“We took the customary summit photos and ate some chocolate. I felt the usual anti-climax. What now? It was a vicious circle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it’s not long before you’re conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious – a bit more dangerous. I didn’t like the thought of where it might be leading me. As if, in some strange way, the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical but frightening conclusion; it always unsettled me, this moment of reaching the summit, this sudden stillness and quiet after the storm, which gave me time to wonder what I was doing and sense a niggling doubt that perhaps I was inexorably losing control – was I here purely for pleasure or was it egotism? Did I really want to come back for more? But these moments were also good times, and I knew that the feelings would pass. Then I could excuse them as morbid pessimistic fears that had no sound basis.” Joe Simpson.

These lines are included in the text because they are true for Joe. They reveal that Joe, doesn’t know whats next for him. The journey was better for him than reaching the summit. Even though the summit was the end goal, the journey was the hard work that was the real success. This is why for him, he doesn’t know to the extent of what he’ll do to experience the rush of adrenaline and risk in future mountains he choose’s to climb. His feelings are pointing him in the direction of harder climbs but he’s stopping to think if he’s being controlled. During the climb up the mountain Joe was scared and nervous but once it’s finished he’s showing that he wants it back, he wants to feel those things again. He wants to feel the risk, the scariness and then feel the success when he’s overcome it. This reveals that the ‘dangerous men’ have a need to do this. For them the life-threatening situations they’re in, then surviving through them is addictive. They have a need to do more, to increase the challenge each time they complete. It hints a message that it doesn’t stop. They will always feel compelled to do more, complete more because they’ll never be fully satisfied with the incredible things they’ve already done. The message from the text is an infinity extent. For Joe, he feels the loss when he reached the top, knowing the journeys over. Which is why he wants more. The feeling they get is testing their personal extents.