Fay Manners and Michelle Dvorak were perched high on the snowy face of a Himalayan mountain when disaster struck their quest to become the first to summit its peak. At more than 6,000 meters (about 20,000 feet) above sea level, a falling rock sliced through the rope carrying Manners’ bag, leaving the climbers stranded in the inhospitable wilderness without vital supplies including their tent, stove, food, crampons and ice axes. “All I can really remember is just seeing the bag go down the mountain and being really shocked, thinking, ‘How has this happened? Like, what’s going on?’” But for both climbers, their immediate reaction wasn’t fear for their safety or survival – it was devastation that their mission, which required painstaking preparation, training, and altitude acclimatization, was being cut short when they were so close to their goal. Manners, a Briton living in France, and Dvorak, an American, had been…
