The eight-man expedition was pinned down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a life-threatening altitude-induced blood clot. Realising that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain's steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25, 000 feet, a climber named George Bell slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever after simply as The Belay. Jon Krakauer
Some Similar Quotes
  1. To die will be an awfully big adventure. - J.m. Barrie

  2. To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement. - Augustine Of Hippo

  3. Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it. - E.a. Bucchianeri

  4. Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a... - Hunter S. Thompson

  5. The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. - Eleanor Roosevelt

More Quotes By Jon Krakauer
  1. Happiness [is] only real when shared

  2. Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

  3. When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.

  4. What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?

  5. Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their...

Related Topics