It's difficult for ordinary mortals to understand the passion that motivates some rare souls to enterprises that require extraordinary will to survive, while surrendering themselves to dangerous situations willingly. Take, for example, women who knowingly place themselves in danger because they are driven to pursue a challenge. For someone like Lara Logan, a news correspondent who has found herself in dangerous situations, and who knows how to protect herself, sometimes there is no adequate protection against danger.

When I thought I am going to die here, my next thought was I can't believe I just let them kill me, that that was as much fight as I had. That I just gave in and I gave up on my children so easily, how could you do that? ...I had to fight for them. And that's when I said, "Okay, it's about staying alive now. I have to just surrender to the sexual assault. What more can they do now? They're inside you everywhere." So the only thing to fight for, left to fight for, was my life. 
Lara Logan, 60 Minutes interview

 

Her ordeal was horrific. She thought she would not survive. The seasoned armed bodyguard she relied upon was himself surrounded by hostile men in Tahrir Square after the abdication of President Hosni Mubarak, and was incapable of protecting her. It was, finally, a group of elderly Egyptian women who led to the scattering of the 200 Egyptian men who preyed upon her, while the Egyptian military standing nearby watching, as bystanders took photos of her plight, made no move to rescue her. She considers her survival a miracle.

And then there are ambitious women whose physical, superbly athletic prowess as high-altitude alpinists and pioneer summitteers present as fascinating accounts of women who made their own kind of history as celebrated mountaineers, conquering the ascents of the world's highest, most dangerous peaks, and the climatic and atmospheric conditions that contribute to their danger, whose exploits stand out as a lesson in courage and aspirational surmounting of all obstacles before them.

Nowhere is hindsight more 20-20 than in mountaineering. The concept of a rest day at 8,000 meters is absurd. At that altitude the body is dying so fast that every minute is measured like precious gold against the loss of brain cells and body fluids. The thought that they would be more motivated and feel better after another day in its death rattle is unfathomable. And yet a handful of the world's strongest climbers reasoned that a day of leisure in the thin air was better than trying for the summit sleep-deprived. 

These are seasoned climbers, well experienced in the pursuit of their single-minded passions, in a state of hypoxic confusion, the brain starved of blood and oxygen, and in danger of succumbing to altitude sickness so dire it could take their lives. In the end, conditions beyond which no human, however experienced to altitude and weather conditions, regardless of their superb physical condition, is capable of surmounting such difficulties, do succumb.

People who envision themselves equal to any situation, struggle with their fear of the mountain on the one hand, and their self-assurance that the dreadful deaths - due to avalanches, slipping off the icy mountain slopes in whiteout conditions or due to faulty equipment, or simply through sheer exhaustion - happens to others, not themselves. People who have convinced themselves of their personal invincibility often act impulsively, heedlessly, against better judgement - not necessarily their own, but the intelligent, powerfully observant advice of experienced others whose cautionary advice in neutrally assessing situations they prefer to decline.

An accounting, titled The True Stories of The First Five Women Who Climbed K2, The World's Most feared Mountain, in Savage Summit by Jennifer Jordan is one of countless books relating the spirited adventurous souls that have set out to summit the world's tallest, most formidable peaks, at the ceiling of the world.

They went, they saw, were awestruck, and they conquered. And many did not survive their triumphs.