The Call of Everest Read online

  Though unmentioned, the political and social challenges that the Everest region, its people, and its visiting mountaineers must confront are complex. With a central government far away in Kathmandu that is characteristically unaware of the issues faced by Everest locals, new authority and resources need to be both delegated to and managed by the Sherpas themselves or committees of Nepali people intimate with the environmental and social challenges that threaten the communities, their livelihood, and the fabric of their fascinating society. Though the problems are large and solutions obscure, the Sherpa people have demonstrated, from one generation to the next, a tenuous adaptability and an enthusiastic and entrepreneurial spirit, tempered with deep compassion and strength. They are amongst the world’s great survivors.

  There’s no telling what future awaits; suffice it to say that Everest has the potential once again to be not only the sine qua non of the mountaineering endeavor but also an example of enlightened development of rural communities and stewardship of one of the grandest mountains on Earth. Expect to be surprised, inspired, frustrated, perhaps incredulous—just not bored!

  —PETER ATHANS Nicknamed “Mr. Everest,” Pete Athans is a mountaineering athlete with The North Face who has summited Everest seven times. He and his wife, Liesl Clark, and their two children live part of every year in Khumbu.

  ENDURING REWARDS

  In the spring of 2012 I talked with many climbers awaiting their first try for the summit. I met a single mother of three who explained that dreaming of the Everest adventure had got her through her toughest moments. Her children were grown and she was at Base Camp, trembling with excitement and full of apprehension. I also met a businessman who admitted matter-of-factly that he disliked everything about climbing, but was determined to get his made-it-to-the-top bragging rights.

  I think about the enormous sacrifices these inexperienced climbers make, the expenses and time away from home and family. Yet this high-risk challenge demands preparation, teamwork, and training that enhances the rewards and value of the ascent. We become more acutely attuned to one another’s actions and opinions, yet also independent and self-aware. In the end, however, every climber, whether heavily supported or not, must face the same cold and wind and make the same treacherous trips up and down the mountain. Everest is never an easy or comfortable experience. It requires fortitude to complete an unfamiliar challenge with all the inherent risks: thousands of feet of exposure, rockfall, ice collapse, avalanches, fast-moving storms.

  FILMMAKING HAS BEEN a tradition on Everest since the earliest climbs. British Capt. J. B. Noel photographed and filmed two expeditions in the 1920s, including George Mallory and Sandy Irvine’s fateful attempt in 1924. He screened his films in North America, spawning early interest in the call to Everest.

  Every year people die on the mountain. The summit attempts of spring 2012 left ten dead—some from inexperience or simple mistakes, some because their desire to reach the summit overrode internal circuits warning them to stop and turn around. From afar we judge and blame the victims for bad decisions and unpreparedness. But nobody goes there to die. Climbers get swept up in an all-consuming desire to reach the summit, willfully ignoring signals that say it’s time to turn around. It’s hard to make disciplined decisions in a hypoxic, sleep-deprived, and dehydrated state.

  What are we seeking in that thin air? Is it an experience that we earn through craft, training, and perseverance? An escape from the dulling rituals of our lives down below? An extreme adventure? A transformative personal journey? Or just a feather in one’s cap? Whatever one seeks, the ultimate goal, after all, is to return home safely. But while on that mountain, for those few glorious weeks, the climber experiences the simple rhythms of life, being and staying alive, the rising and setting of the sun, seeking food and shelter. We become more aware of changes in the weather and our bodies’ needs and limitations. Our lives depend on it. A day’s success is often attained by a simple repetitive act: Can you put one foot in front of the other? And after a few heaving gasps for air, can you do it again? You come away from this step-by-step struggle enriched by the surprises, the friendships forged along the way, and above all new knowledge of yourself and of our inherent resilience and fortitude.

  THE CALL OF EVEREST

  Someone can certainly cast a negative image on the mountain based on today’s concerns. But I will never see it like that. Perhaps the mountain will be overrun and overused. Or perhaps it will fall out of vogue, no longer a prize, eclipsed by other more prestigious and less common adventure challenges. In the end, I don’t think it matters. Mount Everest can’t be diminished. It can’t be overrun. It isn’t ours to control. We don’t have the ability to change the shape of the mountain, but only to transform the idea of the mountain itself. The narrative of our experiences there is tightly woven into the fabric of our collective imagination. Will it remain so after the 20,000th ascent?

  The monolithic ice-draped rock we call Everest is a towering screen onto which we project our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. But behind the screen is a cold, remote, disinterested peak that doesn’t care if we scale it or not. It won’t bend or break because of our presence or willfulness.

  When I recall my first ascent in the fading afternoon light in 1983, the experience seems so innocent and private. Yet I can understand, and even anticipate, the deep satisfaction of the 10,000th person who reaches the summit, no matter what motivation takes him or her there. Intent is a private affair.

  We human beings will forever yearn for transcendent experiences that fleetingly set us free from the complexity and confusion of everyday life. My hope is that the individuals who make the journey to this great mountain bring to it the experience, skills, and respect that it commands and deserves.

  VOICES

  DAWN ON MOUNT EVEREST

  One thing I hope will never change is the view on a clear day from the summit of Mount Everest just as the sun begins to rise. Change is inevitable, but there is something special about a sunrise on top of the world. I can remember the frigid air, the type that takes your breath away—and I was already struggling to breathe. There was a persistent wind biting at the small bits of exposed flesh on my face, and the blue light of morning seemed to drag on forever. In the distance I could see a glow of color beginning to form on the horizon and then the tip of a triangular shadow slowly emerging across the view west. The sun’s radiating strength warmed my smile as it crested the horizon, and I watched as the western expanse danced in the morning light. Slowly the shadow of the highest mountain in the world concealed everything in its path below. The triangle blanketing the mountains below, an indication that its presence is the highest, will always be unique to Mount Everest.

  —KRISTOFFER ERICKSON A team member of the Legacy Climb, Kris Erickson is a photographer and explorer. After summiting Everest on May 25, 2012, he and teammate Hilaree O’Neill went on to summit neighboring Lhotse the very next day.

  CLIMBERS APPROACH THE Third Step, which lies at the base of the final pyramid, about 500 feet from the summit.

  FURTHER READING

  Anker, Conrad, and David Roberts. The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest. Simon & Schuster, 1999.

  Astill, Tony. Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance 1935, the Forgotten Adventure. Tony Astill, 2005.

  Band, George. Everest: 50 Years on Top of the World. HarperCollins, 2003. Bass, Dick. Seven Summits. Warner Books, 1986.

  Bonington, Chris. Everest Expeditions Omnibus. London, Weidenfel and Nicolson, 2002.

  Breashears, David. High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places. Simon & Schuster, 1999.

  Breashears, David, and Audrey Salkeld. Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory. National Geographic, 1999.

  Byers, A. C. “Contemporary Human Impacts on Alpine Ecosystems in the Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Khumbu, Nepal.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(1), pp. 112–140, 2005.

  Coburn, Brou
ghton. Everest: Mountain Without Mercy. National Geographic, 1997.

  Coburn, Broughton. The Vast Unknown: The First American Ascent of Everest. Random House, 2013.

  Coburn, Broughton. Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest. HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.

  Davis, Wade. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. Knopf, 2011.

  Fisher, James F. Sherpas: Reflections on Change in Himalayan Nepal. University of California Press, 1990.

  Fürer-Haimendorf, C. von. The Sherpas of Nepal: Buddhist Highlanders. John Murray, 1964.

  Gansser, A. Geology of the Himalayas. Interscience Publishers/John Wiley and Sons, 1964.

  Gillman, Peter, ed. Everest: The Best Writing and Pictures from Seventy Years of Human Endeavour. Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

  Gillman, Peter. Everest: Eighty Years of Triumph and Tragedy. The Mountaineers Books, 2001.

  Hornbein, Thomas F. Everest: The West Ridge. 50th Anniversary Edition. The Mountaineers Books, 2013.

  Hultgren, Herbert N. High Altitude Medicine. Hultgren Publications, 1997.

  Isserman, Maurice, and Stewart Weaver. Fallen Giants. Yale University Press, 2008.

  Jeffries, M. The Story of Mount Everest National Park. Cobb/Horwood Publications, 1984.

  Keay, John. The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named. HarperCollins, 2000.

  Klatzel, Frances. Gaiety of Spirit: The Sherpas of Everest. Rocky Mountain Books, 2010. Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster. Villard Books, 1997.

  Kukuczka, Jerzy. My Vertical World. The Mountaineers Books, 1992.

  Lewis-Jones, Huw. Mountain Heroes: Portraits of Adventure. FalconGuides, 2011.

  Lowe, George, and Huw Lewis-Jones. The Conquest of Everest: Original Photographs from the Legendary First Ascent. Thames & Hudson, 2013.

  Macfarlane, A., R. B. Sorkhabi, and J. Quade, eds. Himalaya and Tibet: Mountain Roots to Mountain Tops. The Geological Society of America, Special Publication 328, 2009.

  McDonald, Bernadette. Freedom Climbers. Rocky Mountain Books, 2011.

  McDonald, Bernadette, I’ll Call You in Kathmandu. The Mountaineers Books, 2005.

  Rose, David, and Ed Douglas. Regions of the Heart. Michael Joseph, 1999.

  Stevens, S. Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya. University of California Press, 1993.

  Summers, Julie. Fearless on Everest. The Mountaineers Books, 2000.

  Tenzing, Tashi. Tenzing Norgay and the Sherpas of Everest. Ragged Mountain Press, 2003.

  Ullman, James Ramsey. Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing. Hazell Watson and Viney Ltd., 1955.

  Unsworth, Walt. Everest: A Mountaineering History. Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Webster, Ed. Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest. Mountain Imagery, 2000.

  West, John B. High Life: A History of High-Altitude Physiology and Medicine. Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Whittaker, Jim. A Life on the Edge. The Mountaineers Books, 1999.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  CONRAD ANKER is one of America’s best known alpinists. Born in San Francisco in 1962, he first climbed the granite domes and sheer faces of Yosemite Valley near Big Oak Flat, where his great-grandfather pioneered. His parents, outdoors enthusiasts, encouraged his passion for climbing. Anker graduated from the University of Utah while pursuing expedition climbing around the globe. In 1999, climbing Everest, Anker found the body of early British explorer George Mallory, who was last seen nearing the summit in 1924. He is co-author of The Lost Explorer and is a key character in the National Geographic film The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest. Conrad Anker is a professional athlete for The North Face and lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, and their sons, Max, Sam, and Isaac.

  THOMAS HORNBEIN, M.D., is an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Washington. An anesthesiologist specializing in the physiology of breathing, he has always pursued mountaineering along with his professional career. In May 1963, he and Willi Unsoeld, members of the first American expedition to Everest, became the first climbers to ascend Mount Everest via the West Ridge. A span on that mountainside has since been named for him: the Hornbein Couloir. Hornbein wrote of his climbing experience in Everest: The West Ridge, issued in a third edition for the 50th anniversary of the expedition, in 2013. As he enters his eighth decade, Hornbein remains active in exploring, climbing, and caring for mountain environments.

  DAVID BREASHEARS is a filmmaker, mountaineer, and executive director of GlacierWorks, a nonprofit concerned about climate change in the Himalaya. In 1983, he transmitted the first live television pictures from the summit of Everest; in 1985 he became the first American to summit Everest twice. He also co-directed and co-produced the first IMAX film shot on Mount Everest, which premiered in March 1998 and recounted the tragic 1996 climbing season. He is the author of High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest, co-author of National Geographic’s Last Climb, and contributor to National Geographic’s Everest: Mountain Without Mercy.

  ALTON C. BYERS, PH.D., a National Geographic explorer, is a mountain geographer, photographer, writer, and climber with more than 30 years of experience working in major mountain regions throughout the world. His areas of expertise include applied research, community-based alpine conservation and restoration methods, and climate-change impacts in high mountain environments. He has published and lectured widely on topics dealing with mountain conservation, culture, exploration, and climate change.

  BROUGHTON COBURN has worked in development, environmental conservation, and protected area management in Nepal, Tibet, and India for 20 years and has overseen several charitable projects in Sagarmatha National Park. He has written or edited seven books, including National Geographic’s best-selling Everest: Mountain Without Mercy and Triumph on Everest, a biography of Sir Edmund Hillary for children. He collaborated with Jamling Tenzing Norgay on the book Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest. His book The Vast Unknown: The First American Ascent of Everest, on the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition, will be published by Random House in 2013.

  MARK JENKINS is a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine specializing in difficult or dangerous assignments. The author of four critically acclaimed books—A Man’s Life, The Hard Way, To Timbuktu, and Off the Map—Jenkins has won numerous literary awards including the National Magazine Award, the Banff Literary Award, and the American Alpine Club Literary Award. He has covered the guerrilla war in the Congo, land mines in Cambodia, AIDS in Botswana, and koalas in Australia, and has undertaken more than 50 mountaineering expeditions around the world, from Tibet to Bolivia, Afghanistan to Uganda, and Greenland to Pakistan.

  BRUCE JOHNSON, PH.D., is a professor of medicine and physiology at the Mayo Clinic and a consultant in the clinic’s Division of Cardiovascular Diseases. He runs the Human Integrative and Environmental Physiology Laboratory and has a long history of studying limiting factors in human performance. He has set up mobile laboratories throughout the world, including in Antarctica, South America, and Nepal. He has published and lectured widely on human physiology related to health and disease.

  DAVID R. LAGESON, PH.D., is a professor of geology at Montana State University. He received his doctorate from the University of Wyoming in 1980 and has taught and conducted research at Montana State for 32 years. His specialty is structural geology and tectonics. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Geological Society of London.

  BERNADETTE MCDONALD, former vice president for mountain culture at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, has authored eight books on mountaineering and mountain culture. Her numerous awards include the Boardman Tasker Prize and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize, awarded for Freedom Climbers in 2011; Italy’s ITAS Prize in 2010; and India’s Kekoo Naoroji Award in 2008, 2009, and 2012. The American Alpine Club awarded her
its highest literary honor for excellence in mountain literature. McDonald spends her discretionary time in the mountains, climbing, ski touring, and hiking.

  Illustrations & Text credits

  Cover, C. Richards Photography

  Front Matter

  Edmund Hillary, Courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); Barry Bishop/NGS.

  Chapter 1

  C. Richards Photography; Barry Bishop/NGS; Barry Bishop/NGS; Mark Jenkins; Max Lowe; © Eddie Bauer. Photo by Jake Norton.

  Chapter 2

  Courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); Courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, Image Archive; Andy Bardon Photography.

  Chapter 3

  Robb Kendrick Photography/NGS; Robb Kendrick Photography/NGS; Andy Bardon Photography; Andy Bardon Photography; Andy Bardon Photography; Archives of Alton Byers; Scott Warren/Aurora Photos; Andy Bardon Photography.

  Chapter 4

  Steve Winter/NGS; The Asahi Shimbun Premium Archive via Getty Images; Image by Robert Simmon, based on data © 2003 Geoeye. Courtesy of NASA; Colin Monteath/Hedgehog House/Minden Pictures/Getty Images; Alex Treadway/NGS; Tim Watson/National Geographic My Shot; Paul Harris/AWL Images/Getty Images; Photograph by Alton C. Byers; Photograph by Alton C. Byers; Photograph by Fritz Müller, archives of Alton C. Byers; Kyohei Mitazaki/National Geographic My Shot.

  Chapter 5

  Luther G. Jerstad/NGS; The Salkeld Collection; Irvine Archive; T. Howard Somervell, Courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); HO/Reuters/Corbis; Nawang Gombu/NGS; William F. Unsoeld/NGS; Vincent J. Musi/NGS; Stephen Venables; Neil Beidleman/Woodfin Camp & Associates; © COLLECTION MARCO SIFFREDI; Babu and Lakpa Sherpa; Mark Theissen/Becky Hale, NGS; The North Face; Picture Norgay Archive/Reuters.