“Everest and its aspiring cast of glamour models and prepubescent American schoolboys leaves me absolutely cold,” bemoans Jim Perrin
Huddled over a hand-held radio in a tent 27,230ft up on the icy slopes of Mount Everest, mountaineering guide Dan Mazur faced the hardest decision of his life. Outside it was dark and bitterly cold, and snow battered the tent’s exterior as it was whipped up by the strong winds.
Some 1,000 feet above, four members of Mr Mazur’s climbing team were out in the deteriorating conditions, fighting to keep a fifth member and friend, Peter Kinloch, alive. Earlier in the day, Mr Kinloch, a 28-year-old Scotsman who worked as an IT specialist for Merseyside Police, had achieved his lifelong ambition to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain.
But during the long, exhausting descent, Mr Kinloch, an experienced mountaineer, began to get into trouble. His eyesight rapidly deteriorated as he and 10 other climbers in the expedition, run by mountaineering firm Summit Climb, retraced their steps down from the peak. For more than 12 hours the leader of the summit team, David O’Brien, and three Sherpas struggled to get Mr Kinloch down the steep ice falls, snow-covered slopes and rock faces to the relative safety of their camp. Running low on oxygen, food and water, the team were fast losing strength in the harsh conditions and thin air. The extreme cold was also taking its toll in the form of frostbite. With Mr Kinloch unable to walk, appearing to suffer from severe altitude sickness and apparently refusing medication, it was a desperate situation.
Mr Mazur, who was the leader of the 2010 Summit Climb expedition to Mount Everest, was at risk of losing five members of his team. After a painful deliberation with the team doctor, he requested that the rescuers came down, leaving Mr Kinloch on the mountain, where he died.
Mr Kinloch’s tragic death, which took place on May 25 but was only revealed last Wednesday, and the harrowing decision faced by his team-mates, have reopened a wound that plagues the climbing and mountaineering community year after year. During a short two-month season between the end of March and the end of May – when weather conditions are at their kindest and hundreds of mountaineers flock to the Himalaya in a bid to conquer the world’s highest peak – the wider world is left struggling to comprehend the attraction of Everest, along with the life and death decisions that are taken by those on its slopes.
Everest’s history is littered with stories of climbers who have been left to die and others who, in their lust to reach the summit, have walked past mountaineers in trouble. There are also tales of extraordinary rescues and individuals who put their own lives on the line to help others. It is a place where the ordinary rules that dictate people’s behaviour seem to be suspended; a mountain that brings out both the worst and best of human nature.
For some veteran mountaineers, Everest has come to represent everything that is rotten in the world of climbing. Since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand on the so-called “Roof of the World” in 1953, the number of people climbing Everest has steadily increased. This year alone, 470 people reached the top of the 29,029ft high mountain, taking the total number of summits since that first ascent past the 5,000 mark. But only in the past 10 years have the numbers of people climbing to the summit dramatically increased.
There are now more than 20 commercial companies that offer to guide and support clients, who are often paying in excess of £20,000 a time, up to the summit. Fixed ropes, put in place by teams of Sherpas at the start of each season, run up the entire length of the main routes to the summit.
“Climbing Everest now means joining a horrendous queue of people slogging up the mountain,” explains Sir Chris Bonington, a British mountaineer and explorer who reached the summit of Everest in 1985 and has led three other expeditions there.
“The problem is that a lot of these people aren’t actually climbers. Within the climbing community, there is a strong ethos that if anyone is in trouble, you drop what you are doing and go help them. A lot of the people going up Everest have just decided they want to climb Everest.”
Everest basecamps – there are two, one on each side of the mountain – have now become so busy with expeditions and tourists that they resemble small towns. Hundreds of tents fill the area, and the detris of decades of visitors lie scattered on the ground. On the Tibetan side, makeshift buildings and an army barracks mark the basecamp village, and some climbers report that drugs and prostitutes have become rife. There are worries, too, that Chinese plans to build a permanent road to the camp could lead to further problems.
This increase in climbers on the mountain has, strangely perhaps, also increased the risks. Every year Everest lures an increasing number of less experienced mountaineers. In earlier days, the mountain was an achievable goal for just a handful of the fittest and most experienced mountaineers. Even then, many of those who attempted to climb to the summit perished trying.
Recently, however, there have been extraordinary ascents. As well as the high-profile success of Bonita Norris (the 22-year-old media studies graduate who last month became the youngest British woman to reach the summit) and failure of Rugby World Cup winner Josh Lewsey (who abandoned his attempt within 500ft of the peak after his breathing apparatus failed), this year, 13-year-old Jordan Romero became the youngest person to reach the top. Meanwhile, a Nepalese Sherpa, Apa Sherpa, broke his own world record for most ascents of Everest by making his 20th summit. Four years ago, the world’s first double amputee, Mark Inglis, reached the summit, and several pensioners are also listed among summiteers.
Combined with large numbers of climbers reaching its peak each year, Everest appears – to the wider world at least – to have been tamed. Indeed, the main routes to the summit are now jokingly called the “tourist routes”. But this hides a darker truth.
“There is an illusionary safety in numbers,” warns Sir Chris. “These days there is a line of fixed rope all the way from the Western Comb to the summit. It seems like there are lots of people around, but if the weather breaks and there is a storm, suddenly people find themselves on their own.
“As far as the danger goes, people just need to look at the statistics. A significant number of people still die on Everest. Have no illusions – you pass their corpses as you walk up.”
This is not an exaggeration. The routes that wind their way up the mountain are dotted with around 120 frozen corpses of those who have died on the mountainside. Most lie in the so-called Death Zone above 26,000ft, left there because it is too difficult to bring them down.
In its upper reaches, climbers are at heights equal to the cruising altitudes for passenger jets. Here, the air is so thin and oxygen so scarce that it is not possible to sustain human life for long. The human body starts to deteriorate and the extreme cold can cause devastating frostbite. Many believe the bodies serve as a sombre reminder to climbers of the dangers they face.
Altitude sickness is one of the least understood risks. At extreme altitudes, fluid leaks out of the blood vessels into the brain and lungs, causing victims to hallucinate and drowning them in their own body fluids. It can come on in minutes and kill within hours. New research now suggests that genes can determine whether someone is likely to be susceptible to the effects of altitude sickness or not. Scientists hope it could lead to a test to screen climbers before they set off.
Prof Hugh Montgomery, director of the Institute for Human Health and Performance at University College London, who two years ago led an expedition to Everest to study the effects of oxygen deprivation on the human body, says: “Some people are more predisposed to the effects of altitude than others. There seems to be a strong genetic element. The key is knowing when to draw the line and turn back.”
Climbers have also warned that the effects of climate change are increasing the danger on the peak as melting snow and ice loosen rocks and make the trails to the summit more treacherous.
It is baffling why anyone would want to expose themselves to such dangers. Dr Tim Woodman, co-director of the Institute for Psychology of Elite Performance at Bangor University who has studied what motivates mountaineers, believes many climbers do it to fulfil a basic human need.
“A lot of people who climb mountains like Everest struggle to explain why they do it,” he says. “Mountaineers tend to be people who don’t feel in control of emotion in their everyday lives. Emotions are a basic human requirement, and mountaineering allows them to feel fear, a very strong emotion, and be responsible for controlling that emotion.”
This might explain why Everest still has such appeal. As the world’s highest mountain, it represents the ultimate challenge and battle against nature’s forces. The lure of Everest brings in millions of pounds in income for Nepal and Tibet, and tourism now accounts for 4 per cent of Nepal’s GDP. As well as the mountaineers who pay thousands of pounds for permits to scale the peak, thousands of tourists come to trek in the foothills around Everest and to its famous basecamps each year.
So far this year four people have perished on Everest, including Mr Kinloch. The worst loss of life on Everest occurred in 1996, when 15 lives were claimed. More recently, the climbing world faced public outrage when “summit fever” was exposed in 2006, a year in which 12 climbers were killed. One of them, David Sharpe, a British climber from North Yorkshire, was abandoned to his fate by dozens of climbers. They walked past him, sitting cross-legged in a shallow snow cave beside a busy route, as he was struggling to breathe.
The incident highlighted a seemingly callous disregard among mountaineers for other lives, exposing a horrifying secret that, with the achievement of a lifetime’s ambition in sight, and gripped by the selfishness of summit fever, it is every man for himself.
But there are also signs of hope. Late last month, news leaked out from Everest of the dramatic rescue of Bonita Norris, who lost the use of her legs after slipping and injuring her back while descending from the summit. She was carried out of the death zone by a team of Sherpas and climbers from the company she had been climbing with.
Despite these tales of bravery, however, for some the lure of Everest is already starting to wane.
“Everest and its aspiring cast of glamour models and prepubescent American schoolboys leaves me absolutely cold,” bemoans Jim Perrin, a famed British climber and writer. “It’s one vast ego trip for the overprivileged, a sort of mountaineering equivalent of the personalised number-plate – and about as useful.
Richard Gray©: The Telegraph:6-6-10
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