The First Guys to Summit Denali Did It to Win a 2-Cent Bet

Denali, in Alaska, is the tallest mountain in the United States. In 1906, Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the summit, which would make him the first to do so. However, no one believed him, especially after his photographic proof was identified as a different location (Cook later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole). Alaskan miner Thomas Lloyd was skeptical about Cook’s claims and said he could do better than Cook. The bartender replied,  

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“Tom, you are too old and too fat to climb to the top of Denali.”

There’s nothing that will light a fire under a man like someone telling him he can’t do something. And that was the beginning of the Sourdough Expedition of 1910, in which four guys with no climbing experience went up Denali and lived to tell about it. But if a movie were to be made about the expedition, it would be a comedy, as David Friedman of Ironic Sans explains. See, no one believed any of the four had reached the summit, and they had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. -via Laughing Squid

Source: neatorama

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