"Because it's there."

In 1926, English mountaineer, George Mallory, was asked by the British press, "why do you climb Mount Everest?" George uttered the three most famous words in the mountaineering world, "because it's there." What's there? The top of the world.

Bordered by Tibet, Nepal and China, Mount Everest, known by the local Sherpa population as Chomolangma "Goddess Mother of Snows" is the world's highest point above sea level at 29,035 feet (8,850 meters). To put those numbers into perspective, that is 5 and a half miles high, 21 Empire State Buildings stacked upon one another and an elevation slightly below passenger jet air traffic.

Everest is stunningly beautiful from base camp at 17,000. It's the next 12,000 feet of climbing to the summit that is cruelly hazardous that will either kill you, maim you for life or grant you a stay of execution. It is a frozen, icy, mercurial, windy, treacherous and painful environment. Above 28,000 feet, the climber enters the "death zone." Oxygen is 2/3 thinner than at sea level. Hypoxia takes over the body. Your brain malfunctions and brain cells die. And one misstep on an ice edge or an abrupt weather change will quickly imprint you as another expired figure on the mountain landscape forever...frozen in time.

Such is the story of George Mallory in his attempt to be the first man to ascend Mount Everest in May of 1926. Mallory along with his companion Sandy Irvine died that May on their attempt of Everest. 73 years later, Mallory's preserved and frozen corpse was found by fellow mountaineers below the summit in 1999. Did he summit? That is debatable. Some say yes while others say no. 27 years later, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, ascended the summit in May of 1953 as the first men on "top of the world." They returned to earth with Kodak pictures as proof of their success. Mallory's camera was never recovered.

When the month of May rolls around, a fairly benign time to climb Everest before the summer monsoon season begins, I always think of those intrepid some would say foolhardy folks who attempt to replicate Hillary and Norgay's achievement and avoid Mallory's fate on Everest. At this very moment, there are scores of teams at base camp awaiting their window of opportunity to summit. Vicariously, I follow their fascinating blog dispatches of their expeditions on-line. Each year about 150 mountaineers, who pay $50,000 each for the priviledge, ascend Everest. Of those, 5 will die on average. In 1996, Everest claimed 15 climbers in the deadliest season on record. Most of those who die, die early ladder crossing the bottomless ice canyons of the Khumba Ice Falls.

I, like the British media asking of Mallory in 1926, too ask why in 2011? Why do this? Is this desire and act of personal adventure the height of selfishness? What about those you left behind? Isn't the risk too great versus the reward? See, since I ask those questions, I will never be moved to summit Everest. I don't have "IT". But when I have the chance, I do want to see Everest from base camp and marvel at its might and then maybe I'll understand somewhat Mallory's pithy riposte of why, "because it's there."