Avalanche Risk Quotes

When I went to Everest, I underestimated things. I just didn't know what altitude could do. Or the cold - I especially didn't appreciate the cold. It can be just debilitating, and things can happen so quickly.

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

We took a straight course up the great snow ridge.

When you're climbing at high altitudes, life can get pretty miserable.

I won't ski in the backcountry the day after a big storm anymore. The mountains are so humbling. As soon as you think you're on top or crushing it, that's when you need to be really careful.

People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

I have a very different fear if I'm all alone in the summit area of Mount Everest and if I know that there is nothing below me, no Sherpa, no tent, no rope.