I love documentaries about mountaineering. I do not know what it is. I’m not interested in mountaineering myself; I’ve never done it, I never will do it.
But I am absolutely astounded by people that climb these insane mountains, willingly go through something called the “Death Zone”, all to spend a few minutes at the very top before they have to go back down because, you know, there’s not enough oxygen up there to breathe. You are literally in the process of dying.
And then you have people who get a bit stunty when they do it – they don’t bring oxygen, they do it completely alone, etc. Some people are never heard from again. If you climb certain mountains it’s not crazy that you’ll come across the body of somebody who died months or years before. And even despite that, they keep going anyway.
It starts to get weird with the tourist trade too – Everest has it’s own set of problems around people who will just take anybody’s money, even those who in no way, shape, or form are prepared to climb that mountain.
All this stuff around mountaineering just fascinates me. In a way it’s the extreme version of what human beings do and are; if we had never crossed that river, or land mass, or ocean our evolution would have played out very differently than what it had.