Since the dawn of civilization, man has striven to do things that he wasn’t supposed to
do.
Not supposed to be able to see in the dark, man harnessed the power of fire.
Not supposed to be able to cross oceans, man built ships.
Not supposed to be able to fly, man invented airplanes.
And when we found the tallest mountain in the world nestled in one of the most remote
places imaginable, there were men who felt the urge to climb to the top of it, despite
our bodies clearly not being designed to do so.
Today, Mount Everest is visited by more people than ever before, people willing to spend
tens of thousands of dollars for a chance to climb to the top.
But this is hardly a trip to Yellowstone we’re talking about here, the mountain is a killer.
There are a dozen different ways to die on the slopes of Everest, the bodies of dead
climbers left behind on the mountain for others to pass by, a grisly reminder of the risks
one takes when trying to conquer it.
Is it worth it, to brave the dangers to have the chance to stand on the roof of the world?
Judging by how crowded the slopes of Everest are in a typical climbing season, someone
certainly seems to think so.
The Mountain
As interesting as Everest is, its name is certainly….uninspiring.
It was named by Andrew Scott Waugh, the Surveyor General of India, in 1856, after Sir George
Everest, Waugh’s predecessor and mentor.
Everest himself didn’t want the mountain named for him, he wanted to keep to the traditional
names used by the Nepalese and Tibetan peoples native to the area, as was done with other
Himalayan mountains.
But finding a commonly used name was difficult, not least of which because both Nepal and
Tibet refused to allow Westerners into their country.
So Mount Everest stuck, even though the Nepalese name for the mountain, Sagarmatha, meaning
“goddess of the sky”, is far more interesting.
Mount Everest stands 29,029 feet high, straddling the border between Nepal and Chinese controlled
Tibet, the border between the two countries actually crosses over the summit of the mountain.
The mountain is so tall that the top of it juts into the stratosphere, exposing it to
the howling winds of the jet stream.
This contributes to the frigid temperature on the mountain: an average temperature of
-17 degree Fahrenheit, dropping to below -30 in winter.
Dangers from Top to Bottom
So what exactly is so dangerous about Mount Everest, anyway?
The truth is, there are so many dangers we have to work our way from the bottom of the
mountain to the summit in listing them off, much like a mountain climber.
In fact, let’s pretend that you’re one of the thousands that flock to Everest every
year in order to try to climb it.
If you’re anything like me, and an alarming number of people who attempt Everest every
year, you have limited mountaineering experience in general, and even less high altitude climbing
experience, which is an entirely different animal.
The most common place to ascend is on the Nepalese side of the mountain, so that’s
mostly what we’ll be describing.
Your journey begins by flying into the capital city, Kathmandu, and from there, taking a
short hop to the small town of Lukla.
But from there, most conveniences of modern civilization end, and you’re going to be
walking the rest of the way.
It takes about a week for you to hike to Everest Base Camp, this is a necessary step in the
process of climbing the mountain because it acclimatizes you to the high altitude.
A person that has lived their lives at mostly low altitudes can run into a lot of health
problems when climbing, the most serious of which is altitude sickness.
If someone were to invent a transporter and zap you from sea level to Mount Everest instantaneously,
most likely you’d be passed out within minutes because your body isn’t used to how little
oxygen is in the air.
The most serious form of altitude sickness is high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), where
your lungs malfunction so badly that fluid fills them up and left untreated, will kill
you very quickly.
Base Camp
After your journey, your new home is Everest Base Camp, a massive tent city situated at
17,700 feet.
This is where all expeditions from this side of Everest begin.
Climbers will spend several weeks here further acclimatizing to the altitude, while Sherpas
are busy preparing the route ahead for the upcoming climbing season.
Who are the Sherpas?
They are the indigneous people to the area, who’ve spent hundreds of years living in
the Himalayas and are thus well acclimated to the altitude.
They have become invaluable to Everest expeditions, being hired out as climbing guides, porters,
and other manual labor tasks.
For people who live in one of the most impoverished countries in the world, Western tourism money
can be a lucrative living, but unfortunately it also comes at a high price: a third of
the people who’ve died on Everest have been Sherpas.
Even at Base Camp, things aren’t exactly safe: the tent city is still vulnerable to
the whims of Mother Nature.
On April 25, 2015, a massive, 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked Nepal, killing around 9,000
people and causing $10 billion in damages.
150 away from the epicenter, the quake started an avalanche that completely flattened Base
Camp on Everest, killing 22 climbers and injuring over 60.
Avalanches are insidious: assuming you aren’t killed by an object that hits you during the
event, or get swept off a cliff and fall to your death, you can find yourself completely
buried in snow.
And not snow like you played in as a kid, either: once the snow settles, it compresses
into the consistency of concrete, making it hard to dig through.
If you don’t suffocate, you might just live long enough to freeze to death while awaiting
rescue.
Khumbu Icefall
Assuming there are no avalanches to kill you at Base Camp, after a couple weeks of rest,
you’re ready to continue.
At the bottom of Mount Everest is the Khumbu Glacier, a slow moving river of ice that travels
an estimated four feet a day.
At the top of the glacier is the Khumbu Icefall, where the ice drops off a slope to form the
glacier below.
The Icefall is one of the most treacherous sections of the mountain.
Huge blocks of ice the size of houses, called seracs, can collapse or tumble down without
warning, and yawning crevasses, or cracks in the ice, can form suddenly, swallowing
anyone unlucky enough to be standing there at the time.
In 2014, a sudden avalanche of ice cascaded down the Icefall, killing 16 climbers.
Once you make it through the Icefall, you stop at Camp 1, the first of 4 camps situated
on Everest to provide rest and acclimatization to climbers.
Climbers will generally spend several days traversing the Icefall back and forth between
Base Camp and Camp 1 to build up their stamina and get their lungs used to the altitude before
continuing upwards to Camp 2, also called Advanced Base Camp.
Into
the Death Zone
From a technical standpoint, Everest is not a hard mountain to climb.
The routes to the summit are well established and prep work, like fixing ropes and ladders
to sections that require them, is done in advance by teams of Sherpas to make things
easier for the following climbers.
This is probably why so many mountaineering novices attempt it in the first place.
So there aren’t as many deaths from falling on Everest as there might be on other mountains,
but it does happen occasionally, either through equipment malfunctions or human error.
This increases in likelihood the higher up the mountain you go.
Once climbers reach Camp 4, at 26,000 feet, they’ve crossed into the Death Zone: the
altitude at which there simply is not enough breathable oxygen in the atmosphere to support
life.
Most climbers use oxygen masks at this height, because while it is possible to go without
it, the truth is that you are slowly suffocating the entire time you’re there.
A lack of oxygen to your brain is called hypoxia, and it impairs your judgment and rational
thinking skills, sufferers describe the feeling as similar to being drunk.
At this altitude, any mistake can be fatal.
Everything is working against you, from the tricky terrain to the bitter cold and howling
wind.
The lack of oxygen in the air only compounds the problems.
If something happens to you, anything from altitude sickness, an accidental fall, frostbite,
hypothermia, or even an ordinary heart attack, rescue is difficult if not impossible.
Until recently, helicopters couldn’t fly high enough onto Everest to rescue climbers
in distress, and even with today’s modern technology, few pilots are willing to risk
it as the weather around Everest is notoriously unpredictable.
Even worse, other climbers will probably be unable to help you, as they would lack the
energy to do anything but keep themselves moving.
Lowering someone down a mountain on ropes is difficult and dangerous at the best of
times, doing it in the Death Zone risks the lives of everyone involved.
So there is often no choice but to leave the stricken climbers to die.
And of course, because recovering a dead body at that altitude presents many of the same
problems as rescuing someone alive but not able to climb themselves, most of the time
the bodies are left where they lay, or covered by rocks in a rough funeral cairn.
The top of Mount Everest is littered with such corpses, some of whom have been there
for almost 100 years, protected from decay by the frigid temperatures and often serving
as landmarks for other climbers.
One area strewn with bodies dressed in brightly colored climbing gear is known as “rainbow
valley”.
Summit Push
In order to make an attempt to summit Everest, all conditions have to be perfect.
You have to have a window of good weather, which is by no means guaranteed.
It’s entirely possible to spend a month on Everest and end up stuck at Camp 4 without
even being able to make an attempt because of bad weather or high winds.
All your equipment and your body have to be in perfect working order.
And most important of all, you need to have an impeccable sense of timing.
An assault on the peak of Everest is structured like a military mission, and like a military
mission, if anything goes wrong, people can and will die.
If the conditions are right, you leave Camp 4 at a precise time.
You are breathing supplemental oxygen, but you only have a finite amount of gas.
And you don’t want to be descending the mountain in the dark, when the temperatures
can drop down to forty degrees below zero.
Because of all that, you are given a strict turnaround time: if you don’t make it to
the top by a certain time, no matter how close you are, you must turn around and return to
Camp 4.
Imagine being only a couple of hundred feet from the top and having to turn around.
You would certainly be reluctant, but continuing on past the turnaround time puts you in danger,
in an already dangerous environment.
Everest Disaster
These lessons were learned the hard way, in one of the most famous mountaineering disasters
of modern times.
On May 10th, 1996, a large group of climbers set out on their summit push.
They were members of two guided climbing expeditions, Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness.
This was the start of Everest’s commercial era, where clients would pay fees in the tens
of thousands to hire professional climbing guides to escort them up the mountain.
On this day, 34 climbers were attempting to summit Everest, at that time the most in a
single day to try for the summit.
The group was slowed by several factors: the ropes that were supposed to be fixed ahead
of time to help climbers up the steeper parts weren’t in place, forcing a delay while
the task was completed.
The amount of climbers on the mountain contributed to the bottlenecks, and was compounded by
the fact that only one rope was fixed, forcing people climbing up the mountain and people
descending down the mountain to alternate using it.
But the worst delay of all was caused by the summit itself.
There isn’t much on the summit of Mount Everest.
It’s not very big, about the size of a large dining room table.
Buddhist prayer flags are strung across it, along with other offerings left by summiters
over the years.
There certainly isn’t a gift shop.
Other than admiring the view from the roof of the world, there’s not much to do.
But if you had just spent a month climbing a mountain, and reached the top, fulfilling
what for many climbers is a lifelong dream, you certainly aren’t going to get up there,
take a quick look around, and immediately head back down.
They say that climbers who summit Everest feel an intense rush of euphoria, almost as
though the mountain itself is rewarding them for braving the dangers to make the pilgrimage.
Most likely it’s a combination of an endorphin rush mixed with a lower than usual oxygen
count in the bloodstream, but the idea is still romantic.
The clients of Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness certainly felt that euphoria, sticking
around on the summit long after they should have descended.
In fact, everyone who summited that day did so after the agreed upon 1PM turnaround time.
Competition between the two groups probably played a role in this, as well as the fact
that when you have paying customers, you try to get them their money’s worth.
But when the climbers descended, they ran into a storm that they wouldn’t have been
exposed to if they had stuck to their turnaround time.
Wind gusts of up to 80 miles an hour buffeted them, dropping the temperature to 60 below.
By now they had all run out of supplemental oxygen, and were suffering from the effects
of hypoxia.
And the rush of snow and clouds completely blinded them, and they lost all sense of orientation.
By the time it was over, 5 climbers from the group were dead, including the leaders of
both guided expedition teams.
On the north side of the mountain, another group of three climbers from the Indo-Tibetan
Border Police was caught in the storm and were killed too, bringing the death toll to
8.
It was the deadliest day in history at the top of Everest.
One of the climbers on the Adventure Consultants team, Jon Krakauer, was a reporter on assignment
for Outside Magazine and witnessed the tragedy firsthand.
He wrote a book about the experience called Into Thin Air that became a bestseller and
exposed the public at large to the bizarre and dangerous world of high altitude mountaineering.
Modern Day, Modern Problems
Rather than deter would be climbers, the 1996 Everest Disaster seemed to trigger an explosion
in popularity for tackling Everest.
Every year since then, the amount of climbers applying for permits from the Nepalese and
Chinese governments has gone up, and Base Camp gets more and more crowded.
This overcrowding has led to a number of...unpleasant problems.
Garbage, including empty food packages, spent oxygen bottles, broken climbing gear, and
more, is simply left behind by careless climbers, forcing entire expeditions to be mounted simply
to clean up the trash.
Even more disgusting to think about is the estimated 26,000 pounds of human waste left
behind on Everest at the end of a climbing season.
Public bathrooms are something found in civilization, not one of the most inhospitable places on
Earth.
And while lessons have been learned from the 1996 disaster, climbers are still killed every
year on Everest, in many cases their bodies joining the cadre of frozen corpses already
scattered all over the Death Zone.
But it is perhaps this danger that draws people to Everest in the first place.
Few other places offer the opportunity to test yourself against the worst that Mother
Nature has to offer, while providing a great story to tell your grandchildren AND one of
the world’s most spectacular views.
And, this being the modern age, a perfect place for a selfie.
Mount Everest isn’t for the faint hearted.
But for those who brave its slopes, it is a rite of passage, a chance to push yourself
past all known limits to find out what you are truly capable of.
As Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 was one of the first two people to summit Everest, said,
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
Despite that romantic notion, the mountain still claims its deadly harvest of unfortunate
climbers every year: For every 100 people who summit Everest, 4 die.
Which is why Mount Everest will probably forever be, the World’s Deadliest Tourist Attraction.