"In the days after the May [1996] tragedy, teachings about death crowded my mind -- how death should be prepared for and faced, and what it means. Buddhists view death as a critical turning point on the Wheel of Life, the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Death is part of a continuum, one that Buddhists hope will result, after not too many millions of cycles, in enlightenment and liberation from the Wheel -- for individuals and eventually for all sentient beings.
"What determines all of this? The lamas say that the key factors in our rebirth are the merit and karma that we accumulate during our lifetime, our final thoughts at the moment of death, and our ability to navigate the frightening distractions of the after-death transition period of bardo. Buddhist practice trains us to remain aware during this disturbing and disorienting state and to recognize bardo's frightening visions and sounds as no more than illusory manifestations of our own untamed negative emotions.
"I've noticed that Sherpas and other Nepalese and Indians tend to take life less seriously than Westerners do, perhaps because they recognize that this is only one of many lives. One might conclude that we are merely fatalistic -- lightheartedly resigned to the inevitability that we will be reborn. But it is self-defeating to resign ourselves to being reborn into the samsaric existence to which we've become so attached. For one thing, if we have not accumulated an immense reserve of merit, we may not even be reborn as humans. 'Precious human life' describes our mortal human rebirth, which is granted to only the most genuine and devoted of practitioners and believers, and those with good karma amassed from previous lives. It is either inspiring or depressing to think that, as the lamas say, a human rebirth is as unlikely as a turtle swimming somewhere int he world's oceans happening to surface into a single, randomly cast net.
"This is why it is a shame to squander one's precious human rebirth. In the mountains [Himalayas] I've seen Westerners take unusual risks. And in Kathmandu it is common to see the city youth racing their motorcycles or driving cars like maniacs at night with the headlights off. These people are either unaware of the risks or choose to flaunt [flout?] them."
Jamling Tenzing Norgay, Touching My Father's Soul

Hillary and Norgay were part of a Royal Geographic Society (RGS) expedition. Though many mountaineers had preceded them in the attempt, none had succeeded in reaching the top and many had died in the process.

Many people, myself among them, have a fascination with what impels, compels and propels people to take huge risks in pursuing an adventure of their lifetimes. To climb a mountain takes curiosity, a love of nature, energy and persistence in achieving a laboriously glorious but transitory goal. To climb an imperious mountain in the Himalaya takes determination, perseverance, and no little amount of courage, for there, as few other places on Earth, climate, logistics and circumstances play an even larger role in determining who among those adventurers will achieve their aspiration, and who among them will die in the attempt.

My personal interest in mountain climbing stems as well from the relatively tame adventures my family has undertaken over the decades when we ascended the summits of many of the mountains in the U.S. Great Smokies range, and the more familiar and more-often climbed (by us) White Mountains of New Hampshire. We were given the good fortune as well to climb mountains in Japan. And our experience in the coastal and inland mountains of British Columbia, limited as they were, gave us an appreciation of the vastness and imperviousness of nature at close range.

I've read accounts of climbing in the Himalaya, particularly K2 and Mount Everest by various people who undertook that formidable challenge. Well-written and -documented accounts of early attempts written by Wade Davis in his Into The Silence chronicling early expedition attempts and the George Mallory/Andrew Irvine disappearance speculatively descending from the summit, gave me a grounding in the early years of summit attempts by Westerners who lauded the challenge and the British resolve to meet it. And then there is the inimitable account of the 1996 tragedy when too many lives were lost by Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air.

An accounting that led to the further reading of Everest-climb client Beck Weathers' Left for Dead; My Journey Home from Everest, and the Russian mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev's own personal account of that time in Everest history, The Climb; Tragic Ambitions on Everest. It was only fitting, then, that I also read the first accounting of that tragedy, what led up to it and its impact on those whose ambition it was to reach the summit, written by the son of Tenzing Norgay -- whose own father's completion of the summit with New Zealander Edmund Hillary made history -- to gain yet another perspective, that of a son of the Himalaya, whose Buddhist belief is inextricably interwound with veneration of Everest/Chomolungma, and the goddess whose spirit resides on the mountain, Miyolangsangma.