Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights.  Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.  Anatoli Boukreev, 1997

 Some of my earliest memories as a child were that of being aware that I yearned to be in a green space.  That inner appeal never left me.  I have always needed to be out in a wooded area, within nature, finding it complementary to a sense of well-being, enjoying all the benefits that accompany being at one with the great out-of-doors. 

It hasn't, for me, translated into a love of the seaside, but rather an urge to be on a forested trail, or urging myself up a mountainside, or alternatively, paddling a canoe in a wilderness lake.  I have the great good fortune of living intimately with a life-long partner whose values regarding the natural world equal mine.  And of knowing that our youngest child is equally driven to share his life in natural surroundings.

That said, I might never have been able to fully understand - and likely still do not - what drives people with truly adventurous spirits into extreme situations where their physical and mental endurance is put to an incredibly difficult test, challenging geological features and nature's capacity to alter atmospheric conditions at her whim, to surmount those seemingly impossible odds in a bid to own a truly unique experience.

"Honestly, I do not experience fear in the mountains.  On the contrary ... I feel my shoulders straightening, squaring, like the birds as they straighten their wings.  I enjoy the freedom and the altitude.  It is only when I return to life below that I feel the world's weight on my shoulders."
Anatoli Boukreev, The Climb

 This exceptional man, a Russian living in Kazakhstan, had mountaineering in his blood.  He lived to climb, and he successfully summited eleven of the world's 8,000-metre peaks, using no supplementary oxygen.  He climbed Mount Everest four times, becoming a legend in the high-stakes world of high-altitude climbing.  To earn a living, he eventually hired himself out as a mountaineering guide.  And he had a valorous sense of responsibility to other climbers.

For his selfless determination and extraordinary capacity in rescuing three summiteers whose strength and endurance had been tested beyond their capability, exacerbated by an extreme snowstorm hitting Everest after a successful summit during a spring 1996 climb he received due recognition.  Those people whom his resolve saved are now among the living, while others, far less fortunate, died in their attempt.

Anatoli Boukreev is himself among them.  He met his own end in 1997, climbing Annapurna with two other alpine professionals when a sudden avalanche swept Anatoli Boukreev and Dimitri Sobolev to their deaths, likely through suffocation, while the third member of their party, Simone Moro, lived to climb another day.