Free Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom

main vent has been dormant for eons and has become a dead, icy caldera. A caldera is formed when the magma chamber under the volcano has spent most of its contents and the ground above collapses downward. An unusually large crater, often more than a mile across, is formed. There is a small hole in the deep ice at the bottom of the Fumu’s dormant caldera, in the winter it is about the size of an obese man’s waist, and in the summer it becomes the size of an American football gridiron. The hole has been deemed “The Oculus” by explorers. A blasting sub-zero wind seems to rise out of the Oculus itself and blow up the walls of the caldera’s bowl on all sides. The wind has been known to throw equipment and unsuspecting humans off of their perch along the caldera’s lip. It is because of this ever-blowing arctic menace that the dead caldera – the four-mile-in-diameter bowl around the Oculus - has been given the nickname “The Icy Bellows.”
    An Earth scientist from the University of Bedlam named Randy Felcher believes that Fumu was once three times her current size. According to Felcher’s theory, two-thirds of her width was blown off sideways about 50 million years ago by a pyroclastic event that plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter likely lasting for decades. That is why the lip of the Icy Bellows is not consistent in altitude all the way around; the eruption did not do a clean job of severing off the top of the mountain. The current summit of Fumu is actually the southernmost point on the lip. But then the lip erratically drops from its greatest height of approximately 30, 121 feet down to its lowest point of 18,330 feet in the north. When one looks at Fumu from Everest in the north, one sees a peak in the distance with two ridges fanning out from it to the east and to the west. Then like a pair of curved staircases, the ridges come back around, descending toward you and downward, curving back toward each other, and ultimately they meet each other at the bottom to create the lowest point on the lip of the Icy Bellows. Many Nepalese Sherpa who have traveled in the high elevations north of Fumu call the mountain “The Childless Mother,” with the summit as her head and the two descending ridges as cradling arms holding nothing at all.
    Although the main vent between the ridges has long been dead, that does not mean Fumu is dormant. Small eruptions like the one that killed Zach Hoover continue to occur from smaller vents along the ridgelines and especially at the summit. If the mountain were momentarily transparent, you would be able to see vents wending their way to and fro but always upward, some reaching the surface and others coming to dead ends of high pressure. Some of the veins reaching for the surface look bloody, swollen with lava, almost living, like leaves of red chard. Others carry only steam, water, and gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid. Others hold nothing at all but darkness.
    It is hard to think of a better metaphor for strength and immobility than a mountain. But in the case of Fumu, the metaphor breaks. Fumu is in motion from bottom to top. Running down between the spurs near her base are glaciers that can be heard by the human ear as they plod downward. Creaks and loud snapping sounds echo through crevasses, often accompanied by the sound of ponderous ice chunks dropping into subterranean water. Between the glaciers and at approximately the same elevation (10,000-12,000 feet) is the scree. Needless to say, the scree is no monument to stability. New chunks of fresh lava rock and pulverized granite tumble down the mountain to feed its size every day. And every day, older rocks tumble off of it into the glaciers to be slowly pulverized into oblivion. Above the scree one comes to the two main ridges on the north rising up to the summit on the south. The Icy Bellows between the ridges includes ever-moving snowdrifts, sloshing slowly from east to west like cold broth in a bowl on a