Sandy Hill[1] used the closing bonfire at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert to incinerate some memories from her fateful climb of Mount Everest in 1996.
Hill, the ex-wife of iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, barely survived a storm that claimed the lives of eight others who had reached the summit.
Pittman posted on Instagram[2] that she brought more than 200 kata — “Buddhist prayer shawls that had been given to me by celebrants and mourners” after the Everest disaster — and tied them to the huge wooden temple that was torched.
“The burning of these kata is, to me, an act of freeing and celebrating a lifetime of memories for which I am deeply grateful,” Hill wrote. Some memories of 1996 are painful.
Jon Krakauer, a fellow survivor, criticized Hill as a diva in “Into Thin Air[3],” his best-selling memoir. But Anatoli Boukreev, a guide who helped save her life, co-authored a rebuttal book called “The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest[4].”
References
- ^ Sandy Hill (nypost.com)
- ^ posted on Instagram (www.instagram.com)
- ^ Into Thin Air (www.amazon.com)
- ^ The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (www.amazon.com)