Word: oxygenated
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blind guy can do it, anyone can. And indeed, improved gear has made Everest, at least in some people's minds, a bit smaller. In the climbing season there's a conga line to the top, or so it seems, and the trail is a junkyard of discarded oxygen tanks and other debris. But Everest eats the unready and the unlucky. Almost 90% of Everest climbers fail to reach the summit. Many--at least 165 since 1953--never come home at all, their bodies lying uncollected where they fell. Four died in May. "People think because I'm blind...
...Oxygen deprivation does strange things to the human body. Heart rates go haywire, brain function decreases, blood thickens, intestines shut down. Bad ideas inexplicably pop into your head, especially above 25,000 ft., where, as Krakauer famously wrote in Into Thin Air, climbers have the "mind of a reptile...
...making sure Erik stayed on the trail, but they would be primarily concerned about their own survival in some of the worst conditions on earth. Ironically, Erik had some advantages as they closed in on the peak. For one thing, at that altitude all the climbers wore goggles and oxygen masks, restricting their vision so severely that they could not see their own feet--a condition Erik was used to. Also, the final push for the summit began in the early evening, so most of the climb was in pitch darkness; the only illumination was from miner's lamps...
...camp he describes as Dante's Inferno with ice and wind--they had been on the mountain for two months, climbing up and down and then up from Base Camp to Camps 1, 2 and 3, getting used to the altitude and socking away enough equipment--especially oxygen canisters--to make a summit push. They had tried for the summit once but had turned back because of weather. At 29,000 ft., the Everest peak is in the jet stream, which means that winds can exceed 100 m.p.h. and that what looks from sea level like a cottony wisp...
...weather, the team pushed on up the exposed Southeast Ridge, an additional 1,200 vertical feet to the South Summit. At that point the climbers looked like astronauts walking on some kind of Arctic moon. They moved slowly because of fatigue from their huge, puffy down suits, backpacks with oxygen canisters and regulators and goggles...