Hiking - Part 39

Mountain Tops

Mountain summits are always compelling destinations for a hike.  Here's a guy on Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, the highest point in the U.S. east of the Mississippi.

This is Buddy on a mountain in Georgia.

Some mountains have nice views, like this one overlooking Phoenix, Arizona ...

and this one in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming (which, by the way, is where the story Brokeback Mountain is set).

This unnamed summit doesn't have much of a view, other than some fall foliage in the background, but maybe you weren't looking at the background.

This is the summit of Scafell Pike, England.  At 3209 feet, it's England's highest mountain.

This is Glenn on the summit of Ben Lomond, Scotland's highest peak at 3196 feet.  Did you know that the Scottish Highlands and the Appalachian Mountains were once part of the same mountain range, before the Atlantic Ocean split open and divided them 130 million years ago?  The Atlantic is still getting wider by an inch or two a year.

Roy's Peak, at 5177 feet, provides a beautiful view of Lake Wanaka, New Zealand.

Mont Salève overlooks Geneva, Switzerland.  It's 4524 feet high, not as high as the snow-covered Alps in the distance.

Here's Christian on the summit of Antecim, 8612 feet, with France's Mont Blanc in the distance, the highest mountain in the Alps at 15,773 feet.

But those are all foothills compared to the Himalayas.  Here are Ivan Serra and a friend on top of Kala Patthar mountain, 18,519 feet high, looking across at Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.  Everest was recently re-measured at 8849 meters (29,032 feet).  

Above is famous English climber George Mallory (at right), naked at Everest base camp in 1922.  At that time, many expeditions had attempted Everest, but no one had yet reached the summit.  Mallory is the climber who, when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest, replied, "Because it's there."

In another Everest attempt in 1924, Mallory disappeared after being engulfed by a blizzard near the summit.  75 years later, his body was found below a ridge close to the summit.  It is not known whether Mallory actually reached the summit, 29 years before Edmund Hillary.

In 1953, Edmund Hillary (above) and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, became the first men known to have reached the summit of Mt. Everest.  Hillary is also the first man known to have pissed on the summit of Mt. Everest.  In his autobiography, he relates how, before the final ascent, he and Tenzing consumed copious quantities of lemon drink to avoid dehydration during the climb, and "we arrived on top with full bladders.  Having just paid our respects to the highest mountain in the world, I then had no choice but to urinate on it."

In 2006, Sherpa climber Lakpa Tharke became the first man to get naked on the summit of Mt. Everest.  He stayed naked for 3 minutes in subzero weather while his fellow climbers took pictures for the Guinness Book of World Records, but unfortunately, the photos have not been publicly released.

But we do have a photo of Polish climber Mariusz Kubielas on the west ridge of Everest, which appeared on the cover of a 1996 Polish climbing magazine, above.  The uncensored frontal nudity caused a scandal in Poland, where Kubielas was a city councilman at the time.

Next time: more Mountain Tops.