Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

George Mallory, the legendary British mountain climber, was once asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest.  "Because it’s there," he said. Decades after Mallory died on Everest (his mummified body was discovered in 1999), people still climb the world’s tallest mountains for the same reason.

Because no one is yet sure whether Mallory and Andrew Irvine (his climbing partner) reached the summit of Mt. Everest before they died trying, in 1924, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay have that distinction. The pair reached the top of the world (where they remained just fifteen minutes) on May 29, 1953. They had climbed to a height of 8,850 meters (29,035 feet).

What other peaks make up the ten-highest mountains in the world - and - where are they? All, except K2 (the second tallest), are part of the Himalayan Range:

• K2 (Godwin Austen) - 8,611 meters (28,250 feet) - located in the Karakoram Range near the Baltoro Glacier
  
  
• Kanchenjunga - 8,586 meters (28,169 feet) - Himalaya (India/Nepal)
  
  
• Lhotse (near Everest) - 8,516 meters (27,940 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal/Tibet)
  
  
• Makalu - 8,463 meters (27,766 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal/Tibet)
  
  
• Cho Oyu - 8,201 meters (26,906 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal/Tibet)
  
  
• Dhaulagiri - 8,167 meters (26,795 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal)
  
  
• Manaslu - 8,163 meters (26,781 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal)
  
  
• Nanga Parbat - 8,125 meters (26,660 feet) - Himalaya (Pakistan)
  
  
• Annapurna - 8,091 meters (26,545 feet) - Himalaya (Nepal)

Now that we’ve examined Himalaya’s most famous peaks, we need to ask another question about the region. Are Himalayan Yeti real ...or ... imagined??