If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end [goal] of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.—George Leigh Mallory (1886-1924), English mountaineer

On the mountain, people become better. You are closer to God and paradise.—Ulrich Inderbinen, Swiss mountain guide at 103 years old


If you're going to climb a mountain, you have to have the feeling that it's worth dying for. If you're going to climb any mountain—the mountain of this life, the mountain of accomplishment, the mountain of obstacles, of difficulty—it has to be worth braving wind and cold and storm, symbolic of adversities. But alone on the mountaintop, you feel so close to God. His voice is so loud it's almost like it's thundering. You get a real "high" on top of a mountain. It's a thrill!—David Brandt Berg (1919-1994