Mortals on Mount Olympus
A history of climbing Mount Everest
by Borgna Brunner
In 1852, the Great Trigonometric Survey of India determined that
Mount Everest, until then an obscure Himalayan peak, had been
definitively identified as the world's highest mountain. This
announcement captured the international imagination, and soon the
idea of reaching the summit of the "roof of the world" was viewed as
the ultimate geographic feat. Attempts to climb Everest, however,
could not begin until 1921, when the forbidden kingdom of Tibet first
opened its borders to outsiders.
Mallory and Irvine
Sir Edmund Hillary poses with
Sherpa climber Tenzing Norgay
at Everest base.
On June 8, 1924, two members of a British expedition, George Mallory
and Andrew Irvine, attempted the summit. Famous for his retort to the press—"because it's
there"—when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, Mallory had already failed twice at
reaching the summit. The two men were last spotted "going strong" for the top until the
clouds perpetually swirling around Everest engulfed them. They then vanished.
Mallory's body was not found for another 75 years, in May 1999. No evidence was found on
his body—such as a camera containing photos of the summit, or a diary entry recording
their time of arrival at the summit—to clear up the mystery of whether these two Everest
pioneers made it to the top before the mountain killed them.
RELATED LINKS
Everest Almanac
Crossword: Famous
Mountains
Quiz: Explorers and
Adventurers
Measuring Mountains
Everest's New Height
Hillary and Tenzing
Ten more expeditions over a period of thirty years failed to conquer
Everest, with 13 losing their lives. Then, on May 29, 1953, Edmund
Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, and Tenzing Norgay, an acclaimed
Sherpa climber, became the first to reach the roof of the world. Their
climb was made from the Nepalese side, which had eased its
restrictions on foreigners at about the same time that Tibet, invaded
in 1950 by China, shut its borders.
Everest Timeline
Climbing the World's
Fourteen 8,000-meter
Peaks
The Seven Summits
Everest Trivia
Everest Web Sites
World famous overnight, Hillary became a hero of the British
empire—the news reached London just in time for Elizabeth II's
coronation—and Tenzing was touted as a symbol of national pride by
three separate nations: Nepal, Tibet, and India.
Everest Reading List
The Highest Mountains
in the World
Into the Death Zone
Although not considered one of the most technically challenging mountains to climb (K2, the
world's second highest mountain, is far more difficult), the dangers of Everest include
avalanches, crevasses, ferocious winds up to 125 mph, sudden storms, temperatures of
40°F below zero, and oxygen deprivation. In the "death zone"—above 25,000 feet—the air
holds only a third as much oxygen as at sea level, heightening the chances of hypothermia,
frostbite, high-altitude pulmonary edema (lungs fatally fill with fluid) and high-altitude
cerebral edema (oxygen-starved brain swells up).
Even when breathing bottled oxygen, climbers experience extreme fatigue, impaired
judgment and coordination, headaches, nausea, double vision, and sometimes
hallucinations. Expeditions spend months acclimatizing and usually attempt Everest only in
May and October, avoiding the winter snows and the summer monsoons.
After Hillary and Tenzing's ascent of Everest, other records were broken, including the first
ascent by a woman, the first solo ascent, the first to traverse up one route and down
another, and the first descent on skis.
Messner and Habeler
Yet none of these records compared to the next true milestone: climbing Everest without
supplemental oxygen. As far back as Mallory, who called the use of bottled oxygen
"unsporting," climbers found they had no alternative.
But on May 8, 1978, two Tyrolean mountaineers, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler,
achieved the impossible. Messner had resolved that nothing would come between him and
the mountain; he would climb Everest without supplemental oxygen or not at all. At the
summit he described himself as "nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung."
Climbers who
die on the
mountain are
left where they
perish because
Incredulous, some disputed the veracity of a climb without
supplemental oxygen. Yet two years later, Messner quashed all
skepticism when on August 20, 1980, he again ascended Everest
without oxygen, this time solo (another Everest first). Climbing
without oxygen has now become de rigueur among the climbing elite,
and by 1996 more than 60 men and women had reached the top
relying on their own gasping lungs.
the effects of
altitude make it
An Icy Graveyard
nearly
impossible to
drag bodies
away. Those
ascending
Everest pass
through an icy
graveyard
littered with
remnants of old
tents and
equipment,
empty oxygen
From 1921—2009, Everest has been climbed by more than 4,500
people from over eighty nations. More than 200 have lost their lives,
making the odds on not coming down alive about one in twenty-one.
The dead are left where they perish because the effects of altitude
make it nearly impossible to drag bodies off the mountain. Those
ascending Everest pass through an icy graveyard littered with
remnants of old tents and equipment, empty oxygen canisters, and
frozen corpses.
In the past few years, media access to Everest has mushroomed: live
Internet reports have been sent from the mountain (using solar
energy); an Imax film crew has documented a climb; and Jon
Krakauer's bestselling account about an Everest ascent gone wrong,
Into Thin Air, has introduced cwm, col, sirdar, short-rope, and Hillary
Step into the vocabulary of mainstream America.
canisters, and
frozen corpses.
Gods and Mortals Above the Clouds
One reason for the recent media attention is the novelty of
comparatively ordinary people venturing up a Mount Olympus formerly limited to
mountaineering gods like Messner and Hillary. There are now guided trips up the mountain,
fanning debate about the commercialization of Everest. Pathologists and postal workers can
now follow in the footsteps of the greatest mountaineers. Purists like Hillary lament the lack
of respect for the mountain, and young Turks boast they can get nearly anyone up the
mountain as long as they're in decent physical shape and have $65,000 to spare.
Another reason for so much media attention is the appalling waste of human life. In May
1996, eight lost their lives in the single greatest disaster on the mountain—yet it did not
stop others from attempting the climb just weeks later, resulting in four more deaths. The
total for the year was fifteen. As the number of climbers grow, so does the death toll, with
Everest taking down world-class climbers and novice adventurers alike.
With so many ambitious climbers determined to scale Everest, their ethics and singleminded pursuit of personal glory have come under criticism. In 2006, more than 40 climbers
were believed to have passed by a dying British climber on their way to the summit—none
came to his aid. It is true that helping a gravely ill or injured climber while in Everest's
death zone could very well jeopardize one's own life. It is also true that it is grossly unfair
when climbers have had to sacrifice their own dreams of climbing Everest in order to rescue
irresponsible and poorly prepared individuals who never should have been on the mountain
in the first place. But one wonders how such a climber sleeps at night, knowing he left
another to die, whatever the reason. As Hillary remarked about the incident, "I think the
whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people
just want to get to the top. . .”