Everest: Beyond the Limit

Diaries
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Mesmerized and Appalled

by Martin Pailthorpe

Slide Show

May 14, 2006 — At 7 p.m. dinner is over and the sun has gone down. Base Camp settles down for the night. In three and a half hours time I'll be up again for a day no one would have believed if we had scripted it.

Summit day on Everest is a mass of conflicting emotions for everyone. For the climbers: Will they summit? Will they return alive? For the film crew: Will everyone stay fit and healthy — and will we get the footage we came for?!?

Today we struck gold: We interviewed an emotional Terry (the expedition doctor) on the summit as he dedicated his climb to his father, who had died two years before, as well as his best friend Charlie, who had died in a climbing accident just a few weeks earlier.

But just because everything worked today, there are no guarantees it'll work tomorrow.

Sleeping this high is never easy — the altitude and adrenaline make it almost impossible — but I hunker down in my four-season sleeping bag and somehow carve out some space in a tent crammed with cold-weather gear and other necessities (like a pee bottle) and a few luxuries from home.

Next: Preparing the Production