifiying that he had reached his limit and "in his mind" he has summitted. Then in the epilogue, it states he is trying next year on a different (and most likely, easier) route. Or what about the biker "Tim" that kept of referring about how he would of made it if he wasn't turned around. He didn't seem to realize he was crawling to the top and would of died. The show got worse with each episode, to the point I didn't even care.

I don't even want to know what kind of "survivor's guilt" Chaya (and the others) will go through.

I give Russell Brice a lot of credit - he's got to have balls the size of basketballs for personally calling that climber's family and telling them what happened. What a great example of personal accountability, even if it wasn't his fault. True role model in that.