Quotes from Ed Viesturs

I believe that, with anything in life, if you have the patience, desire and passion, you can do whatever you set your mind to.

Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

Mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

I believe that, with anything in life, if you have the patience, desire and passion, you can do whatever you set your mind to.

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.

Every person has his or her own Annapurna." I go on to explain that there were many Annapurnas in my life—challenges I wasn't sure I could meet—but that "the real Annapurna was my last one." For each of you out there, your Annapurna might be a tough project at work, a bad illness, or the breakup of a marriage, but the trick is to find a way of converting adversity into something positive, a challenge to look forward to.

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

there is nothing else in life like getting to the summit. What's more, I've always felt that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.

Getting to the top is optional, getting back down is mandatory. A lot of people forget about that.

Your instincts are telling you something. Trust them and listen to them.

No matter what the future holds in store, I can say now—out loud, without hesitation—something that, sadly, all too few men and women can ever say: I have lived my dream.

What drives my life is not the desire to get along with other people or make friends so much as a moral obligation to give back as much as—no, more than—I take. That's karma. It's really not so far from the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Some

The famous last line of Herzog's book is "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.

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.

Safety is first; fun is second; success is third.

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.

A great climb is a wonderful mixture of difficulty and intimacy.

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

Mount McKinley

I'll go even further and say that competitiveness in mountaineering is wrong. It's dangerous. Climbing should be personally motivated.

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.

a simple but stark criterion: the number of climbers who successfully reach the summit compared to the number who die on the mountain. For Everest, the ratio turns out to be seven to one. For K2, which has the reputation of being the hardest and most dangerous of the high peaks, the ratio is a little over three to one. But for Annapurna, it's exactly two to one. For every two climbers who get to the top, one climber dies trying.

We stopped in our tracks. I said, "Man, let's not get ourselves killed doing this. Let's discuss this." Scott sat down facing out, looking down at me. I figured, if a big spindrift slide comes down now, we're going to get washed off the face.