A Quote by George Leigh Mallory

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.
I wanted to be an explorer, but gradually found the world had been explored and that there was nowhere left, really. Once they climbed Everest in 1953, when I was 10 years old, I thought, 'Well, that's pretty much it now.' But the idea of travelling and exploring and adventure was very strong.
Everest is how it is right now. We have to fix ropes up there; we have the commercial expeditions. If you don't like that, go on another mountain or choose another part of the mountain. There's still space for everybody.
Everest wasn't like any other mountain. Only one of ten climbers who attempt the mountain stands on the summit. And for every three climbers who do scale the mountain, one dies trying. The facts aren't welcoming. But you don't plan a trip to Everest believing those facts will apply to you.
The very remoteness kindles the imagination of the adventurous hunter. From the top of any mountain the challenge extends far and wide, until the mountains meet the sky.
That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew.
The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
For nearly 11 years, now, we have been on this mission; we call it, "climbing Mt. Sustainability", a mountain higher than Everest, to meet at that point at the top that symbolizes zero footprint-zero environmental impact. Sustainable: taking nothing, doing no harm.
We can begin ever so modestly. We can begin with a one week's food supply and gradually build it to a month, and then to three months. I am speaking now of food to cover basic needs. . .I fear that so many feel that a long-term food supply is so far beyond their reach that they make no effort at all. . .Begin in a small way, ... and gradually build toward a reasonable objective.
On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there.
In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.
But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.
Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.
Americans need help understanding their world now more than ever. [TV] believes it's filled its obligation to the public because it's presented both sides. But most of what we're living through now has multiple sides, and those sides, if you take the extreme oppositional views, have to be brought together for people to make a decision about how to act on the information.
Of course I climbed Everest without oxygen, but it's not the end of the story for me. The summit itself is not what counts. It's how'd you get there, what'd you climb, and there are really great opportunities to climb on this mountain. It's a beautiful place.
For we need this thing wilderness far more than it needs us. Civilizations (like glaciers) come and go, but the mountain and its forest continue the course of creation's destiny. And in this we mere humans can take part-by fitting our civilization to the mountain.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
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