The Call of Everest Page 14

  STRONG EVEREST WINDS give flight to a rope being held by guide Anatoli Boukreev on the approach to the Hillary Step during his 1996 climb. He would die a year later in an avalanche on Annapurna Peak, located in north-central Nepal.

  VOICES

  BESIDE MALLORY

  Sitting beside Mallory on May 1, 1999, I looked east toward the descent route he and Irvine would have taken had they summited that June 8, 1924. I imagined Mallory’s awareness even in extremis: no radio to communicate with others, no chain of fixed ropes to guide him down the mountain, no teams of rested climbers ready to enact a rescue, no way of telling the world what really happened.

  I can only guess what Mallory’s and Irvine’s last moments were like but what I do know is how their achievement has affected our climbing legacy. The boldness of their last climb formed a stepping-stone to the future. The debate over oxygen and its ultimate acceptance made it possible for their successors—including Hillary and Tenzing—to visit high places with a reasonable safety margin.

  Sometimes late at night I wonder whether by discovering Mallory I’ve aided in the destruction of a mystery. The possibility haunts me. Has my find somehow taken some of the enigmatic glory away from the 1924 expedition?

  Others may think so, yet for me, the discovery only increases my admiration for these pioneer climbers, whose story—which will never be told in its entirety—has always lain wrapped in the secrets of Chomolungma, “mother goddess of the snows.” I feel privileged to have participated in casting new light onto this mystery. Ultimately, Mallory and Irvine’s greatest achievement was an inspirational one, for even in failure, their magnificent attempt showed us what the human spirit is capable of.

  —CONRAD ANKER Conrad Anker is recognized the world around as a premier alpinist. With funding from the National Geographic Society and The North Face, he led the 2012 Legacy Climb up Everest to commemorate the first American team’s summit 50 years before.

  PIONEERS FOREVER

  Despite the tragedy that sadly dominates this decade, many others took on the challenge of Everest and succeeded, sometimes in very original ways. At the beginning of the decade, Australian Tim Macartney-Snape began his journey at the Bay of Bengal and continued, walking (and sometimes swimming) the entire distance to the mountain’s base, and then to the summit. In 1990 Jim Whittaker led the Peace Climb, a joint venture between the Chinese, Americans, and Soviets that placed 20 climbers on the summit. Also that year, the first married couple climbed to the summit when Maria and Andrej Stremfelj, two veteran Slovenian climbers, barely beat a rival team, American Cathy Gibson and her Russian husband, Aleksei Krasnokutsky.

  In 1991, British filmmaker Leo Dickinson ballooned over Everest, taking some of the most superb photographs ever seen of the mountain. On April 22 of the following year Pasang Lhamu became the first Nepali woman to climb Everest—on her fourth attempt at the mountain. But her story did not turn out happily. While she became a national hero, she died on her descent and took a Sherpa with her—Sonam Tshering, father of three children and an unborn fourth. A somewhat similar fate greeted British climber Alison Hargreaves, who in 1995 climbed the mountain alone without supplemental oxygen. Sadly, she would lose her life in August of that year as she descended from the summit of K2.

  FRENCH SNOWBOARDER MARCO Siffredi gets set to descend Everest on a snowboard on September 9, 2002. He had successfully snowboarded down the Norton, or Great, Couloir the year before. He returned to attempt the more challenging Hornbein Couloir but would never be seen again.

  The same year as the 1996 Into Thin Air disaster, veteran Everest climber and award-winning filmmaker David Breashears made the first IMAX film on Everest. That same year, a South African team, including Bruce Herrod, Cathy O’Dowd, and Ian Woodall, placed the South African flag on the summit for the first time. But Bruce Herrod lost his life in the process. Everyone on the mountain stopped to listen when President Nelson Mandela called their base camp to offer congratulations to the summit climbers. When he learned they were still high on the mountain, he asked that they call him back, and even began to give his telephone number, over national radio! Luckily, their base camp manager cut that particular transmission short, to the amusement of the entire mountain.

  Also in 1996, a strong Russian team from Siberia led by Sergei Antipine climbed a bold new line straight up between the North and Northeast Ridges of the mountain, succeeding on their very first attempt. The slopes varied from 65 to 90 degrees of steepness.

  In the same year Swedish climber Göran Kropp rode a specially designed bicycle, groaning with its 240 pounds of equipment, 7,000 miles from Stockholm to Kathmandu, then carried on to the summit of Everest. He survived the deadliest Everest season only to die rock climbing near his Seattle home.

  Near the end of the 1990s—on May 1, 1999—American climber Conrad Anker discovered a body high on the mountain, clad in old-fashioned clothing. Stunned, he realized he had found Sandy Irvine. When the other team members arrived, they discovered a name tag sewn to the collar of one of the shirts: G. MALLORY. So convinced were they that this was Irvine that teammate Jake Norton commented, “That’s weird. Why would Irvine be wearing Mallory’s shirt?” Anker had found the body of George Mallory.

  The following year, Slovenian skier Davo Karnicar made the first ski descent of the mountain, taking less than five hours from the summit to Base Camp.

  Sherpa Babu Chiri rang in the new millennium when he raced up the normal route in just 16 hours. A ten-time veteran of Everest’s summit, including one night’s bivouac (planned, and without supplemental oxygen) on the summit in 1999, Babu Chiri died a year later when he fell into a crevasse at Camp II in the Western Cwm while out on an innocent jaunt to take photographs.

  French snowboarder Marco Siffredi made the first successful snowboard descent, on the Tibetan side of the mountain the following year. He was killed one year later while trying to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir.

  EVEREST BECKONS FOR all kinds of adventure sports, including tandem paragliding from the summit. Babu Sunuwar, pilot, and Lakpa Tshering Sherpa descended in just 42 minutes, landing in Namche Bazar.

  The same year, Erik Weihenmayer defied his naysayers when he became the first blind man to climb the mountain. Despite what some might classify a “stunt,” he brought hope to disabled people numbering in the tens of thousands around the world.

  Three years later, a Russian team sieged a line to the left of the Japanese Couloir on the North Side, fixing more than 3,000 meters of rope in the process, most of which remained on the mountain after they summited and left.

  THE IMPACT OF EVEREST

  Climbing Everest remains for most a life-changing experience. Whether they are guided clients or trailblazing explorers, many climbers have seen their life stories dramatically affected by Everest. Ed Hillary was convinced that nobody’s life had changed as dramatically as that of Tenzing Norgay’s after his ascent of the mountain. In truth, the fame and politicking and posturing humiliated him: “Everest did not matter. Only politics mattered. And I was ashamed.” His Everest triumph became an albatross for Tenzing, who spent his later years as a tragically lonely figure.

  Older, heavier, aluminum-frame packs fastened rigidly to the back, making climbs more effort-intensive. Today’s mountain climbers know the comfort of The North Face’s lightweight, indestructible backpacks, built with an internal frame that allows more freedom of movement and more storage space.

  TRIUMPHANT EDMUND HILLARY (at right), Tenzing Norgay (center), and John Hunt, a British army officer and the leader of the successful 1953 Mount Everest expedition, arrive at London’s Heathrow Airport.

  Fifty years after his climb, the doubts that Tom Hornbein felt on the summit began to make some sense: “Dreams are the beginning, and doubt simply a catalyst to creativity,” he said. “My life is still rich with adventure and its attendant uncertainties. Precious are those people with whom I share it.” Many of those precious relationships came to Hornbein because of Ever
est.

  Reinhold Messner treasured his two Everest climbs: the first supplemental-oxygen-free ascent with Peter Habeler and the lonely solo of the North Face. But his anger over the subsequent developments on Everest eventually overshadowed these feelings. He scoffed with anger that Everest, by 2012, had become a “Disneyland.” Instead he turned to smaller peaks. “When I was a small child, I began on small mountains,” he said. “Now, as I am getting older, the small peaks are getting bigger. If I am lucky, some day I will end on a small peak.”

  Everest in winter was Krzysztof Wielicki’s first Himalayan climb. It wasn’t his last. Like Messner, he climbed all 14 of the 8,000-meter peaks. But for Wielicki, Everest remained his best memory, not because it was highest, but because of the atmosphere, the team effort, and the strong leadership from Andrzej Zawada. For Wielicki, Everest cemented a deep and meaningful friendship with the man who helped shape his dreams of winter climbing on the highest mountains.

  Everest was Alison Hargreaves’s last Himalayan peak from which she would return. Just three months later, she was blown off the slopes of K2 after summiting. Almost as violent as her death was the reaction to it, as many vilified her—a mother—for risking so much. The woman whose first words on the top of Everest were for her son and daughter was maligned for not loving them as much as her own ambition.

  Friendship, shame, anger, fame, joy. Despite the disparity in the aftermath of their Everest ascents, for each of these climbers the mountain gave a unique, exalted feeling of reaching the top of the world.

  Legendary Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev expresses that rapture well: “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.”

  Why does a scientist transport hundreds of pounds of equipment on the backs of yaks and porters to set up a research laboratory on Mount Everest? While climbers may seek to test the limits of their bodies, scientists are intrigued by the adaptive limits of the human body—in short, by how the climber does it. Humans are capable of a remarkable degree of plasticity, and Everest may be the greatest physiological challenge that exists on our planet, with the severe reduction in available oxygen, the cold, dry conditions, sleepless nights, prolonged time needed for acclimation, and the extreme exertion such a climb requires. To address the challenges of high altitude, to learn how the human body adapts to extreme hypoxia (lack of oxygen), and to find out what happens when the body doesn’t adapt, we at Mayo Clinic took the opportunity to partner with National Geographic and The North Face to observe and measure as never before what happens in people’s bodies when they climb Everest.

  EVEREST’S EXTREME ENVIRONMENT can cause extreme responses in the human body. Better understanding of how our bodies adjust under these conditions leads to better treatment—and better equipment.

  MEDICAL RESEARCH ON EVEREST

  Mount Everest has an ongoing rich tradition of medical research. In any given season, several groups may perform field studies to explore how the body responds to the extreme conditions on Everest. The adventuresome scientist finds this type of work intriguing, but it also has practical applications in other areas of medicine. For example, knowledge gained on Everest can be used to assist medical personnel during the deployment of troops or workers to cold, high, and dry environments or equally extreme conditions. At the U.S. South Pole Station, for example, up to 700 workers are rapidly exposed to high-altitude conditions each year. Others serve in oil-industry postings in extreme northern latitudes or work in the numerous observatories located at high altitudes. And of course there’s the general outdoor sports/tourist industry.

  But there are also applications in more everyday settings, such as the hospitals and clinics that treat patients with congestive heart failure, sleep disorders, lung disease, and other conditions similar to the hypoxia, or lack of oxygen, experienced by climbers and others at high altitudes.

  HIGH-ALTITUDE CHALLENGES

  What is it about higher altitudes that challenges the body?

  In the 1600s, on the heels of work by Galileo, an Italian physicist, Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), determined that the air above us has weight. Around this same time physicist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and others discovered that the weight of air (or air pressure) determines the level of oxygen in our lungs and subsequently in our bloodstream. This explains the challenge of surviving at high altitudes: Air pressure drives oxygen into our blood, and the agony felt by climbers comes from a severe lack of air pressure.

  Before we can explore how altitude affects the body, we must first understand how the body processes and uses oxygen on the Earth’s surface. We breathe oxygen into our lungs, and from there the oxygen enters the bloodstream, traveling to body organs that require oxygen to operate. Hemoglobin is the metalloprotein in red blood cells responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body. Blood that has run through the body returns to the lungs for a fresh infusion of oxygenated air, which means that on average the amount of oxygen in the lungs is greater than the amount of oxygen in the arteries.

  Oxygen saturation values (one measure of the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream) normally range between 95 and 100 percent. At sea level it is difficult to hold one’s breath long enough to cause a significant drop in these values. When values fall below 85 to 88 percent, as can happen among patients with chronic lung disease, it often becomes necessary to use portable or home oxygen in order to maintain a normal quality of life.

  Almost everywhere on the surface of the Earth, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere remains stable at 21 percent. In fact, from sea level up to the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere (62 miles, or 100 kilometers, above the surface), oxygen levels in the air remain nearly constant. What changes is air pressure, which drops proportionally as altitude increases. The atmospheric pressure at Everest Base Camp is about half that at sea level; at the summit, it’s one-third that at sea level. In other words, each breath of air taken in at high altitude contains less oxygen than at sea level. As a result, oxygen levels in the lungs and in the blood drop in parallel with the atmospheric drop in pressure. Normal oxygen saturation levels at 10,000 feet (3,000 meters, just above the starting point for most Everest expeditions) are between 88 and 90 percent. During sleep, when breathing slows, these levels may fall below 84 percent—lower than the point at which many lung-disease patients use supplemental oxygen.

  The balance between oxygen levels in the lungs and arteries is especially important when climbing at high altitudes. Physical exertion increases the speed at which red blood cells travel through the lungs and thus reduces the time blood spends getting replenished with oxygen in the lungs. The combination of exercise and high altitude doubly stresses the body, more and more the higher a person climbs. (I should point out here that any given individual’s ability to adapt to high altitudes can vary dramatically and depend on a variety of factors including genetics, overall health, and altitude of residence, as well as a number of situational factors such as hydration levels.)

  MOUNTAIN DANCES

  The body is equipped to handle modest changes in altitude. For example, changes in air pressure at altitudes up to 8,000 to 10,000 feet (2,500 to 3,000 meters) only mildly reduce the oxygen saturation in the body, thanks to the unique properties of hemoglobin. But at greater heights, the lack of oxygen can have serious—and even fatal—consequences. Without the benefits of the acclimation process—in other words, if a person moves rapidly from sea level to an extreme altitude—most, if not all, individuals would become sick above 15,000 feet. They would likely be conscious for only 20 to 30 minutes at 18,000 feet and only for 1 to 2 minutes at the summit of Mount Everest.

  BRITISH CLIMBER STEPHEN Venables returned 20 pounds lighter a
fter his ascent of the Kangshung Face, the east side of Everest, without oxygen in 1988. Extended time at altitude can lead to rapid weight loss, which includes the loss of muscle.

  In order to avoid the worst effects of altitude sickness, most climbers who plan to summit Everest spend six to eight weeks in a laborious dance with the mountain and their health. This dance of acclimation includes a gradual ascent to Base Camp followed by several rotations to higher and higher altitudes, the climbers slowly pushing the “hypoxic stress” in hopes of stimulating the body to adapt to higher altitudes. While the body becomes more able to accommodate the extreme altitudes, sustained time spent at altitudes as high as Everest Base Camp and above can cause muscle deconditioning and muscle loss. Thus a balance must be negotiated between acclimating to heights and losing muscle condition. Some climbers even go down to lower altitudes for brief periods of time to gain back some muscle strength. The protocol for acclimation has primarily been developed by trial and error, taking advantage of the impressive adaptive abilities of the human body, particularly for short windows of time.

  IMMEDIATE DEFENSE

  How does the body respond to reduced oxygen levels in the blood and a reduced amount of oxygen delivered to the tissues? The amount of oxygen delivered in the bloodstream to body tissues is a product of several factors: the number of red blood cells (hemoglobin levels); how saturated the hemoglobin molecules are with oxygen molecules (arterial oxygen saturation); and the output of the heart (the heart rate and the volume pumped per beat of the heart).