Quote:
Originally Posted by Louis
It would be interesting to see what would happen if next week someone discovered that 100 years ago a surveyor had made an error, and some obscure peak in the Karakoram (sp?) range is 10 feet higher than Everest.
Suddenly something that until now had been considered incredibly important would become so much less so.
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Isn't the saving grace of all those other peaks that they are not nearly as "easy", relatively speaking, to climb as Everest, which is apparently the Mount Whitney of the 8.000m peaks, and which is therefore pretty ironic given its status as the highest-flag king?
This is not to disparage true mountaineers at all, but the "tourist/ego" side of the high peaks seems far past the absurd now. I know a fellow who is one of those "peak baggers"; he is not at a real climber at all, just a very insecure person with a huge ego and tons of money and free time. Everest seems incredibly popular with that crowd. He can barely hit three tennis balls in a row, is a terrible skier and athlete in general, is also socially very awkward, but is now lining up some mini-submarine trip to the Marianas Trench just so that at parties he can tell people that he has "been to the tallest
and deepest places on Earth...". More yawns will ensue than already do.