Snow Days in the Southwest

As I've been telling everyone that I meet in a five-mile radius who doesn't looks like a secretly plotting rapist, I loved Miracle in the Andes, almost as much as I loved the movie Alive. Actually, honestly, much more so. I've realized that I love anything that includes crashes, certain death, a surgery scene, and a hopeful tune somewhere in the middle, that sounds like "We're gonna die/Shoo-bop-shoo-wa/But I'm gonna get us out of this situation with total craziness and moxy/Shoo-bop-do-wa-wa..." And so on. I don't know why tragedy has to be set to 50's style pop. I guess it doesn't. I'm sure that there are some tragedy-narrative fans who hear the hopeful tune, as sung by Hank Williams or Sarah McLachlan or maybe even Fifty Cent.

Anyway, after this, I've been obsessed with moutain climbing. So, of course, I've been rabidly following the developments of the three (now two) missing climbers on Mt. Hood. If I could have a secret earpiece with five-minutely updates, I totally would, but so far as yet, the CIA and Madonna have been unwilling to lease me this technology, so I'm stuck with Internet updates. Until I got to Russell's parents house in Arizona and was blessed with the semi-miracle of cable TV. Ahh, news. Ahh, Discovery channel.

Which is how I became hooked on another climbing-related fix: the show Everest: Beyond the Limit. Last night, there were lots of frostbitten toes and fingers (some of which had to be removed), egos the size of the mountain that refused to descend even when they were running out of oxygen and falling asleep in the snow, and most disturbingly of all, climbers who had given up and laid down on the sides of the trails at Everest's summit to die. The climbers descending have to pass these climbers, sometimes still breathing, and instead of being able to do anything about it, they have to keep descending. Because the sad truth of it is, those people laying down can't be carried and won't get up and walk.

Even freakier? Because the summit of Everest is 29,000+ feet, there's no mold or heat and thus, the bodies don't decay. So one climber relayed the surrealness of climbing the summit and seeing, sometimes near the trail, the dead bodies of past climbers, perfectly preserved, still laying in the snow.