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 Summits, the 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.
source http://3.bp.blogspot.com
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 source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/George_Mellori_1915.jpg/220px-George_Mellori_1915.jpg
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.
Mallory and Irvine, source: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/13/article-0-003D605900000258-1000_468x286.jpg
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.
George Mallory's body, 1999 source: http://static-mb.minutebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dead-body8.jpg
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 fêted 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 team. Hillary, later spent
much of the rest of his life campaigning to improve the welfare of the Nepalese people, particularly around
the Himalayas.
Hillary in Nepal source: http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2008/01/11/seha2003_gallery__600x378.jpg
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 Krakauer’s 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 mountain. One infamous example is that of “Green Boots,” below.
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.”
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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