Sri Lankan mountaineer Johann Peries, who has climbed six of the Seven Summits, is preparing for another attempt at Mount Aconcagua.
\n\n"Because it is there," British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory had famously replied when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. Noell Odell, a member of the doomed 1924 expedition, last saw Mallory and fellow climber Sandy Irvine, not far from the peak, and "going strongly."
\n\nMallory's body was found only in 1999, and even today it's not clear he and Irvine reached the peak about 30 years before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.
\n\nWhen I asked Johann Peries, who has climbed Mount Everest and the highest peaks in North America, Europe, Africa, Antarctica and Oceania, with only Mount Aconcagua in South America to reach before he joins the elite set of about 400 people who have done the Seven Summits, why he attempts to do the impossible and often succeeds, he said: "It is to challenge myself."
\n\nAlso a "hair stylist," Peries said, almost conversationally: "At the beginning it was about Everest. I am from Sri Lanka, a tropical island. I wanted to see if I, who had spent most of his life close to the…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/world
