Mount Everest collapsing under our weight

The loss of Hillary Step lays the mountain open to more human destruction. We should remember we do not own these awesome places

t’s a scene from one of John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings. Or a modern disaster movie. But this isn’t computer-generated imagery. Everest has begun to collapse, as if under the collective weight of its explorers.

Or so it seems. Reports that the rocky outcrop Hillary Step, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who first climbed the mountain with Tenzing Norgay in 1953, may have been destroyed during the Nepal earthquake of 2015 (although some Nepalese say it’s just been buried under snow), speak to our desire to extend our human dominion. Even the name signifies appropriation — our taxonomy of nature. Metaphorically, it seems, the Earth reacts.

But some climbers now fear that the disappearance of the near-vertical step — a final challenge to those attempting the ascent — will make it easier to climb Everest — and thus open it up to new depredations. Some even wonder if it is time to impose severe limits — or even a ban — on expeditions that are becoming too popular, and too invasive, affecting the very qualities that define the place.

The politics of the issue are complicated. There are local economies predicated on the visits of crazy westerners determined to ascend those heights, as if humankind were affronted by the notion of eminence. There have been heroes and there have been sacrifices. But to this end? Where the mountain becomes one big litter heap, and we don’t even take our dead away with us, let alone our rubbish, Everest literally becomes a graveyard for our ambitions.

There may now be a good case for declaring Everest and other over-popular peaks as reservations — perhaps even in the way that visitors to Uluru in Australia’s Northern Territory have been asked not to climb a site sacred to the Anangu people.

Ownership versus wonder

Although inevitably, it seems some people cannot resist, and recent accounts of climbers stranded on Uluru have only underlined the sensitivity of these issues and conflicting meaning — of ownership versus wonder. It is the great paradox: The fragile human set against apparently immovable majesty.

Clearly, better qualities are also at work. It is human curiosity to see stairs, a tree, a hill and the atavistic instinct is to climb up, to get a better view.

We need to reinstate our awe and dump the bucket list. We do not own these places, no matter how many names we give them. The fact that someone has stuck a flag at the top of a peak has no greater meaning than that fact. What does it mean that only three people have descended to the ocean’s profoundest depths? Or that the Russians have planted their flag on the Arctic sea bed, or the Americans their stars and stripes on the moon? When humans are over, and have become just another geological stratum, the entirety of our existence will be represented by a layer no thicker than a cigarette paper. Now I find that rather beautifully humbling. Philip Hoare is the author of Leviathan or, The Whale and The Sea Inside.