Cho Oyu

Like maybe he didn't want to shoot for the highest peak quite yet.

And so in 2000, Marco made his first ascent of an 8,000 meter peak, Cho Oyu, which is the sixth highest mountain on earth, which Marco summited again without supplemental oxygen and partly descended on snowboard.

Folks, this was the proof of concept that he needed.

His body could in fact adapt to extreme altitude and He could keep his balance on his snowboard while descending from some of the world's highest peaks.

trip.

I had climbed another 8,000-meter peak called Cho'oyu, not far from there.

And I'd been on Makalu with her a few years earlier, but I didn't make it to the summit.

We were turned around on our attempt to...

Four.

Mount Everest, Hotse, Makalu, and Chihuahua.

That sense of scale is just, it's impossible to convey fully in words.

Wait, four giants of the planet from one spot? That is a fundamentally different experience than EBC.

Um, I'd love to hit a 8,000 meter peak.

Cho Oyu would be my first choice if, if I, you know...

So I've, I've got a lot of dreams.

Um, but, uh, but I love, more than doing that for myself, is I love guiding other people, and I like be- kind of being a cheerleader for them.

And-

It was two places, Kangchenjunga, and the other one was Cho Oyu, which I think they call K2 now.

So he do, he did two very significant, at that time, mountaineering expeditions that were like real, like not just solo, but like, you know, like Sherpas, pack animals, the whole bit.

Mm-hmm.

Some companies like Kalbar and Partner have been running it for years and kind of put it out there as now that Baruntse and Pumori aren't good, as the new Baruntse, Pumori 7,000-meter peak.

And, uh, so there were going to be hundreds of climbers on the mountain this year, and so the big companies sent advance teams to claim their spots on the mountain and to start building their huge infrastructures of dome tents and cook tents that people are becoming accustomed to on mountains like Everest and Cho Oyu and Manaslu, and they're bringing that to mountains like Himlung.

So that's why there were so many workers and no others.

When I first heard the story, I heard the climbers had gone down and the workers were there.

You know, there's...

We have great examples of this, like, uh, in, in the Himalaya even two years ago when Jim Morrison's team pulled off of, uh, Everest North Face after a big storm for a variety of really good reasons.

We were on Cho Oyu at the time.

You know, it was a storm that dropped four meters of snow, 14, 15 feet of snow.

That was something other people did.

Even when I began climbing mountains, even when I did Cho Oyu, which is only 600 meters lower than Everest, it's one of the 14,000 meter peak, um, 14,000ers, I ...

That's feet, not meters.

I hadn't, um ...

I, I, I ...

It was financially out of my comfort zone and everything else.

It just wasn't an option, and it wasn't until I did Cho Oyu that one of my teammates said to me on the walk out, "Squash, I think you're strong enough to climb Mount Everest," and that was the first time I ever saw that maybe I was strong enough to climb Mount Everest.

Because up until that point, I'd said I wasn't, and then I'd never kind of updated my software, and I think we do that a lot.