Why do men and women continue to risk their lives climbing? The world of the high peaks, dazzling in its snow and ice, shows us something of the grandeur and beauty of nature, but it is also a place of risk and danger. As we have read recently, for every six climbers who have reached the summit of Mount Everest, one has died. On K2, the world's second highest mountain, the death rate is higher. Why do we climb?

This question has been around for a long time.

In response to the question, "Why try to climb Mt. Everest?" George Leigh-Mallory, the great English mountaineer who died climbing that peak, said, "Because it is there." Afterwards, a New York Times writer covering the story wrote: "It is the necessity of human nature that practical records should be broken; and to affect the inability to understand why men are irresistibly attracted to the chance of doing something first or going somewhere first, is a waste of time. They are built that way, and to the very impulse that rules them the world is enormously indebted."

James Ramsey Ullman, who wrote many books about mountaineering, explained that it is not just we non-climbers who wonder why. The climbers themselves examine their hearts and minds, searching for the motives that drive them on - and up. We can never know the whole answer, he thought, any more than we can know why we "listen to music or look up at the stars. But this much we do know about ourselves - and this much the Everesters know about their own adventure - that the supreme and most precious moments of human living, however much they may appear to depend on the body and the senses, are primarily experiences of the spirit. The men who try to climb Everest are aspiring, consecrated men. If we understand that we understand their exploits."

And Evan Connell, in a less solemn vein, wrote about adventurers that "certain people do not travel the way most of us travel; not only do they sometimes choose odd vehicles, they take dangerous and unusual trips for incomprehensible reasons."

The great books of exploration, discovery and survival always leave us wondering about the peculiarities - and the glories - of the human spirit. The English explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who went to Antarctica with Scott, wrote as the first lines of his book, THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD:"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." And he too takes up the question why. "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things: regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried [in my book] to tell how, and when and where? But why. That is a mystery."

Edward Burlingame, former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Harper & Row, is Publisher of The Adventure Library in North Salem, New York, a book club offering its members specially edited and printed new editions of the classics of high adventure.

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