Mount Everest Climbing Expedition

[Travel Guru]

I want to climb Mount Everest so badly. i doubt that my body could handle it, but just imagine how cool it would be to go on a climbing expedition at Mount Everest in Tibet/ China. That would be so cool! I have been lucky enough to climb a few mountains in America and Europe, but I have never gone mountain climbing in Asia, much less anything like Mount Everest! Here's some information I found on it:

It’s a graceful, gentle mountain, even though it occasionally keeps some of us forever. In return, Everest offers the lucky rest of us a tremendous insight in ourselves and the human kind; as we and our fellow climbers are tried in brutally exposing situations. Everest also reveals the true soul of nature, in all it’s beauty, temper and might. Everest shows you the grace of great dreams, fears overcome and, sometimes, triumph following the most desperate of outlooks. This lesson is perhaps Everest’s most powerful gift to all of us: whether we are on the summit, or wandering by its foot, or simply at home, gaining the knowledge by the testimony of others.

Mount Everest is literally located at the top of the world, rising 29,035 feet (8850 meters) above sea level. As soon as it was crowned the world's tallest mountain, people inevitably had to climb it. And just as inevitably, many of them failed. While more than 2,200 people have succeeded, nearly 200 have lost their lives attempting the climb. Everest hasn't always been considered the king of mountains. It wasn't until 1852 that a Bengali mathematician and surveyor named Radhanath Sikhdar determined that "Peak XV" was actually the highest point on the earth. In 1865, Sikhdar's discovery was confirmed. India's Surveyor General Sir Andrew Waugh renamed the mountain Mount Everest after Sir George Everest, the previous Surveyor General and the person overseeing the original survey that listed "Peak XV."

Mount Everest, rising 8,850m (29,035ft) above sea level reigns as the highest mountain on Earth. For decades summitting Everest has been considered one of the greatest mountaineering achievements. In the spring of each year, we embrace this intense challenge by taking a group of qualified climbers to Nepal to climb Mt. Everest via the South Col route. The South Col was the first successfully climbed route on Mt. Everest as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay accomplished this feat in 1953. Since then, the South Col has seen over 2,000 ascents. It is by far, the most successfully climbed route on the mountain.

Essential equipment: Oxygen canisters: five to seven 3l bottles; a sack to collect ice and snow, for melting; and wet wipes for washing your body. These freeze, so you need to sleep with them inside your tent if they're going to be of any use. You'll also need a satellite phone, a two-way radio and some foot powder.

Using state-of-the-art technology Professor Brad Washburn of the Boston Museum of Science, the world's foremost mountain cartographer, and his team have calculated that earth's highest elevation is actually 7 feet higher than the previous record. That makes the official height 29,035 ft/8850m. Thanks to some engineering whizzes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed really light, high-tech gear, the work of Washburn was made easier because he was able to hand carry a radar device to the top of Everest where it could be positioned to measure the actual height of the mountain - underneath all that snow. GPS technology was also deployed near the summit, which uses satellite signal relays to take readings from the top of Everest. After months of crunching numbers Washburn's team arrived at the new, official world-record elevation.

I sure would like to go on a Mount Everest climbing expedition some day!