Word: peaking
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...turn. Although Everest had been mapped from summit to base camp, I felt like I was stepping into uncharted territory. Most of the world's experts thought a blind person had no business on the world's tallest peak, especially after eight climbers died in a storm now known as the "1996 disaster." But I had prepared for 16 years, learning to feel my way up mountainous terrain using ice axes and long poles. I finally concluded that when other people's expectations become barriers, the best thing to do is to surmount them...
...About an hour's bumpy drive from Xidan or a convenient bus ride from Deqin, this sleepy village sits in the shadow of the brooding but magnificent Kawa Karpo Peak, whose mammoth glacier?at 11.7 kilometers long and covering an area of 13 square kilometers?feeds a gurgling tributary of the Mekong...
...Kawa Karpo (sometimes referred to as Virgin Peak) is the formidable summit of Meili Mountain. At a towering 6,470 meters it is the highest point in Yunnan and has never been conquered. For thousands of years Kawa Karpo has been sacred to Tibetan Buddhists, and it is the site of a major annual pilgrimage. Locals are fond of recounting the cautionary tale of one of many ill-fated mountaineering expeditions: a team perished on the ascent, Tibetans believe, because it was blasphemous enough to tread on holy ground...
...even more leisurely ascent, the few clean and inexpensive stone guesthouses in Mingyong can arrange for mules to carry you partially up the mountain. Reaching the peak, however, will still require divine intervention...
...Masks are no longer omnipresent, once vacant cinemas are filling up again?and the alleys are once more strewn with garbage. SARS-weary residents are encouraged by the slowing infection rate. "I have started going to karaoke again," says Julie Ong, a 24-year-old auditor who spent the peak of the territory's epidemic in self-imposed hermitage. "I just decided that I couldn't live like this forever...