I've been busy this past week trying to trim down my ThingsToDo list, so I've not been blogging. But there's always time to doomscroll, and while doing so yesterday I saw what looked like a clickbait link to People, which I don't normally visit or monitor.
The link turned out to be a brief but fairly decent summary of Beck Weathers' near-death experience on Mount Everest thirty years ago. Beck was a classmate, neighbor, and friend during my years of postgraduate study in Dallas in the 1970s. Two decades later his adventure -
"... Weathers at one point became temporarily blind from the ice splinters in the air, and opted to wait 400 feet below the summit until his vision cleared... Weathers collapsed and over the next 24 hours, eight other climbers died on the summit. When a Canadian climber found Weathers half-buried in fresh snow the next day, he assumed he was too late. "I thought Weathers was dead," Hutchinson said in an earlier interview, per PEOPLE. "I unburied him and broke the ice off his face.... Weathers ultimately lost his hands and nose to frostbite and underwent 10 reconstructive surgeries in the years that followed..."
- made headlines and was eventually incorporated into the novel and movie Into Thin Air. Beck and I have fallen out of touch over the decades, but it's nice to see that the People article indicates that he is alive and doing well.
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