If so, then mountaineering stands above the rest, as the most famous peaks are also those littered with the most bodies. So why do people keep doing it? Because it affords opportunities for inhuman displays of badassery. Like ...

Ernest Hemingway once said, "There are only three sports: Bull fighting, motor racing and mountaineering; the rest are merely games." The point being, Hemingway only thought it qualified as a sport if there was a good chance the sport would murder you at some point.

5 Hermann Buhl vs. Nanga Parbat

Via gore-ljudje, Wikipedia

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The Mountain:

Nanga Parbat in Pakistan is five miles straight up -- 26,660 feet to be exact. It's also known as "Killer Mountain" because up until 1990, 77 percent of the climbers who attempted to climb Nanga Parbat died trying. Just to be clear, they didn't just fail to reach the top, the mountain punished them with murder for even attempting it.

Via Jon Martin

"Please keep your hands and feet away from the mountain."

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The Man:

Hermann Buhl was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and had taken up climbing in the Alps as a teenager first as a hobby, then as an obsession. In winter, he'd walk around with snowballs in his hands in order to toughen them up for his next trip. He eventually became a mountaineering guide, and then in 1953, Buhl heard about the mountain that had already killed 31 climbers (with and no successful summits) and said, "Yep, that's the one. I'm climbing that."

Via lecturasinquietantes

"I'm not even going to get up."

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And ... Fight!

The expedition's main problem was the fact that it was 1953. At that time, there had been very few attempts or successful climbs of mountains that high, so no one knew much about the lethal effects of the thin air at those altitudes. Climbers, for instance, didn't know that future generations would label everything 26,000 feet and higher "The Death Zone" because the human body literally can't survive for more than a couple of days.

After suffering through bad weather and organization, Hermann Buhl and the rest of the summit party got the green light to ascend to a camp at 22,600 feet. From there they would climb to the summit the next day. They woke at 1 a.m., but Buhl's partner wasn't feeling well, so Buhl decided that was fine, he would just go alone.