Alex Lowe Quotes

It's really impressive what those like Messner and Walter Bonatti have done - they are a big part of the history of alpinism.

Climbing has so much more culture than all other activities put together. There is no culture in tennis, just a few names, a few dates. No big culture in soccer. But we have thousands of books, great philosophers, thinkers, painters.

I want to solve a climbing problem in the mountains, not in the sporting goods store.

I climb mountains.

I spent the night on a sliver of rock high up on the east face of Long's Peak, climbing with Tom Frost, and slept at the icy feet of the Dru, listening to the lightning crack above me and the thunder roll down. I only did it to write about it. I would never go up on the Grotto Wall for fun.

I've climbed in a lot of places, but only once in the U.K., at Stanage Edge in the Peak District.

I am immediately disinterested when I hear mountain-climbing stories.

Climbing, for me, is all about solving the magnitude of the problem. The best projects are the ones with big question marks hanging over them.

I happily claim expertise in no single aspect of climbing, which is what has kept the passion burning hot all these years.

I've loved mountains since I was a girl, and when I discovered mountaineering fiction after college, I was hooked.

The best climbers no longer go to the 8000ers, but to the most difficult mountains in the world which are 6000 or 7000-meter-peaks. There they find any kind of playground. But it is a pity that the really good climbers have fewer opportunities to finance their expeditions because so much attention is taken away by the Everest tourists.

It lasted but a year of two, till all the routes were done. The pace so fast that most forgot that climbing could be fun.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

The experienced mountain climber is not intimidated by a mountain - he is inspired by it.

I saw a mountain. I wanted to climb it.

Everest has a special place in all of our imaginations. For centuries, Everest was a little bit like the moon. It was the place where everyone wanted to go. Empires wanted to be able to say that they were the first to put a climber on top of Everest. So when a tragedy happens up on that mountain, I think it has a global resonance. Everybody's heard of Everest. Everybody knows what Everest is and what it means, and the significance.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said Because it is there. Well, space is there, and were going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

The real, in all this efforts, is that we climb just for climbing.

I've always been a big fan of the Yeti, simply because I have an affiliation to Everest - who was the New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy that conquered it.

Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing

You want to climb the mountain because it’s there and you know you can do it.

The people that first climbed Mt. Everest weren't scientists, right, they were adventurers. If you're an adventurer, you want to go yourself. It's different than a scientist, who is simply wanting to learn.

Because it is there [famous explanation for wanting to climb Mount Everest].

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

Do you think the people who were trying to reach to the Everest were not full of doubts? For a hundred years, how many people tried and how many people lost their lives? Do you know how many people never came back? But, still, people come from all over the world, risking, knowing they may never return. For them it is worth it - because in the very risk something is born inside of them: the center. It is born only in the risk. That's the beauty of risk, the gift of risk.