… and, did you pack out all your trash?
(… including your poop?)
The Sherpa thing makes it tricky, as there is now an entire segment of the Nepalese economy depending on Everest tourism, and the alternative is crushing poverty.
Maybe they should quadruple the fees and make a quota. I heard one suggestion of forcing climbers to pay a deposit that they don’t get back until they haul down their trash.
That video said 100, 000 climbers a year attempt Everest. That can’t be right, can it? I was under the impression it was hundreds.
Hundreds try to summit, but purportedly ~100,000 visit Sagamartha National Park every year. Base camp is apparently a tourist destination in of itself.
Maybe because you have to be from an older generation to venerate the accomplishment? I’m just barely young enough to consider it a narcissistic and commercial endeavor, and I’m sure the Celtling would just be horrified if anybody under 40 said they’d done it.
There really aren’t many. The most famous one, “green boots,” is a person who died during the same disaster that Krakauer wrote about, and which is being discussed - the 1996 disaster where 8 people died. “Green Boots” is known to be one of the members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition, which lost 3 people. He has been identified as Tsewang Paljor.
It’s not like people aren’t noticing that someone has died. Sometimes someone just disappears. They may or may not be recognized if they are later found. One of the people who disappeared in 1996 was found the following climbing season, hanging from ropes at the Hillary Step. Others might never be found. Some may turn up after enough time has passed that it’s not immediately obvious who they are.
George Mallory’s body was found in 1999, 75 years after he died on Everest.
It’s mostly because of the expense and time away from work. People under 40 (or 50) generally aren’t able to afford it or get the time off.
I did grow up in the generation that venerated the accomplishment, went to British schools and remember our teachers speaking with admiration for Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
However, my interest in the rise of the average age of those summiting has no connection to veneration. I don’t think that those summitting nowadays are particularly admirable. I’m looking with interest, and not with admiration, at the phenomenon of richer older climbers becoming more common.
My point was more that younger people wouldn’t be interested in doing it, because they don’t venerate the accomplishment. Part of me wants to raise funds to hire Sherpas to clean up that trash heap at Camp IV. But it may be the saving of the place. The more people who see the photos of the Disneyesque roller-coaster queues, and the piles of trash, the sooner this whole business will die out.
An article about how climate change has created more dangerous conditions.
I’ve known only 1 person who ever climbed Everest but I’ve known at least a dozen who did the base camp. And all of the base camp crowd seemed quite satisfied with that with no need to go further up the mountain. From what I can tell sitting here comfortably at 636 feet about MSL the two experiences are quite different with very different levels of hazard.
Going further up the mountain is a $90K+ consideration, so very few people are interested in that.
And, it’s a major difference between trekking to EBC and climbing through the Khumbu icefall, which is just above EBC.
The handful of people I know who have trekked to EBC have marveled at how thin the air is there. And then I remember Krakauer also marveling about the thin air at EBC and wondering how the hell they were supposed to make it to the summit which is more than 10,000 feet higher than EBC. He later acknowledged the successful process of acclimatization after going up to camps I, then II, then III, each time returning to EBC. After the climb to camp III, when they returned to EBC before their final summit push, the words he used to describe the air at EBC were “thick”, and “sweet”, IIRC.
The porters speak out.
Fascinating article, Spice_Weasel. This is an indictment of the whole climbing industry. Maybe, just maybe, something will change because of these terrible incidents.
I think that this is appropriate here. Two women have climbed thirteen of the fourteen 8k meter plus mountains. They were both, at the same time, trying the be the first woman to climb all of them. Taking two different approaches to the same peak, they died in avalanches.
probably the best visual representation so far of what was going on … (70 sec. movie)
I did not read the article, but I thought it had already been done — a woman summiting the 14 8,000m peaks. I looked it up.
In 1986, the first man did it.
In 2010, the first woman did it. Per wiki,
“In 2010, Spaniard Edurne Pasaban became the first woman to summit all 14 eight-thousanders, but with the aid of supplementary oxygen. In 2011, Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner became the first woman to summit all 14 eight-thousanders without the aid of supplementary oxygen.”
Looks like the recent attempts were for the first American woman.
I just read more carefully. They were trying to be the first American women to accomplish this. I think it would have cooler for them to have tried to summit together.