(Ultimately, 22 people lost their lives on Everest, making it the deadliest day in the mountain’s history.) Davidson didn’t know it immediately, but the Gorkha earthquake was a magnitude 7.8 and would take the lives of some 9,000 people, including 19 hikers and Sherpas at base camp. “Inside the tent Bart and I rose and sank in unison, as if we were riding a lifeboat over rolling ocean swells.” We hovered there for about two seconds, then fell back once more,” writes Jim Davidson in The Next Everest. You, a thousand-foot glacier, your tent, and your climbing buddy are all lifted a foot into the air. You’re at Camp 1-at 19,900 feet-and you don’t realize it but you are, in fact, incredibly fortunate to have climbed out of base camp. You won’t feel like eating, your head will throb, and there’s also the danger of losing toes or fingers to frostbite. Oh, and throw in the fact that it takes a small fortune to pay for a trekking company to get you to the top and that you’ll be walking past the corpses of those who have tried and failed. Cold, wind, avalanches, ice, ice falls, flying rocks, flying ice, howling winds, steep pitches, even steeper pitches, crevasses, cheap light ladders for crossing those crevasses, and the last five-thousand feet up require you to endure something called the death zone.
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