The Call of Everest Read online

  It is still dark, but the sky has turned purple when Panuru and I reach the South Summit. Now most of the headlamps are below us rather than above us. We traverse the col to the base of the Hillary Step, a 25-foot vertical wall of rock, scratched and scarred by thousands of crampon points. Several climbers are working their way up the lines. Panuru and I swiftly climb the rock and go around them.

  We can see the summit now. It is just along the ridge crest. Pink velvety light is saturating the sky. I feel as if I’m in the center of a fish-eye lens, watching the world dropping away in all directions. Everything on Earth is below me. Everything. The rows and rows of mountains, even the clouds. The only thing above me is outer space.

  Poking around a rock, we meet up with Kris, Hilaree, and Danuru. Jangbu has already gone up to take GPS measurements. The five of us walk slowly toward the summit together. The wind is tearing at the Tibetan prayer flags planted at the apex, but we can’t get near them: At least 40 people have packed onto the summit hump. Instead we stop just a few feet below the top, throw our arms in the air, and tightly hug one another.

  Emily, then Sam, as well as our other Sherpas—Dawa, Tendi, Mingma, Sonam Dorje, and Lakpa—will all stand on the summit in several hours. The next day, as if rising from the dead, Conrad will rally and summit without oxygen, a feat fewer than 200 climbers have accomplished. In a supreme test of endurance, Kris and Hilaree will push on to summit neighboring Lhotse after only a half day’s rest at Camp IV. Our entire team, climbers and Sherpas, will rendezvous safely at Base Camp three days later.

  At this moment, though, standing on the top of the world, I know I should feel elated, joyful. I know this is how the summiters of the ’63 American expedition felt. “We hugged each other as tears welled up, ran down our oxygen masks, and turned to ice,” wrote Hornbein. But climbing Everest was a bigger, richer challenge 50 years ago. There were more unknowns, the margins slimmer, the personal effort greater. The truth is, Everest has become domesticated, declawed. The majesty of the mountain and the meaning of climbing it have diminished. A half century ago, climbing Everest was a triumph of mountaineering prowess. Today, from the perspective of modern alpine ethics, it is almost an unsporting accomplishment.

  So what do I feel standing on the summit of Everest? I admit to some pride for simply persevering, for sucking wind day after day and still putting one foot in front of the other. And I feel relief. The damn thing is done. But I also have an uneasy sense of ambiguity. I don’t think I really deserve the grandeur of the world’s highest peak. It wasn’t a fair fight, and I know it.

  SAM ELIAS LOWERS himself (at right) from the South Summit to continue on toward the top of the peak. At 28,707 feet (8,750 meters), the South Summit is the first place where Everest’s true summit is visible. The climbers then head up the ridge, visible here behind Elias.

  ICY PRAYER FLAGS wave in the breeze at Base Camp. As climbers and trekkers from all over the globe come and go, this international village is ever changing—and becoming increasingly populated.

  In the spring of 2012 I spent a month at Mount Everest Base Camp for a GlacierWorks photographic project. I arrived in early April, just as the expeditions were establishing the camps for the climbers, clients, and guides who would soon follow. I wandered slowly up the rock-strewn glacier ice, pausing frequently to stare at the hundreds of brightly colored tents clustered tightly along the meandering trail. Most were small personal tents, but many were large dining, cooking, and communication tents. Generators purred in the distance, yak bells tinkled from the transport caravans, and a multitude of languages buzzed from the expedition camps. Thousands of prayer flags fluttered in the breeze. National flags from myriad nations rippled in the wind, too. It was an international village at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall. Hundreds of climbers would shortly be residing here, all with the same goal and each for a different reason. Yet Base Camp bore no resemblance to the one I visited 29 years earlier in the spring of 1983.

  AMERICANS PETER JAMIESON and Gerry Roach (at right) celebrate their 1983 ascent of Everest. They were part of filmmaker David Breashears’s team when he transmitted the first live images from the peak. The scene at the summit was a different one from today: There were no visible mementos left behind by previous climbers, no jostling for space with larger climbing groups. “It appeared as if no one had been there before us,” Breashears said.

  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

  That year we were a small American climbing team with an essential Sherpa support team. Our small encampment, nestled up under the icefall, was hard to find. We had no contact with the outside world other than the sporadic delivery of mail by runner from Lukla, 40 miles down the trail. We were the only team on the Nepali side of the peak. The mountain was ours and it was wonderful. We shared its slopes with only our teammates. The mountain and its challenges felt intimate and authentic, and at the same time so immense and grand.

  During that expedition I reached the summit of Mount Everest for the first time on May 7, 1983. I had been assigned to the team by the ABC TV series American Sportsman, which sent me to the mountain to transmit the first live images from Earth’s highest point. We set out from our high camp in the dawn’s early hours. For some reason we chose to pioneer a shortcut directly up to the Southeast Ridge from the South Col, but we unexpectedly encountered thigh-deep snow and were slowed by the wearying efforts of wading through it. There were no fixed ropes above the South Col—we didn’t need any. We only found 30 feet of wind-battered rope hanging down the Hillary Step.

  My teammates—Ang Rita Sherpa, Peter Jamieson, and Gerry Roach—and I traded the exhausting duty of plowing a trail up through the soft, deep snow. Yet we all managed to remain close together and gained firmer snow at the South Summit at 3:30 p.m., where we readied for the final push. Larry Nielson had chosen to climb without bottled oxygen and was lagging behind. The traverse from the South Summit to the famed Hillary Step is long and exposed. Not until I put that intimidating final 40 feet of steep climbing behind me did I know we would succeed.

  I well remember my last few steps. The peak was pristine, devoid of footprints, survey tripods, promotional banners, prayer flags, and mementos that would later clutter its summit. It appeared that no one had come before us. The wind was light, but an occasional gust reminded us of its potential power. We shared the piercing spectacle of Everest’s harsh, implacable grandeur and a great solitude. Since arriving at Base Camp, we had taken more than 40 days to reach this moment; days of hardship, teamwork, self-reliance, and growing camaraderie. The five of us were but tiny dark dots barely visible from afar against the shimmering white peak. I gazed north out into the vast expanse of the Tibetan Plateau and thought of the early 1920s British expeditions. Their magnificent pioneering efforts to climb the mountain from Tibet had all ended in failure. Many lives were lost. Standing there, I knew my life had changed. I had attained a childhood aspiration. A long journey had ended. The world was at my feet. I was filled with a quiet awe and wonder, and a deep satisfaction, too.

  LONELY HEROES

  After assembling the transmission equipment, I pointed the video camera at my companions as we stood astride the great peak. Then I captured Larry Nielson’s labored final steps as he became the first American to reach the summit without supplementary oxygen. His was a noble effort, but it had taken a toll.

  By now late afternoon, low-angle light slithered around the peaks below, casting long shadows over the valleys. The closest members of our support team were nearly 8,000 feet below in the advance base camp. Isolated? Yes. But also exhilarated with what we had just accomplished. Nor did we mind the enveloping darkness and heavy snow as we staggered down to tents on the South Col, exhausted but triumphant.

  I lay awake in my sleeping bag that night, recalling images of tired faces, exultant grins, and glinting peaks. Only hours earlier, I had become the 130th person to reach the top of Mount Everest in the 30 years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 ascent. I was proud to bel
ong to that select club, but I thought it was already 100 members too big.

  THE END OF INNOCENCE

  Since then I have returned to the mountain often and reached the summit four more times. I couldn’t have imagined how much the Everest experience would change, and in so little time. Today nearly 129 people may reach the top of Everest in a single day; the total number of ascents recorded as of spring 2012 is more than 6,200.

  Since 1856, when its supreme height of 29,002 feet (a number later revised to 29,035) was announced to the world, Mount Everest has exerted an enduring tug on the human imagination. I felt it too, when I was 11 years old, transfixed by a book’s color photograph of Tenzing Norgay wearing the alien garb, and oxygen mask, of an explorer on the planet’s outermost edge. In that single triumphant image I found an example that represented my own yearning for independence, discovery, and freedom. I sensed that the man behind the oxygen mask and thick down suit had taken risks and striven mightily to reach that spot, and that he was standing right where he wanted to be. Someday I wanted to stand there, too.

  I was in excellent company. Countless people before and after me have projected their own values, dreams, and ambitions on the mountain. British explorers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were pioneering a route up Everest’s North Face when they died in 1924, just shy of the summit, leaving a mystery for the ages. When Tenzing and Hillary made the first ascent in 1953, the world was riveted. Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein, in 1963, completed the first traverse of the Himalayan giant, one of the greatest achievements in mountaineering history. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler were the first to reach the summit without supplemental oxygen in 1978; Messner did so again, solo, unsupported, two years later. A Polish team made the first winter ascent in February 1980.

  Everest has equally been a magnet for unusual characters with unlikely aims. The “mad Yorkshireman” Maurice Wilson, an eccentric World War I veteran with no climbing experience, flew illegally to India in 1934, intending to crash-land his DH Gipsy Moth into the glacier at the base of Everest and then climb to the top. But British authorities impounded his plane and denied him permission. Undeterred, he trekked through Tibet to Everest with only a small support team. His body and tent were found in 1935 at 21,400 feet, just below the North Col.

  Philosophy professor Woodrow Wilson Sayre, grandson of the President, recruited a geology student, schoolteacher, and lawyer to make a wildly amateur and ambitious attempt to climb Everest from the north in 1962. They entered Tibet illegally from Nepal, unsupported, ferrying all their own gear and food to the mountain’s north side. Their audacious and little-known attempt reached nearly 25,500 feet before turning back. The exhausted team retraced their steps to Nepal, ending the first American expedition to Mount Everest.

  On September 26, 1988, French mountaineer Jean-Marc Boivin completed the first descent from the summit by paraglider. Siovenian climber and extreme skier

  Davo Karnicar climbed to the summit October 7, 2000, then descended on skis during the snowy post-monsoon climbing season. And the first marriage vows were pledged on summit by Pem Dorje Sherpa and Moni Mulepati on May 30, 2005.

  Whatever one’s motivation, reaching the top of the world has always been an ironman achievement. One must overcome the mountain’s barriers, the challenges of ferocious winds, thin air, and one’s own physical limits and trepidations, to win the honor the public assigns to success on Earth’s most exalted peak.

  But in the 1980s those barriers began to fall. Two years after my first ascent, I returned to the mountain with Dick Bass, a strong high-altitude performer who after three attempts finally stood atop Everest, fulfilling his quest to reach the tallest summit on each of the seven continents. To the uninformed public, however, he was a Texas oilman who paid his way to the top. If Dick Bass can reach the summit, many began to reason, then so can I. In their eyes, the bar had been lowered. The numbers of climbers heading to the mountain each spring began to rise.

  Alexander Kellas, an early explorer of the Himalaya, used this vest-pocket camera on his unfulfilled Everest expedition of 1921; he died en route to the mountains of dysentery and heart failure. The Canon 5D Mark II camera with numerous digital features, including video, was one of several cameras used on the 2012 National Geographic expedition.

  In 1996 I led the Everest IMAX film expedition and directed the filming on the mountain. I witnessed for the first time the early stages of overcrowding, along with widespread inexperience among the climbers and a strength-in-numbers approach. In this golden age of guided expeditions, 12 of them ventured up the mountain that season. In early May a violent, fast-moving storm left eight climbers dead, captivating the world’s attention. The more the media and press dramatized what happened on Everest—a husband’s last words to his wife, a doctor’s loss of both hands to frostbite, a perilous high-altitude helicopter rescue—the more compelling the mountain became, and its value rose in the eyes of the public, and climbers too.

  Afterward, at every public lecture I gave, an audience member would ask, “Did that tragedy change the way people climb?” The answer is, Not really.

  What lies ahead for Everest? Every year the support system for climbers, clients, and guides will improve, along with better cooperation and communication among team leaders. Some guiding services will enhance their success rates, sharpen operational efficiencies, and increase their familiarity with their clients’ strengths and weaknesses. But many will not.

  Traditional and social media will continue to spread images and personal accounts of the Everest experience across the globe. In addition to the usual cadres of clients and guides, its slopes will be crowded with fund-raising, cleanup, and corporate-challenge expeditions but thinning prospects of achieving significant firsts.

  Could a breaking point be reached? A photo taken on the Lhotse Face in May 2012 shows 156 people departing Camp III at 23,000 feet on their way to the South Col at 25,900 feet, streaming upward in a cheek-to-jowl procession. Can the mountain and its popular routes sustain these numbers? Will climbers and clients begin to turn away from an experience that puts them in a conga-line formation? I know climbers who have reached the summit in the predawn darkness even though they had only a dim view from the summit. Why? They left the high camp at 8 p.m. to avoid the crowds.

  I often think about my own role in the growing numbers of summit seekers. Some of us who treasure this mountain have spread our knowledge in the interest of income and education and inadvertently have become its prime publicists. Capt. John Noel, a member of the 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions, made films of both journeys and crisscrossed the North American continent eight times to screen them for packed audiences. More than 70 years later, 30 million people in 38 countries would watch Everest, the IMAX film based on footage my team shot before and after the catastrophic storm of 1996.

  Everest has always drawn the purist, the dreamer, and the trophy hunter. Most are a mix of all three, and each climber brings a wide range of abilities and capacity to the mountain. Dangers will increase if their ambition isn’t matched by experience, and many individuals feel they don’t need to take the necessary steps to prepare themselves for the mountain and its unforgiving moments. The public rarely inquires how you made it to the top, focusing only on the achievement. Too often climbers likewise focus on the prize and the accolades, not the huge support system and the Sherpas’ hard work and expertise required to get them there. When climbers don’t take part in the decision making, they are no longer agents in their own fate and forsake an intimate connection to the mountain, its weather, and its dangers.

  VOICES

  SUSTAINING LIFE ON EVEREST

  While the future of mountaineering on Everest remains unclear with global climate change transforming the high Himalaya, one can rest assured that Everest will, as it has done in the past, continue to captivate a world audience.

  Fleshing out the richness of the Everest experience requires a look at the social environment of the mountain and recogniz
ing that, as they have in the past, Sherpas will be decisive factors in any future effort. Most notably, Sherpas, the formerly agrarian inhabitants of Everest’s southern foothills, are no longer simply load bearers on Everest’s majestic features. In the last decade of increased commercial guiding on Everest, we have seen Sherpa mountaineers take on a decisively important and urgent role in the safe management of foreign mountaineers on expeditions.

  Through on-the-job training and such organizations as the Nepal Mountaineering Association and the Khumbu Climbing Center, we are witnessing a transformation of knowledge and endowing of professional guiding skills to enthusiastic and capable climbers of Sherpa and other Nepali ethnicities. Sherpas have from the turn of the 20th century exhibited their remarkably adaptable physiology for climbing in the high Himalaya. Now, they will dominate the arena with superior climbing, guiding and organizational skills. This transformation will not take place overnight, but improvements have been noted most recently on expeditions where Sherpa guides do all the technical engineering of the climbing route, a task once relegated to the superiorly trained Western climbers leading the expeditions.

  There is also the urgent objective of sustainability and the promotion of the mountain as an international symbol of environmental sensitivity and best practices in a wilderness setting. The Sherpa people will be driving the changes here as well, with great support from the visitors from the developed world—but the local population need to assume the role of champion stewards. Managing Base Camp habitation, organizing removal of waste materials, and ensuring the acceptable condition of the physical environment are critical objectives. Yet more expansively, conditions leading to Everest Base Camp in the villages of the Sherpa heartland need also to be addressed. Deforestation, overdependence on slowly renewable fuel sources, overconstruction of certain municipalities to increase tourism, management of potable water, and a vast array of similar issues face any future that Everest anticipates.