“Things are falling apart.” – Emily Harrington
Exploration is not dead. More so, the most basic of instincts, the will to live, breathes on.
Trains off tracks. Town arrest. Sketchy motorcycles. Shitty drivers. An enchanting yet unforgiving jungle laden with bamboo spikes. Non-existent infrastructure. 1,245 by planes, trains, and automobiles (and foot). And that’s only to get to base camp.
“We’re on an adventure,”Hilaree O’Neill says. “And I think that’s what got me started on expeditions in the first place — just this excitement for the unknown.”
What exactly is this adventure? As I wrote before:
An exploration to the furthest (and highest) reaches of Myanmar, in an outlandish attempt to measure the peak of Hkakabo Razi, an adventure executed by none other than the who’s who of outdoor pursuits: expedition leader Hilaree O’Neill, author Mark Jenkins, photographer Cory Richards, videographer Renan Ozturk, and climber Emily Harrington.
Towards the end, when, as Emily describes, “things are falling apart,” we see the intangibles of such expeditions.
“I’m scared,” Cory admits with the summit in their sights. “I think it’s fucked up. I think we’re putting it too far out there.”
He continues, “It does look close — but what’s close? Close has always been relative on this thing.”
So they turn around. But even having resigned themselves to an unfinished goal, they still have challenges ahead.
“I’m worked,” Cory goes on. “I’m done. And we still have two weeks of walking through the jungle… so fucked up.”
However, in spite of Cory’s seemingly defeated spirits, he and the team appreciate the enormity of what they did accomplish.
“I know that in traditional terms of success as far as getting to the summit and hurrahing and getting our GPS point it wasn’t successful,” Hilaree intimates. “But it was real.”
“Full stripping down of all veneers,” she finishes, “and the most stretched out and beaten down I have ever been.”
“We got what we came for,” Jenkins concedes. “Fair enough.”
So it goes.
Read Mark Jenkin’s first hand account on National Geographic. And for more photographs, check out the gallery.
