Mick Conefrey > Quotes

“Kangchenjunga is something more than unfriendly, it is imbued with a blind unreasoning hatred towards the mountaineer.”
― Mick Conefrey, The Last Great Mountain: The First Ascent of Kangchenjunga

“British climbers were driven as much by the fear of shame as they were by the lure of fame and glory. 4”
― Mick Conefrey, Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent

“K2 had been climbed, not conquered.”
― Mick Conefrey, The Ghosts of K2: The Epic Saga of the First Ascent

“Fritz was looking forward to the challenge but in the end he was given something much more testing: a huge storm. For eight days Camp 4 was savaged by high winds and freezing temperatures. Fritz had survived similar storms on Nanga Parbat in 1932, but the others had never experienced anything like this. When the expedition chronicler George Sheldon wrote an article about their attempt on K2 six months later, the strange mixture of terror and monotony was still vivid in his mind: We would lie in our sleeping bags swathed in several sets of underwear, wind-suits, boots, gloves and hats. At any moment we expected to be blown into nearby Tibet. We had nothing to read except the labels on the food cans. A meal became an event of tremendous importance… the eternal banging and cracking of the tent, in the seventy-mile-an-hour gale, made us virtually psychopathic”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“in true mountaineering, the summit is not everything, it is only part.16”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“He had died in silence as he had lived,’ wrote expedition photographer Mario Fantin, ‘almost tip-toeing out of life in order not to disturb the people in the tent next to him.’1”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“As ever, the challenge was not just to get high on the mountain, but to haul up hundreds of kilos of supplies and equipment and set up a ladder of camps to the summit.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“Irvine’s spirit said, ‘came drowsiness and peace; and after that freedom, but some call it death.”
― Mick Conefrey, Fallen: George Mallory: The Man, The Myth and the 1924 Everest Tragedy

“Deep down everyone suspected that Art was unlikely to survive for more than a few days and that any rescue attempt would endanger them all, but what were the alternatives? Abandon him? Stay and watch him die?”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“Europe’s ranges looked Lilliputian in comparison. Eckenstein’s men crossed vast glaciers, covered in huge rocks, riven by streams up to 100 ft wide. In Switzerland a typical glacier might culminate with a rocky terminal moraine a few hundred feet high, but here, according to Crowley, some of them soared up to 1500 ft.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“It might sound strange, it might sound irrational, but in extraordinary situations people often behave in extraordinary ways. Elaborate conspiracy theories are just an attempt to bring order to the chaos of life. Reality is frequently much stranger.”
― Mick Conefrey, The Ghosts of K2: The Epic Saga of the First Ascent

“He was appalled to see the expedition so casually misreported. Like everyone else in the team, Hunt thought that the issue of who had stepped on the summit first was absurd but he was also irked by repeated references to Tenzing “having guided” the British team. The Everest victory was the result of teamwork and everyone had played a role.”
― Mick Conefrey, Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent

“Down at the end, alone, detached from all the other mountains soared up K2, the indisputable sovereign of the region, gigantic and solitary, hidden from human sight by innumerable ranges, jealously defended by a vast throng of vassal peaks, protected from invasion by miles and miles of glaciers. Even to get within sight of it demands so much contrivance, so much marching, such a sum of labour.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“pinned down by a ferocious storm which”
― Mick Conefrey, The Last Great Mountain: The First Ascent of Kangchenjunga

“I felt that all my previous life had reached a climax in these hours of intense struggle against nature… in those minutes at 26,000 feet on K2, I reached depths of feeling which I can never reach again.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“The concept of ‘acceptable risk’ was, of course, at the heart of the argument.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“Each man needed about 2 lbs of flour a day to make chapattis. Over the course of ten days, that meant 500 men would consume around 10 tons. In”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“This was a key moment in the expedition. In years to come, the crack would become known as ‘House’s Chimney’, K2’s equivalent of the ‘Hillary Step’ on Everest. Future generations of climbers would marvel at the skill, and guts, of the man who first climbed it.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain

“Instead of the monotonous horizons of the far north, all the landscape around K2 has the richest variety of design, the greatest majesty of form and an infinite diversity of plane and perspective… The scale is far too vast for one to receive an impression of the whole at once. The eye can only take in single portions.”
― Mick Conefrey, Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain