Cory Richards was about to attempt an unclimbed route up the seventh-highest mountain in the world when he realized he needed to stop before he started. He was crying uncontrollably in his tent at base camp. The world was so loud, he said, it was as if he was standing between two freight trains going in opposite directions. “I might actually die and that is really exciting to me,” Richards, 40, recalls thinking in early April as he looked up 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri, in west-central Nepal. Two days from the nearest village and alarmed by his deteriorating mental health, he reached out to his therapist back home.

Source: New York Times July 11, 2021 21:56 UTC