K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
by Ed Viesturs and David Roberts · 13 Oct 2009
didn’t summit by 2:00 P.M., I’d turn around. As it was, we topped out at noon. In August 2008, I suspect, summit fever took over in the traffic jam. All those climbers were piled together. They were slow together, and they were late together, and that probably rationalized
…
. There are a lot of people, and they are all going up together. It’s the majority against you.” (There’s a succinct definition of summit fever!) Some of the climbers that day may well have pondered turning around. But one of the more experienced, the Italian Marco Confortola, tried to rally
…
slowly, which created the traffic jam; the further delay when the team leaders insisted that the fixed ropes in the Bottleneck had to be repositioned; summit fever, which kept so many from turning back short of the summit; too late an hour when all but Zerain topped out; the panic that set
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer · 25 Aug 2009 · 283pp · 98,673 words
, and the gloom was quickly banished by nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, we assumed, after
…
exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske, Hutchison, Kasischke, and Fischbeck had each spent as much as $70,000
…
towel and went down at around 2:00 P.M., but Smanla, Paljor, and Morup pushed onward despite the deteriorating weather. “They were overcome by summit fever,” explained Harbhajan Singh, one of the three who turned around. The other three reached what they believed to be the summit at 4:00 P
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
by Oliver Burkeman · 1 Jul 2012 · 211pp · 69,380 words
. ‘You can become obsessed with goals.’ Mountaineers, of course, do not speak in the corporate language of targets and goalsetting. But when they refer to ‘summit fever’ – that strange, sometimes fatal magnetism that certain peaks seem to exert upon the minds of climbers – they are intuitively identifying something similar: a commitment to
Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War
by Ken Adelman · 5 May 2014 · 372pp · 115,094 words
author, Richard Perle (back of his head), Shultz, NSC staffer Bob Linhard, and Don Regan—to make absolutely sure that we hadn’t succumbed to summit fever, but were doing right by America. (Ronald Reagan Library) Reagan and Gorbachev squaring off in the Hofdi House hallway on what Reagan called “one of