It's inevitable that we'll get another pandemic, whether it's this bird flu or something else. I expect these things to happen more often than they used to, though at least we have the advantage of modern medicine nowadays to hopefully prevent something from spiraling completely out of control.
I mean I'm not a Himalayan mountain climber, but I've climbed that mountain from that route before... To be down and back by 9:30am would be a pretty incredible feat... I mean, it's possible, it's not a technical mountain to climb at all, but to be posting at almost midnight last night would have meant he would have done it on essentially no sleep. It also just doesn't seem very enjoyable.