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Mortals on Mount Olympus: A History of
Climbing Everest
Called Chomolungma (“goddess mother of the world”) in Tibet and
Sagarmatha (“goddess of the sky”) in Nepal, Mount Everest once went by the
pedestrian name of Peak XV among Westerners. That was before surveyors
established that it was the highest mountain on Earth, a fact that came as
something of a surprise—Peak XV had seemed lost in the crowd of other
formidable Himalayan peaks, many of which gave the illusion of greater
height.
In 1852 the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India measured Everest's
elevation as 29,002 feet above sea level. This remarkably accurate figure
remained the officially accepted height for more than one hundred years.
In 1955 it was adjusted by a mere 26 feet to 29,028 (8,848 m). The
mountain received its official name in 1865 in honor of Sir George
Everest, the British Surveyor General from 1830–1843 who had mapped the
Indian subcontinent. He had some reservations about having his name
bestowed on the peak, arguing that the mountain should retain its local
appellation, the standard policy of geographical societies.
Pretenders to the Throne
Before the Survey of India, a number of other mountains ranked supreme
in the eyes of the world. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
Andean peak Chimboraso was considered the highest. At a relatively
unremarkable 20,561 feet (6,267 m), it is in fact nowhere near the
highest, surpassed by about thirty other Andean peaks and several dozen in
the Himalayas. In 1809, the Himalayan peak Dhaulagiri (26,810 ft.; 8,172
m) was declared the ultimate, only to be shunted aside in 1840 by
Kanchenjunga (28,208 ft.; 8,598 m), which today ranks third. Everest's
status has been unrivaled for the last century-and-a-half, but not without
a few threats.
The most recent challenge came from a 1986 American expedition climbing
K2 (28,250 ft., 8,611 m) in the Karakoram range. According to their
measurements, K2 was actually 29,284 feet, beating Everest by a cool 256
feet. Had this figure been accepted, mountaineering history would have
required drastic revision: Everest would have taken a back seat to K2, no
longer the ne plus ultra of geographical extremes.
The Third Pole
Once the North and South Poles had been reached by explorers, the next
geographical feat to capture the international imagination was Everest,
often called the Third Pole. Attempts to climb Everest began in the 1921,
when the forbidden kingdom of Tibet opened its borders to outsiders. 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 vanished for good. Mallory's
body was not found for another 75 years, and it did not clear up the
mystery as to whether the two men made it to the top before the mountain
killed them.
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. World famous overnight, Hillary became a hero of the
British empire—the news reached London just in time for Elizabeth II's
coronation—and Norgay was touted as a symbol of national pride by three
separate nations: Nepal, Tibet, and India.
Into the Death Zone
Although not considered one of the most technically challenging
mountains to climb (K2 is 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 (when the lungs fatally fill with fluid) and
high-altitude cerebral edema (when the 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 weeks, sometimes months,
acclimatizing, and usually attempt Everest only in May and October,
avoiding the winter snows and the summer monsoons.
After Hillary and Norgay'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. 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. Yet 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.”
Incredulous, some disputed the veracity of an oxygenless climb. Yet two
years later Messner quelled all skepticism when on August 20, 1980, he
again ascended Everest without oxygen, this time solo. 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.
An Icy Graveyard
Between 1922 and 2006, Everest has been climbed by almost 3,000 people
from twenty countries. More than 200 have lost their lives, the odds being
one-in-six of not making it down alive. The dead are left where they
perish because the effects of the 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, returning two years in a row before
attaining the summit; 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. There are now guided trips up the mountain, fanning
debate about the commercialization of Everest. 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. One reason for the recent media attention is
the novelty of comparatively ordinary people venturing up a Mount
Parnassus formerly limited to gods like Messner and Hillary. Pathologists
and postal workers now follow in their footsteps. Another reason 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. The following May, another nine
mountaineers died. As the number of climbers grow, so does the death toll,
with Everest taking down world-class climbers and novice adventurers
alike.
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education,
Inc. All rights reserved.
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