It is beyond fascinating to read accounts of those supreme athletes who seek out physical and mental challenges that most sane people would never dream of meeting.  Say, for example, the extreme 'sport' of ascending the tallest mountain peaks in the world.  The public reads or hears of horrifying adventures of dismal endings, and of brilliant recoveries, and wonder what truly motivates people to push themselves to the very edges of human endurance.

For some people, ascending and summiting the world's highest peaks represents their reason for existence, difficult though it is for most of us to digest.  We are amazed at their determination in the face of geological and atmospheric conditions that pose grave risks to anyone who assumes they may be capable of surmounting any difficulties that may arise.

For some, like us when we were younger, ascending peaks in the White Mountain Range of New Hampshire, reading signage below, warning to turn back at the first sign of bad weather, augmented by the death toll at that particular mountain, was a sobering enough experience.  Not sufficiently sobering to halt us from our determination to proceed, however, and we did.

 Once, only to find ourselves shivering, well within a sleet storm with no visibility whatever and only the option of descending.  On another occasion, a sudden violent thunder storm just as we were close to the peak, forcing us to turn back.  Just a few of many experiences we had over the years when we climbed Mounts Eisenhower, Little Haystack, Lafayette, Mousalaki, and Clinton among others. 

It had become for us an annual family outing, with our youngest child, now a biologist, urging us on to completion.

Far different for those who attempt the truly majestic, towering and forbidding heights of the world's ceiling.  The dangers they face are enormous.  Most accomplish what they set out to do, but too many never return from their adventure-turned-tragedy.  And it was like that in May of 1996 for a disparate group of climbers attempting Mount Everest, both professionals and their clients, and a national group who had happened to all assemble at the same time for the attempt, when bad weather suddenly set in. 

On May 10 of 1996 nine climbers died.

"That had happened to a number of climbers at Camp Four that night ...... who hadn't yet attempted the summit and were thus relatively well rested.  But in the chaos and confusion of the moment, Boukreev apparently located few, if any, of these climbers.  And in the end Boukreev discovered ... that everybody he did manage to rouse was too sick, too exhausted, or too frightened to help.
"So the Russian guide resolved to bring back the group by himself.  Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion he plunged into the maw of the hurricane and searched the Col for nearly an hour.  It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers.
"Boukreev didn't give up, however.  He returned to camp, obtained a few more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again.  This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen's fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers.  'They were lying on the ice, without movement', says Boukreev.  'They could not talk.'  Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead."                    Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Anatoli Boukreev, an internationally notable alpinist and widely respected, did in the end, manage to rescue all of those stranded climbers, saving their lives through an almost superhuman effort to rouse himself from his own climbing lethargy post-summiting exhaustion.

The stranded climbers were desperate to keep together in the eye of the storm that had captured them, as they desperately searched for Camp Four and the tents where they could take shelter, where the waiting Sherpas would give them hot tea and replenish their oxygen and they would survive the adventure that had turned into a harrowing, life-threatening ordeal. 

"We did decide to huddle up.  We got into a big dogpile with our backs to the wind.  People laid on people's laps.  We screamed at each other.  We beat on each other's backs.  We checked on each other.  Everybody participated in a very heroic way to try to stay warm and to keep each other awake and warm.  This continued for some period of time - I don't know how long.  Time is very warped, but it must have been awhile because I was extremely cold pretty shortly after that.  We were checking fingers.  We were checking each other's consciousness.  We just tried to keep moving.  It was something of an experience that I've never really had before, being what I felt so close to falling asleep and never waking up.  I had rushes of warmth come up and down through my body - whether it was hypothermia or hypoxia, I don't know - a combination of both.  I just remember screaming into the wind, all of us yelling, moving, kicking, trying to stay alive."                                                                          Neil Beidleman - from Anatoli Boukreev's (and G.Weston DeWalt's) The Climb; Tragic Ambitions on Everest.