The 12-Hour Walk by Colin O'Brady

Author:Colin O'Brady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

WITH A POSSIBLE MINDSET,

I know that failures are the foundation of my success—winners lose the most.

Scan the QR code

or visit 12hourwalk.com/chapter7

to view a short video that illuminates

the story from this chapter.

8 LIMITING BELIEF: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.”

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.

—STEVE JOBS

I was alone on an icy precipice in the depths of winter in Pakistan at 23,500 feet on K2, the world’s second tallest mountain.

It was forty below—the kind of cold that lets you know what it means to freeze to death. Ripping winds put the windchill at minus-seventy, which made it tough to move, tough to breathe, tough to even think. At these temps, your fingers and toes start to feel like they belong to someone else, if you can even feel them at all.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon. In a couple hours, without the sun, the temperature would drop another twenty degrees.

K2 in “normal” summer climbing conditions is widely considered the world’s most dangerous mountain—one in four climbers who reach the summit fail to make it down alive—but I was a long way from normal. I was out to climb K2 in winter, a feat that had never been accomplished before this season. In some years, no one even tried, and yet this year there were a couple dozen climbers from several different teams on the mountain hoping to grab what the New York Times called “the last great prize of high-altitude mountaineering.”

A prize like that… it spoke to me. Tell me something is out of reach, and I’ll reach for it anyway, which explains how I came to be alone on that ledge in the Karakoram, battling the mighty K2, unable to take a breath without feeling as though I were being stabbed in the lungs by an icicle.

I’d gone ahead of my two Sherpa climbing partners through the Black Pyramid, a hugely complicated and exposed section of the Abruzzi Spur route. I’d been clipping my harness to old, frayed ropes from seasons past—an admittedly reckless move on my part, but climbing at this level is shot through with risk. The key is to take only calculated risks, and while I knew at that moment I was trusting my life to a ratty old rope, I also knew mixed in with the old ropes were a few sections of new rope that had been fixed by an all-Nepali team of heroic, world-class climbers who’d summited just two weeks earlier, becoming the first to climb K2 in winter and claiming the prize. And yet their success hadn’t diminished my ambition to still reach the top.

Alarmingly, the rope I’d been following suddenly disappeared beneath the hard, windswept snow. I’d been counting on those fixed ropes, so I was stuck. I took a carabiner and clipped my backpack onto the end of the rope and sat down on it to protect me from the frozen ground while I figured out my next move. Despite the fierce winds, the sky was clear. I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.