All 28 Uses of
vertical
in
Into Thin Air
- Four hundred vertical feet above, where the summit was still washed in bright sunlight under an immaculate cobalt sky, my companions dallied to memorialize their arrival at the apex of the planet, unfurling flags and snapping photos, using up precious ticks of the Clock.†
Chpt 1
- With Tenzing nervously paying out rope from below, Hillary wedged himself into a cleft between the rock buttress and a fin of vertical snow at its edge, then began to inch his way up what would thereafter be known as the Hillary Step.†
Chpt 2
- Near the southern tip of South America, where the wind sweeps the land like "the broom of God"-'Vaescoba de Dios, " as the locals say-I'd scaled a frightening, mile-high spike of vertical and overhanging granite called Cerro Torre; buffeted by hundred-knot winds, plastered with frangible atmospheric time, it was once (though no longer) thought to be the world's hardest mountain.†
Chpt 3
- Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a dapper, genteel publisher from Hong Kong, had attempted Everest three times with one of Hall's competitors; in 1994 he'd gotten all the way to the South Summit, just 330 vertical feet below the top.†
Chpt 3
- The spectacularly fluted ice pinnacles of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru pierced the sky more than two vertical miles above.†
Chpt 4
- At 20,500 feet, the altitude was deemed too high for safe evacuation by helicopter ... so he would have to be carried 3,000 vertical feet to Base Camp down the Khumbu Icefall,
Chpt 4 *vertical = up and down
- Rob announced that on April 13, acclimatization sorties would occur the first of these was a one-day round-trip to Camp One, perched on the uppermost brow of the Khumbu Icefall, a vertical half mile above.†
Chpt 6
- As the glacier inched over humps and dips in the Cum's underlying strata, it fractured into countless vertical fissures-crevasses.†
Chpt 6
- They typically have vertical or even overhanging passages that demand considerable expertise with ice ax and crampons.†
Chpt 6
- Following the fixed line, I Meandered through a vertical maze of crystalline blue stalagmites.†
Chpt 7
- As massive as a twelve-story building, it loomed over our heads, leaning 30 degrees past vertical.†
Chpt 7
- At the appointed hour only Rob, Frank Fischbeck, John 34 Taske, Doug Hansen, and I had arrived at Camp One; Yasuko Namba, Stuart Hutchison, Beck Weathers, and Lou Kasischke, escorted by guides Mike Groom and Andy Harris, were within 200 vertical feet of the camp when Rob got on the radio and turned everybody around.†
Chpt 7
- From there Wilson started ascending the slopes leading up to the North Col, getting as high as 22,700 feet before a vertical ice cliff proved too much for him and he was forced to retreat back to the site of Shipton's cache.†
Chpt 8
- At first light on Thursday, April 18, by which time the sky had cleared, we gathered our belongings and embarked for Camp Two, four miles and 1,700 vertical feet above.†
Chpt 8
- The summit, however, was still a vertical mile above, wreathed in a nimbus of gale-borne condensation.†
Chpt 11
- The top of Everest, two vertical miles above, seemed so impossibly distant that I tried to limit my thoughts to Camp Two, our destination for the day.†
Chpt 11
- Geran Kropp, the Swedish soloist, had ascended to within 350 vertical feet of top on May 3, but he hadn't bothered to put in any ropes at all.†
Chpt 13
- A little higher, seemingly no more than a stone's throw away, was the vertical gash of the Hillary Step, and slightly behind guides Andy Harris, Neal Beiyond that the summit itself.†
Chpt 13
- One of the most famous pitches in all of mountaineering, its forty feet of near-vertical rock and ice looked daunting, but-as any serious climber would-I'd wanted very badly to take the "sharp end" of the rope and lead the Step.†
Chpt 13
- At 6:30, as the last of the daylight seeped from the sky, I'd descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four.†
Chpt 14
- Although they were moving slowly, they had descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four.†
Chpt 15
- Although a strong climber might require three hours to ascend 1,000 vertical feet, in this case the distance was over more or less flat terrain, which the group would have been able to cover in perhaps fifteen minutes had they known where the tents were.†
Chpt 15
- I realized, however, that if he hadn't turned left but instead continued straight down the gully-which would have been easy to do in the whiteout even if one wasn't exhausted and stupid with altitude sickness-he would have quickly come to the westernmost edge of the Col. Below, the steep gray ice of the Lhotse Face dropped 4,000 vertical feet to the floor of the Western Cum.†
Chpt 16
- But when they got to the top of the Hillary Step, Hall couldn't get Hansen down the 40-foot vertical drop, and their progress ground to a halt Shortly before 5:00, Groom finally managed to get through to Hall and communicate that there actually was oxygen at the South Summit.†
Chpt 17
- On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen's body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end.†
Chpt 17
- As astounding and courageous as Boukreev's rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground; Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four-an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the best of circumstances.†
Chpt 17
- Leaving their high camp at 27,230 feet as a party of six, the Ladakhis did not get away from their tents until 5:45 A.M.* By midafternoon, still more than a thousand vertical feet below the top, they To avoid confusion, all times quoted in this chapter have been converted to Nepal time, even though the events I describe occurred in Tibet.†
Chpt 18
- An hour later we arrived atop the Yellow Band, and a bottleneck ensued as each climber cautiously descended the vertical limestone cliff.†
Chpt 20
Definition:
-
(vertical) oriented straight up and down
(When you are standing, you could be thought of as vertical. When lying down, you could be thought of as horizontal.)