Summit Quotes

No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .

I regard taking healthy sea level adapted children to the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea as a form of child abuse.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Based on the medical evidence that clearly states that being above 10,000 feet is hazardous to the health of sea level adapted humans, it is clear that all of the manned facilities on top of the 13,796 feet Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii should be removed and the summit restored back to its native environment.

When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.

At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.

I saw a guy faint at the W. M. Keck Observatory, he stepped out from the tour group and said to me "I'm feeling sick" and then his eyes rolled back and his knees gave way! The group caught him on his way to the ground and he got free emergency medical oxygen for half an hour before being evacuated off the summit by his tour group!!! His friends stated that he was considered the healthiest person in the group while he was gasping for breaths of life on the summit of Mauna Kea! Never saw him again.

The summit of Mauna Kea was definitely a place where it was better to be a hard to replace skilled engineer than an easy to replace technician. It was my experience that once you had developed Mauna Kea Sickness that the management team would blatantly harass you out of your job using nasty inhumane human resources techniques.

I consider myself fortunate that I spent three years working at 7,775 feet before spending five years working at 13,796 feet on the summit of Mauna Kea. I can only wonder how much more severe my long term very high altitude sickness could have been without the initial adaptation to the lower altitude.