Left for Dead Quotes

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“We stood there maybe five minutes. We didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. And then I heard one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard in my entire life, that whap! whap! whap!—the distinctive chop of a helicopter. Long before we could see this thing we could hear it claw its way up that two-thousand-foot wall, once again this same lone man rising into view. He moved up the valley with greater authority. With the same consummate skill he lay those skids down again. Not waiting, I hot-footed across there and dove into the back of this machine. They slammed the door and one more time the helicopter tail went up and we moved toward the precipice, crevasses gliding by beneath the skids. We crested the edge and then went screaming down that face with the blades whipping around above us, trying to grab hold of cold, heavy, dense air that would provide lift. The machine felt alive beneath us as it pulled us out of the dive, and we knew we were safe. We retrieved Makalu at Base Camp and put him back in. We got the copilot and put him back in. We got all the gear that Madan had stripped off this machine, and we put it back in. That’s when I discovered that when Madan returned to get me, he was flying the Squirrel on just seven minutes of fuel. 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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Once again the helicopter rose. One lone man. He moved up that valley with deliberate and delicate precision, and lay those skids down on the surface. He dared not let the weight of the helicopter descend. He had no idea if this was solid, or if this was chiffon over air. You never know up there whether you’re standing above a crevasse. The power was full on. His hands were frozen on the controls. His head didn’t move left or right—that changes your depth perception. We grabbed Makalu like a sack of potatoes, ran him over there and threw him in the back of this machine, slamming the door shut. The tail of the helicopter rose up. It did not lift up, but it did move forward toward the Icefall, where it plunged out of sight, as did my heart, because I knew he was not coming back.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Just as we received the radio message, a group of Sherpas came running down the valley toward us. They were dragging something, which turned out to be Makalu Gau, whose feet had been destroyed by the cold. He could not stand. Now we had a problem. We talked about it, and I told the others that I couldn’t get on the helicopter and leave Makalu. I think that was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t why I said it. I didn’t want to second-guess myself every day for the rest of my life. Then we saw the Squirrel. The shiny green machine rose directly above us, and moved up the valley, ascended toward us and then just disappeared off the face. I thought to myself, This guy is not stupid. This was a supremely dumb idea. If he puts the machine down for any reason and cannot take off, he is a dead man. He’s got to know that. He was up there in civilian clothes. He was not a climber. He did not have the clothing. He did not have the experience. He did not have the skills. He’d be trapped above the Khumbu Icefall, two thousand of the most vicious feet of real estate on earth. Altitude sickness would kill him before he could walk out of there.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Todd Burleson’s amazement stemmed in part from my appearance, and in part from the news he’d received that everyone above High Camp, including me, was dead. He quickly recovered his composure, reached out and took me by the arm to the first tent—the dead Scott Fischer’s tent—where they put me into two sleeping bags, shoved hot water bottles under my arms, and gave me a shot of steroids. “You are not going to believe what just walked into camp,” they radioed down to Base Camp. The response back was “That is fascinating. But it changes nothing. He is going to die. Do not bring him down.” Fortunately, they didn’t tell me that. Conventional wisdom holds that in hypothermia cases, even so remarkable a resurrection as mine merely delays the inevitable. When they called Peach and told her that I was not as dead as they thought I was—but I was critically injured—they were trying not to give her false hope. What she heard, of course, was an entirely different thing. I also demurred from the glum consensus. Having reconnected with the mother ship, I now believed I had a chance to actually survive this thing. For whatever reason, I seemed to have tolerated the hypothermia, and genuinely believed myself fully revived. What I did not at first think about was the Khumbu Icefall, which simply cannot be navigated without hands. I was going to require another means of exit, something nobody had ever tried before.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“About four in the afternoon, Everest time—twenty-two hours into the storm—the miracle occurred: I opened my eyes. Several improbable, if not impossible, events would follow in succession. I would stand and struggle alone back to High Camp. Next day I’d stand again and negotiate the Lhotse Face. Then there would be the highest-altitude helicopter rescue ever. Those were the big things. The miracle was a quiet thing: I opened my eyes and was given a chance to try. In my confused state, I at first believed that I was warm and comfortable in my bed at home, with Texas sunlight streaming in through the window. But as my head cleared I saw my gloveless hand directly in front of my face, a gray and lifeless thing. I smashed it onto the ice. It bounced, making a sound like a block of wood. This had the marvelous effect of focusing my attention: I am not in my own bed. I am somewhere on the mountain—I don’t know where. I can’t see at any distance, but I know that I am alone. It would take a while to recapture the previous night in my mind. When I did, I assumed the others all were rescued and that for some reason I was overlooked, left behind. Was it something I said? Innately, I knew that the cavalry was not coming. If they were going to be there, they already would have been there. I was on my own. One mystery still unsolved is why I no longer was lying next to Yasuko. She remained where Stuart Hutchison and the Sherpas found, and left, us that morning. But I awoke from the coma alone and a good distance away that afternoon. I can only surmise that sometime between morning and late day I semi-revived and somehow made my way (perhaps fifty yards) in the direction of High Camp before collapsing again.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice. First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing. He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value. What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back. I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice. Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge. “Is there any hope?” Peach asked. “No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Neal, Mike and Klev somehow did find High Camp that night, but were on their hands and knees by the time they did. None of them had anything left. They weren’t going to return for us; they couldn’t. The Sherpas in camp wouldn’t. There was no one else to try, except for the Russian, Anatoli Boukreev. That day, Anatoli had forsaken his duty as a guide. While everyone was struggling up and down the ridge to the summit, or stacked up like cordwood at the Hillary Step, Anatoli climbed for himself, by himself, without oxygen. He just went straight up, tagged the summit, and came straight back down. Because he lacked oxygen, he couldn’t persist in the cold, and was forced to retreat to the shelter of his tent. So Boukreev had been in his tent recovering for hours, and if that was where his story had ended that night, the climbing community would have stripped the flesh right off his bones. They are not a forgiving bunch. But Anatoli did what no one else could, or would do. He went out into that storm three times, searching both for Scott Fischer, who froze to death on the mountain, about twelve hundred feet above the South Col, and for us. Boukreev twice was driven back to camp by the wind and cold. The third time he located our little huddle by the face and brought in each of the three Fischer climbers—Tim, Charlotte and Sandy. He left behind Yasuko and me, the Hall climbers.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“I could no longer feel or move my right hand, no surprise under the circumstances, and normally a fairly simple problem to fix. You take off two of the three gloves you wear and jam the affected hand beneath your coat against your bare chest. When it’s warmed sufficiently, you take it back out, put on the gloves and go about your business. Now, I had been in very cold places, but what happened next was a complete shock. When I pulled those two outer gloves off, the skin on my hand and my arm immediately froze solid, even underneath that third expedition-weight glove. The shooting pain of instant frostbite so startled me that I lost my grip on the glove in my left hand, which the wind grabbed—whoooooosh—and sent into outer space. There was another pair of gloves in the pack on my back. But they might as well have been under my bed at home. In such a storm, there was no way I could take off that pack, put it down and rummage through it. The wind was strong enough to lift me bodily off the ground and drop me, which at one point it did. I didn’t have the time, or presence of mind, to consider my exposed right hand and forearm’s probable fate, or how I might fare in the future as a one-handed pathologist. I did reinsert my hand under my coat, a frozen Napoleon. Life and death were now the issue for all of us, with the odds against the former lengthening each moment.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“But as we all began to move, we heard that throaty rumble come surging up the mountain. Suddenly, the blizzard detonated all around us. It crescendoed into a deafening roar. A thick wall of clouds boiled across the South Col, wrapping us in white, blotting out every discernible feature until the only visible objects were our headlamps, which seemed to float in the maelstrom. Neal Beidleman later said it was like being lost in a bottle of milk. It quickly became incredibly cold. I grabbed Mike’s sleeve. He was my eyes. I dared not lose contact with him. We instinctively herded together; nobody wanted to get separated from the others as we groped along, trying to get the feel of the South Col’s slope, hoping for some sign of camp. We turned one way, and that wasn’t it. We turned again, and that wasn’t it. In the space of a few minutes, we lost all sense of direction; we had no idea where we were facing in the swirling wind and noise and cold and blowing ice. We continued to move as a group, until suddenly the hair stood up on the back of Neal’s neck. Experience and intuition told Beidleman that mortal danger lurked nearby. “Something is wrong here,” he shouted above the din. “We’re stopping.” It was a good decision. We were not twenty-five feet from the seven-thousand-foot vertical plunge off the Kangshung Face. From where we stopped the ice sloped away at a steep angle. A few more paces and the whole group would have just skidded off the mountain. When we stopped something else stopped, too—that internal furnace that keeps you alive. The only way to stay warm in those conditions is through constant activity. To stand still is to freeze to death, which already was happening to me.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Climbing down a mountain is a lot more dangerous than climbing up. If you’re going to get yourself killed, that’s generally when it happens. In this case, we had the added problem of exhaustion and blindness and one other little detail, my crampons. They were so-called switchblade crampons, good for technical climbing but prone to clog up in wet or sticky snow. Pretty quickly, the accumulated snow extends down beneath the blade tips and suddenly you’re better equipped for skiing than clinging to the mountainside. So here goes. I move, commit and plant my weight on what I believe to be that hill. Wrong. I step onto nothing but air and come whipping off the front of the face. The rope snaps taut, and pulls Mike right off his feet. Both of us start to slide. We take our ice axes, jam them into the hill, and both of us roll our body weight on top of them to stop the fall. We do this another two or three times before we get all the way down. Mike later described the experience as “somewhat unnerving.” Little did he guess what lay dead ahead. Except for some rips in my down suit and a whole lot of wounded pride, I was fine, and heartily relieved. We were back on the South Col—practically home free. In less than an hour of easy traverse we were going to be in those tents, in those sleeping bags, drinking hot tea and putting the long, exhausting day to bed.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Krakauer did the right thing. Although our guide Mike Groom was just twenty minutes behind him on the trail, he offered to help me down. I, in turn, was uncomfortable with inflicting myself on Jon. I declined with thanks, saying I’d wait for Groom. I think Jon heaved a little sigh of gratitude. Another half hour or so passed, and here came Mike Groom with Yasuko. She looked like a walking corpse, so exhausted she could barely stand. Fortunately, Neal Beidleman and some other members of the Fischer group also came along just then, including Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen, all of whom had summitted, and all of whom were close to the limits of their endurance. Yasuko and I were the acute problems, however. Neal took her and headed on down the Triangle. Mike short-roped me, which is exactly what it sounds like. One end of a rope went around the waist of the downhill climber, me. Twenty feet back was Mike, who’d use muscle and leverage to stabilize me as we descended. It was nearly 6:00 P.M. by now.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“I expected Rob no later than three. The hour came and went, as did four and five. Now I began to worry. The sun was my great ally, but the shadows were beginning to lengthen as it started to set. With it, those pinpoint irises of mine would begin to open up and I’d be blind again—soon. I could sense the mountain starting to put itself to bed. The light went flat. It began to get a little colder. The wind picked up. The snow began to move, and I realized I’d stayed too long at the party. I was trapped. I was beginning to lose it. Although I’d been breathing bottled oxygen and was not hypoxic, I had been standing or sitting for ten hours without moving much. The cold was beginning to act like an anesthetic on my mind. I hallucinated seeing people. They drifted in and out of focus. I recognize now that I was sinking, cold past shivering, overtaken by a calm apathy, unable to appreciate my peril. The water bottles inside my jacket against the skin of my chest had frozen solid. If I’d been left there, I probably would have slowly frozen to death, without even trying to stir. Then Jon Krakauer came along and I collected myself. He was plainly exhausted. We spoke for a bit. Jon said that Rob was still up there on the ridge, at least three hours behind him, which meant that all deals were off. There was no way I could wait three more hours. On the other hand, there also was no way now for me to descend unassisted.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“By noon, three climbers from our group descended toward me: Stuart Hutchison, Lou Kasischke and John Taske (Frank Fischbeck already had turned back). They said there was a slowdown at the uppermost part of the mountain at Hillary Step, a natural obstacle on the ridge leading directly to the summit. Because of the bottleneck of climbers, the three of them realized there was no way they could make the summit by two. So Stuart, Lou and John decided to come down, and as they came by me, standing alone, getting colder and colder on the Balcony, they said, “Well, come on down with us.” “Uh, I’ve really put myself in a box here,” I answered. “I’ve promised Hall I will stay put. We have no radio, so I have no way to tell him that I’m leaving. It would be as if I never honored that commitment at all. I just don’t think I can do that now.” They said good-bye and continued on down. Three wise men. In retrospect I clearly should have joined them. But I didn’t then sense I was in any imminent danger. It was a perfect day. Also, even though I knew that I was not going to climb the mountain that day, I still hated to give up. To go down with them would be to absolutely concede I’d failed.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“I don’t like that idea any better than your last one,” he said. “If I come down off the top of this thing and you’re not standing here, I’m not going to have any idea whether or not you’ve gone down safely to High Camp, or if you’ve just gone for an eight-thousand-foot wipper. I want you to promise me—I’m serious about this—I want you to promise me that you’re going to stay here until I come back.” I said, “Rob, cross my heart, hope to die, I’m sticking.” It didn’t enter my mind that he might never come back.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The sun at that altitude is an enormous ball of light so powerful that it can burn the inside of your mouth and the inside of your nose. If you take off those protective glasses, within ten minutes your retinas will be seared to total blindness. Hence, I expected that, once the sun was fully out, even behind my jet-black lenses my pupils would clamp down to pinpoints and everything would be infinitely focused. I was certain I was right. It had to work. In the predawn darkness, however, I was too blind to climb. So I stepped out of line and let everyone pass, going from fourth out of thirty-some climbers to absolutely dead last. It wasn’t unpleasant, really, watching everybody traipse past me. I basically stood there chatting and acting like a Wal-Mart greeter until the sun began to illuminate the summit face. As I expected, my vision did begin to clear, and I was able to dig in the front knives on my boots, move across, and head on up to the summit ridge. Then I compounded my problem by reaching to wipe my face with an ice-crusted glove. A crystal painfully lacerated my right cornea, leaving that eye completely blurred. That meant I had no depth perception, and that’s not good in that environment. My left eye was a little blurry but basically okay. But I knew that I could not climb above this point, a living-room size promontory called the Balcony, about fifteen hundred feet below the summit, unless my vision improved. Still believing it would, I said to Rob, “You guys go ahead and boogie on up the hill. At a point that I can see, I’ll just wander up after you.” It was about 7:30 A.M. “Beck,” he answered in that unmistakable Kiwi accent, “I don’t like that idea. You’ve got thirty minutes. If you can see in thirty minutes, climb on. If you cannot see in thirty minutes, I don’t want you climbing.” “Okay.” I hesitated. “I’ll accept that.” This was not a willing and happy answer; I had come too far to quit so close to the summit. But I also recognized the common sense in what Hall said.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“We reached High Camp on schedule late that afternoon. The South Col (from the Latin collum, or “neck”) is part of the ridge that forms Everest’s southeast shoulder and sits astride the great Himalayan mountain divide between Nepal and Tibet. Four groups—too many people, as it turned out—would be bivouacked there in preparation for the final assault: us, Scott Fischer’s expedition, a Taiwanese group and a team of South Africans who would not make the summit attempt that night. Altogether, maybe a dozen tents were set up, surrounded by a litter of spent oxygen canisters, the occasional frozen body and the tattered remnants of previous climbing camps. If you wander too close to the South Col’s north rim, you’ll tumble seven thousand uninterrupted feet down Everest’s Kangshung Face into the People’s Republic of China. Make a similar misstep on the opposite side, and you zip to a crash landing approximately four thousand feet down the Lhotse Face.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Our plan was simple. We were going to get up with the sun and climb all day to get to High Camp on the South Col late that afternoon. We would then rest for three or four hours, get up again and climb all night and through the next day to hit Everest’s summit by noon on May 10, and absolutely no later than two o’clock. This point had been drilled into us over the preceding week: Absolutely no later than two. If you’re not moving fast enough to get to the summit by two, you’re not moving fast enough to get back down before darkness traps you on the mountain.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Our climb began in earnest on May 9. By then we’d successfully negotiated the Khumbu Icefall, surmounted the Western Cwm, and now were halfway up a moderately steep, four-thousand-foot wall of blue ice called the Lhotse Face, which the prudent climber will traverse very carefully. This extreme care is a function of the physics involved. With hard ice such as that found on the Lhotse Face, there is no coefficient of friction; you are traction free. Fall into an uncontrolled slide, and your chances of stopping are nil. You’re history. A Taiwanese climber named Chen Yu-Nan would discover the truth of this, to his horror, on the morning of May 9. Because the Lhotse Face is a slope, you pitch Camp Three by carving out a little ice platform for your tent, which you crawl into exhausted, desperate for some rest. No matter how tired you are, however, you must remember a couple of fairly simple rules. One, don’t sleepwalk. Two, when you get up in the morning, the very first thing you’ve got to do, without fail, is put those twelve knives on each climbing boot, your crampons, because they are what stick you down to that hill. Chen Yu-Nan forgot. He got out of his tent wearing his inner boots, took two steps, and went zhoooooooop! down into a crevasse, leading to his death.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“One of the body’s most important physiological adaptations to high altitude is the millions and millions of extra oxygen-bearing red blood cells that your bone marrow produces in response to chronic oxygen deprivation. The extra oxygen-carrying capacity is critical. Still, you thirst for air when high on the big mountains. Breathing is such hard work that 40 percent of your total energy output is devoted to it. Each day you can blow off an amazing seven liters of water through your lungs alone. That leaves you constantly dehydrated. Also, you can no longer sleep or eat. Once in the Death Zone, above 25,000 feet, the thought of food becomes repugnant to most people. Even if you can force yourself to chew and swallow something, your body will not digest it. Yet you are burning about twelve thousand calories a day, which means you’re consuming your own tissue—about three pounds of muscle a day—in order to stay alive.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“If you, the reader, were by some magic instantly transported to the top of Mount Everest, you would have to deal with the medical fact that in the first few minutes you’d be unconscious, and in the next few minutes you’d be dead. Your body simply cannot withstand the enormous physiologic shock of being suddenly placed in such an oxygen-deprived environment. What a climber must do, as we did over several weeks, is to start at Base Camp, climb up, and then climb back down again. Rest and repeat. You keep doing this over and over on Everest, always pushing a little higher each time until (you hope) your body begins to acclimatize. You basically say to your body, “I am going to climb this thing, and I’m taking you with me. So get ready.” But you must be patient. Climb too fast and you elevate your risk of high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), in which your lungs fill with water and you can die unless you get down the mountain very fast. Even deadlier is high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), which causes the brain to swell. HACE can induce a fatal coma unless you are quickly evacuated. There’s no way to know beforehand if you are susceptible to these medical conditions. Some people develop symptoms at altitudes as low as ten thousand feet. Moreover, veteran climbers who’ve never encountered either problem can develop HAPE or HACE without warning. Similarly unpredictable is a much more common menace, hypoxia, caused by reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. In its milder forms, hypoxia induces euphoria and renders the sufferer a little goofy. Severe hypoxia robs you of your judgment and common sense, not a welcome complication at high altitude. Climbers call the condition HAS, High-Altitude Stupid.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“On June 8, 1924, the thirty-eight-year-old Mallory and his protégé, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, twenty-two, were seen by Noel Odell, a member of their team, about nine hundred feet below the summit and climbing strongly. Then Mallory and Irvine were swallowed from view by a cloud, and disappeared with no trace. Mallory’s fate remained a mystery for seventy-five years, until May of 1999, when an American expedition organized specifically to hunt for the famed British climber found his frozen body approximately two thousand feet below the summit, where he apparently had fallen. Whether George Mallory made it to the top before his fatal plunge is an unsettled debate. His altimeter, a monogrammed scarf, some letters and a pocket knife were recovered in 1999, but the Kodak cameras that Mallory and Irvine brought along to record their ascent were not found; nor (yet) was Irvine’s body.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Above the Icefall’s upper edge, and also hidden from your view, is the gradually sloping valley of the Western Cwm (pronounced koom), which rises another two thousand feet toward an immense, jagged amphitheater, anchored on the left by Everest, with 27,890-foot Lhotse in the center and, on the right, the third of the three brute sisters that dominate the high terrain, 25,790-foot Nuptse. The Cwm (Welsh for “valley”) was named in 1921 by George Mallory, who led the first three assaults on Everest, all from the Tibetan side. Mallory, when asked why he wished to climb Everest, quipped famously, “Because it is there.” He may also have been the first person to summit Everest. Then again, maybe he wasn’t.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from 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.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest