Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Mt. Everest: Lord of the Seven Summits





To its closest neighbors, the Nepalese, it is Chomolungma, goddess and mother of the earth. In the West it is known as Mt. Everest, after a 19th century Welsh surveyor, George Everest. Whichever appellation you designate, Mt. Everest is the literal roof of the earth. With a summit reaching a (quite literally) breath-taking 8,848 meters (29,029 feet), Everest sustains a fascinating, perplexing, humbling, inspiring, lethal, and continuously intriguing history. It may be the only mountain on Earth that people the world over can actually name. Bordering Nepal on one side and Tibet on the other, Everest’s geological, historical, and cultural significance casts a wide (if not pun-filled) shadow over time and space. Mt. Everest can also claim lordship over the so-called Seven Summitsthe highest peaks of each continent. This sky-scraping mountain, simultaneously the highest vista, graveyard, and trash-dump in the world, continues to capture the world’s imagination. 


Nearly fifty million years ago, via plate tectonics, the Indian-Australian plate subducted the Eurasian Plate. The result was the earliest formation of the Himalayan Mountain Range. The first organized and recorded attempt at the range's highest peak, Everest, occurred during the 1920s by three successive, and ultimately ill-fated, British expeditions. Today, Nepal is the favored course for climbing Mount Everest since it is the easier of the available summit routes and is currently the best charted path. During the 1920s, however, Nepal was “closed” to foreigners, so the expeditions had to traverse the far more difficult path from the Tibetan side of the mountain. 




George Mallory, pictured above, was the only British climber involved in all three of the first official attempts to summit Everest in the 1920s. After several initially unsuccessful attempts, Mallory set out  in June of 1924 for what proved to be his final climb. All expeditions were made during the summertime due to the extremely dangerous nature of winter ascents. During their final climb, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine were last spotted by a fellow climber Noel Odell only a few hundred meters from the summit. This would prove to the last time they were seen alive.




Soon after Odell’s sighting, Mallory and Irvine disappeared and were not seen again until over seventy-five years later. In June 1999, an international team went looking for Mallory and Irvine’s remains and potential proof they had reached the summit before they disappeared. Irvine’s body remains missing to this day, but the team found Mallory’s uncannily preserved corpse at nearly 8,500 meters (27,887 feet) up the mountain. Although there were many artifacts found on Mallory’s person, there was no camera, and therefore no definitive proof that Mallory and Irvine had been the first to summit. Picture below is Mallory found in situ, 1999. The team interred Mallory where they found him.




In 1953, another British Expedition to summit Everest was launched by Sir Edmund Hillary and his climbing partner Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. They successfully reached the peak on May 29, 1953.

Hillary and Norgay, 1953 source http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Hillary_and_tenzing.jpg


Hillary and Norgay were fĂȘted by their respective governments of Nepal and Britain, although the contemporary bigotry of the West typically acknowledged Hillary as the “leader” and Norgay as the “assistant,” when the truth was that both men were experienced climbers and worked as a teamHillary, later spent much of the rest of his life campaigning to improve the welfare of the Nepalese people, particularly around the Himalayas.





Mt. Everest, whose health-risk perspicuity bears repeating, is hazardous to human health in a myriad of ways. Everest is one of the famed 8000ers,” or mountains whose summits lie above the 8,000 meter mark. This height is significant because the thinness of oxygen above 8,000 meters cannot sustain human life due to the multitudinous dangers of altitude sickness. The Swiss doctor Edouard Wyss-Dunant coined this elevation, fittingly, as the “death zone.” Loss of coordination, fatigue, brain swelling, thinness of the blood, increased risk of frostbite, and disorientation are but a few of its symptoms. Essentially, once you reach the 8,000 meter mark of a mountain, the race is on to make the summit and head back below 8,000 meters to the nearest base camp before you die.
Everest’s death zone has claimed the lives of many of even the most experienced climbers. Perhaps the best known story of Everest’s lethality is related by author and mountaineer Jon Krakauers 1997 personal account, Into Thin Air.


Krakauer’s book, a must read for any Everest or mountaineering enthusiast, tells the story of the ill-fated 1996 expedition where eight climbers died while getting caught in a blizzard on the summit attempt. In all, fifteen climbers died in that climbing year, making 1996 the deadliest on record. 

The vast majority of the bodies, especially near the summit, have never been recovered. This has to do with the simple fact that carrying down frozen bodies, especially those above the 8,000 meter mark, is nearly suicidal. Helicopter rescues are extraordinarily dangerous, exorbitantly expensive, and virtually impossible to secure at this elevation. These unpleasant facts mean that Mt. Everest, among its many titles, is also the highest graveyard in the world, with potentially more than 200 corpses strewn about the mountainOne infamous example is that of “Green Boots,” below.



This unfortunate climber was later identified as Tsewang Paljor, an Indian climber who was caught in the same blizzard as Krakauer’s 1996  expedition, but on a different face of the mountain. Paljor had gone under a cave outcropping to try to shield himself from the storm, but ended up dying from exposure. His body, now forever frozen in situ, is now a grim marker to climbers making their way through the Death Zone, a literal graveyard in the sky

So with the enormous financial, emotional, and physical costs associated with climbing Everest, what compels people up the mountain? That intrepid Englishman George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, famously replied, “because it’s there.” There has always been the cavalier notion of climber as conqueror. Nature provides challenges for the stout of heart, so say these folk. Sir Edmund Hillary, upon returning from the summit of Everest, told climbers at base camp that, “[w]ell, we knocked the bastard off.” 



Hillary/Norgay Summit 1953 source http://www.mountainsoftravelphotos.com/

Climbers site a host of reasons for wanting to ascend Mt. Everest. Personal glory and bragging rights, a love of the outdoors, the physical challenge of the death zone, a chance to work with a climbing team, and a "once in a lifetime" opportunity, among others. Anatoli Bourkreev, one of the greatest climbers of the 20th century (who himself died climbing Annapurna) once opined thus on the overriding compulsion of mountaineering, a speculation as lofty as the peaks he encountered:

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.

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