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Informationen zum Autor Roger Hart is a former research professor at the College of Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and was a member of the first American expedition to Mount Everest. He has worked as an exploration geophysicist in the rainforests of Ecuador and Brazil, had a glacier named after him in Antarctica, has lived and traveled in more than forty countries, and has appeared on numerous radio talk shows and television programs. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, Sunset Magazine, and Oregon Coast Magazine. He currently lives on the Oregon coast. Klappentext The Route Tracker CHAPTER T Leseprobe Chapter One: The Route Tracker At last the meaning of these events is clear. I set out eager -- yes, brash -- in youth to explore polar ice caps, tangled jungles, and snow-clad mountains. I had visited every continent save one by the age of nineteen; I had a glacier in Antarctica named after me by the age of twenty. Then strange events in Tibet, Tierra del Fuego, Morocco, India, turned my course from explorer to scientist. I sought after the ultimate understanding of how our consciousness participates in the creation of reality. This is the adventure I share with you now -- an adventure that changed my view of the world. My story begins, when I was twenty-one, on an expedition to Mount Everest. Tibetan legend says Buddhist monks from the Rongbuk Monastery take the form of ravens and fly among the snowcapped Himalayas. If this is true, then they must have seen us on May 29, 1962, four black specks perched precariously in the glare of horrendous ice cliffs on the North Face. We climbed without bottled oxygen, without porters, too exhausted to think straight. Woody Sayre, first on the rope, laboriously kicked footholds; Norman Hansen, twenty feet below, struggled under the weight of his pack; lower still, Hans Peter Duttle gasped for breath. I brought up the rear, bent over my ice ax, heaving long breaths, eight of them for each step. I heard a sharp report on the North Peak. I twisted my body to the right and focused on massive edifices of ice that had broken free, toppled, and now were careening down the slopes below the rocky peak. They shattered into pieces on a ledge, leapt free, and floated silently in thin air. The roar arrived after the vision of impact, like thunder after lightning. The chunks of ice splashed down, picked up speed, cascaded through a network of cracks, and trickled out onto white fans at the base of the rock face. The hood of my parka reverberated steadily in the incessant wind. Slowly, one foot after the other, I kicked into the soft snow. Kick, step, then eight breaths leaning on my ice ax. Kick, step, eight breaths. The rhythm became a monotonous dirge. Norman and Hans Peter advanced even more slowly than I, and the rope in front hung limp over the sticky snow. Above and to my left, clouds streaming north from Nepal slipped past the colossal prow of Everest's main peak. When I leaned back to study the clouds, they seemed to stop moving and the black hull of Everest plunged away from me, throwing me off balance. I threw up my arms, plunged my ice ax up to its hilt, and grabbed hold. Don't look up, focus on the steps, I told myself. With only ice slopes and white clouds above us, it seemed as though the North Col, the ridge between the two peaks of Everest, was just over the next rise. To my oxygen-starved brain, it seemed as if we would never get there. As we struggled upward, the slope became steeper with a two-hundred-foot drop straight to crevasses, yawning gashes in the ice, ready to swallow whatever fell from above. Seven Tibetans of the mountain Sherpa tribe, acting as porters for the British, had died here in an avalanche in 1922. The snow is firm, unlikely to give way, I thought to myself. It was wishful thinking, since there ...
