Quotes About Mountaineering

There's intense personal gratification in finding a mountain and becoming inspired by the aesthetics of an unclimbed line on that mountain, especially if that line has been tried by a lot of people who couldn't do it, and you get to set yourself up against the history of it.

It's really impressive what those like Messner and Walter Bonatti have done - they are a big part of the history of alpinism.

climb high, sleep low

I had been hired to prepare the mountain for the people instead of the other way around.

as had been the situation on other commercial expeditions, I had been hired to prepare the mountain for the people instead of the other way around.

I think that people ran out of oxygen and don't really know what happened up there, maybe some of them just made things up because they weren't sure what had happened.

Not all Sherpas are bad. There are a few who are crazy, but the rest are good people.

When I climb a fourteener, a 14,000-foot/4,260-meter peak, in the winter by myself, I leave an itinerary and information about where my vehicle will be parked and the name of the county sheriff to contact in case I don't get home.

I don't know a lot about mountaineering. I once went walking in the Lake District with the legendary climber Chris Bonington and had to have emergency physio afterwards to regain sensation in my thighs.

I started the whole 'Into Thin Air' thing - nothing I'm proud of.

As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.

Perhaps you could say that mountaineers are driven by ego or our competitiveness, but there's a lot more to it than that. Whether it's a huge face in the Himalaya or some crag in the woods behind your house, exploration offers us a unique perspective on the world that you can't really find anywhere else.

She gained fame in 1895 when she became the third woman to scale the Matterhorn—and the second to do so in trousers, at a time when women could be arrested for wearing them in public.

When I lost seven of my toes on Nanga Parbat and small parts of my fingertips I knew I'd never be a great rock climber. So I specialized in high-altitude climbing.

Chashkin Sar was virgin, and we climbed it for the first time, and afterwards, the people renamed it as Samina Baig.

I wasn't looking too much into my social media when I was on K2, but overall it's been really humbling to see all of the appreciation.

In climbing there is no question of right or wrong. Moral right or wrong, that is a religious question, they have nothing to do with anarchical activity, and classical mountaineering is a completely anarchical activity.

I didn't say a word. He wouldn't be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.

M]ountaineering as a sport both emanates from and addresses itself back to (and back against) the normal patterns of middle class life. One of the dominant discourses of mountaineering [...] positions it critically against "bourgeois" existence, even as the sport demands the resources made possible by such an existence.

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.

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.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

Traditional alpinism is to go where the others are not going and to be self-reliant.

I am not made for lonely expeditions. In the sixties, I climbed during the day so I wouldn't have to be alone. I finally learned to stay up for weeks in the high altitude all by my own without being afraid.