THE ODDS ON EVEREST
The pre-monsoon climbing season on Everest this year has seen 11 deaths so far; three of them were Indians. There have been photographs for some years now, of long queues of climbers, even hundreds on a given clear day, being herded up a flank on the mountain like a train of shackled sheep. Even so, the photos of the traffic jam on the summit ridge this year, accompanying news of climbers dying, having run out of bottled oxygen just waiting, had a touch of the scandalous.
Climbers and hired mountain workers die on Everest almost every year. It is hardly news anymore unless someone famous, or a large number of them die in a single episode. But it’s the very odds themselves that are part of the attraction for a climber. On Everest, among the odds are the thin air, steep and icy terrain, extreme weather, the threat of avalanches, rock-fall, toppling seracs and yawning crevasses. And lately, who would have thought, overcrowding.
Just last year, 802 people stood atop Everest, bringing the number of times Everest has been climbed to 8,306. K2 has only ever been climbed by 306 people.
But let’s be clear: of the 18 climbed and named routes on the various faces of Everest, only two draw this near-stampede; the easier South Col route from Nepal and the Northeast Ridge from Tibet. It was only after 1990, when Nepal allowed permits for the commercial guiding of paying clients, that almost anyone with enough money could get a berth on one of these two routes. This currently costs $35,000 to $75,000 (Rs 24.3 lakh to Rs 52.1 lakh) per person, depending on who you hire. It is their job to take the sharp end of the rope, fix ropes and ladders, cook and carry and literally chaperone you up and down the mountain. A style of ‘climbing’ driven by the mystique of Everest, yet the antithesis of an implicit ethic of climbing as sport.
And how does one reconcile ‘climbing’ the highest mountain on earth, when you could, with the turn of a knob on your oxygen bottle, bring it down to sea level? As far back as 1978, the ascent by Messner and Habeler without
hired help or bottled oxygen demonstrated beyond doubt that this was possible. Since then, there have been not 10, not 100, but over 200 ascents of the Everest without the use of supplemental oxygen. Yet, both hired help and ‘cheating’ with bottled oxygen to get to the top have been normalised by the colonial-style ‘exploration’ of the early 1900s.
Having failed to be the first to reach the North and South Poles, Britain hogged all opportunity to be the first to ‘conquer’ Everest, the ‘third pole’. Early attempts saw intrepid climbers such as George Mallory reach altitudes of over 8,000 metres without bottled oxygen. It was after a couple of attempts in 1924 and at the prospect of failing that Mallory and Irvine took to using bottled ‘English air’, as the Tibetan and Nepali porters nicknamed it.
Not surprisingly, even the language associated with climbing Everest remains grandiose and baroque. Mountaineers, not climbers, scale and not climb the mountain. Whatever means these ‘mountaineers’ employed, and however terrified they may have been on the mountain, on their safe return, and to the world at large, they had ‘conquered’ the mountain. Sir Edmund Hillary’s first words to George Lowe on his return from the summit in 1953 were, “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.” There were no less than 362 porters on the mountain on that military-style siege.
While some climbers from the West may rue the vulgarisation, the bringing low and making common of Everest, let us also acknowledge that it was they who set it on this path. And, at the end of the day, it somehow isn’t these grand successes that catch our imagination as much as the heroic failures of people like Mallory and Andrew Irvine, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who pushed the limits of the unknown, perhaps the greatest of odds on Everest.
Hiring help and ‘cheating’ with bottled oxygen have been normalised by the colonial-style ‘exploration’ of the early 1900s