Quotes from Beck Weathers

Your body doesn't carry you up there. Your mind does. Your body is exhausted hours before you reach the top; it is only through will and focus and drive that you continue to move. If you lose that focus, your body is a dead, worthless thing beneath you.

Madan is to me the most extraordinary person in this story, because he didn't know me at all. He didn't know my family, and he has his own family, for whom he is the sole provider. We were separated by language, by culture, by religion, by the entire breadth of this world, but bound together by a bond of common humanity. This man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart.

Everest Base Camp, where you actually begin to climb the mountain at 17,600 feet, is higher than all but two points in the United States, both in Alaska. Interestingly, you cannot see the upper part of Mount Everest from Base Camp. As it is, you are huffing and puffing by the time you get there, and you wonder when you finally arrive, exhausted, just how in the world you're ever going to survive. We arrived on April 7.

Each climber in our group was assigned an individual tent, a rare and welcome bit of privacy in the otherwise highly communal world of mountain climbing. Our other amenities included a solar-powered satellite phone and fax, and access on three or four occasions to an outdoor shower. To wash oneself under the little dribble of warm water was an exquisite pleasure.

The reason the Khumbu Icefall concerns you in Base Camp is that it stands between you and the summit. You must go up and down the thing at least five times, spend about twenty hours in it, like an ant trapped in the bottom of an ice machine, if you are to successfully climb Everest.

It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.

The operation was a radial keratotomy, in which tiny incisions are made in one's corneas to alter the eyes' focal lengths and (presumably) improve vision. However, unbeknownst to me and to virtually every ophthalmologist in the world, at high altitude a cornea thus altered will both flatten and thicken, shortening your focal length and rendering you effectively blind. That is what happened to me about fifteen hundred feet above High Camp in the early morning hours of May 10, 1996.

Sleep was our deadliest enemy. Every mountaineer knows that if you allow yourself to be taken down by that cold, it is a one-way ticket to death. There are no exceptions. Your core temperature plunges until your heart stops. So we yelled at each other, and hit each other and kicked each other. Anything to remain awake.

Both my hands were completely frozen. My face was destroyed by the cold. I was profoundly hypothermic. I had not eaten in three days, or taken water for two days. I was lost and I was almost completely blind.

Burleson later shared his first impressions of me with a TV interviewer: "I couldn't believe what I saw. This man had no face. It was completely black, solid black, like he had a crust over him. His jacket was unzipped down to his waist, full of snow. His right arm was bare and frozen over his head. We could not lower it. His skin looked like marble. White stone. No blood in it.

Loving someone, even loving them so hard your teeth hurt, is necessary, but not sufficient if you are not there for them. If you're not there when they need you, then you force them to make a life without you. They have no other choice. You may believe at some point you can turn around and say, 'Now, I'm ready.' But you'll only discover that they've moved on.

Studies seem to show that those of us who believe we must achieve in order to merit love and respect—not just be ourselves—are vulnerable to emotional troughs when our opportunities to excel are restricted.