I was three hundred metres into the Death Zone, yet still hours away from my goal. My blood was turning to sludge my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. I was just a few hours shy of the Earth’s summit and feeling deceptively strong. S tanding motionless in a cloud 8,300 metres above Tibet, setting out from Camp 3, an oxygen mask pressed to my face, I took a deep breath of compressed gas and wondered how many more steps it would take before I’d poke my head above the storm and begin seeing stars. And though neither of them was with me now, I had been drawn back. A year had passed since I lost my crampon in the snow and forced myself to turn around, exactly one year since I was last here with Elia and Richard. There, on the North Col, that frozen ridge that divides your world from mine, I found myself caught in yet another snowstorm in the dark of night.

To that place high in the sky where man was not built to survive. And I can’t not climb.Īnd so I dragged myself back. On some level, I climb for the same reason an otherwise fully functioning man steps outside his office to fill his lungs with the smoke he knows could one day kill him. In order to understand what I’m trying to say, you have to believe that I have never climbed a mountain in order to stroke my ego or to say that I did it. Before I tell the story of that friend and his small place in the larger narrative of my life, let me explain that it’s because of that man that I now have a different definition than most people of what is commonly referred to as the Death Zone.

The Escapist by Gabriel Filippi