[/caption]Michael Cosgrove - What drives people to risk, and sometimes lose, their lives in order to attempt to climb the world’s highest mountain? The recent death of a climber on Everest's treacherous slopes is the first so far of this year's four-week long climbing season, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.
At 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) above sea level, Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the World. It was first climbed in 1953 by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. Since then, over 4,100 successful summit attempts have been made by over 2,700 individuals. Approximately 220 people have died trying.
Although a few rare winter attempts have been made, May is the climbing season for Everest, as it is the only time of the year that an attempt can have a reasonable chance of succeeding. Even experienced mountaineers arrive weeks in advance in order to get acclimatized to the mountain, where breathing is more of an effort, including on the lower slopes. Most of those who are to risk their lives on Everest this year will be leaving base camp during the last ten days of the month, hoping for a three-day ‘window’ of relatively clear skies and lower temperatures. After that the weather closes in and the season is over. An estimated 26 expeditions consisting of 251 climbers are scheduled to make a summit attempt this month.
The first person to lose his life this year was an 82-year-old former Nepalese foreign minister called Shailendra Kumar Upadhyay. He was trying to become the oldest person to climb Everest, but he died on Monday on the lower slopes whilst trying to descend from one of the first of the mountain’s six main camps, which are used as staging posts and shelter during ascensions. His death highlights complaints that too many unqualified people are being given permission to attempt to climb Everest by the Nepalese authorities. But even highly qualified climbers die on this mountain, and more shall die before the end of May.
There are two main routes to the summit of Everest. The North Col – or ‘Ridge Route’ – and the slightly easier and therefore more often used South Col Route. But whichever route you choose to get there you have to defy and conquer what is called the death zone. Beginning at 7,600 meters of altitude, this upper – and deadly - section of Everest is where the level of oxygen is just one-third of that to be found at sea level.
The death zone is an alien place for human beings, and the lack of oxygen there, coupled with temperatures which can descend to -40C, can quickly lead climbers to make impaired judgments. It is not possible for the human body to acclimatize itself in order to survive at this altitude - which is also the 'cruising altitude' for jet airliners - and the extreme cold and climbing hazards all contribute to make an ascent even more dangerous. It becomes very difficult to sleep, and the human digestive system all but stops working. Climbers who find themselves in difficulty in the death zone become disoriented and weak before finally slipping into unconsciousness, coma, and death.
Accidents can, and do, happen frequently, but here they are often the equivalent of a death sentence as it is impossible at death zone altitudes for other climbers to carry an injured person who cannot walk unaided off the mountain, or even drag them behind them, and the same applies to those suffering from the effects of a lack of oxygen. To make matters worse, helicopter rescue is almost always out of the question due to the extreme winds and snow. This means that almost all incapacitated climbers are left behind by the others to die.
Those who have survived Everest agree that their motivation to reach the summit can turn into a deadly obsession due to the effects of the death zone. This effect is enhanced by the fact that those who begin to suffer often think they are okay and fit to continue. One climber, in the excellent National Geographic documentary ‘The Dark Side of Everest’, says it is “bewitching, beguiling, and intoxicating.” He adds that “the closer you get to the summit, the more the magnetic power of reaching that point becomes all-consuming.” It is as if the lack of judgment caused by the extreme conditions causes them to drive themselves on until some of them cannot go any further. They die where they fall, be they accompanied by others or not.
All of this has led climbers over the years to ask themselves serious moral questions about climbing at this altitude. Although leaving a comrade to die is an awful decision to have to make, in almost all cases it is the only decision possible if a climber in reasonable shape is to survive, although instances do exist of people coming to, even hours after falling into a coma. One or two of those people made it down again and it is only understandable that they say that leaving someone is morally incorrect.
Complicating the issue even further is the extreme motivation of climbers to reach the summit, and commercial pressures – books, films etc - are present too. The same dilemmas face those who are further down the mountain and who hear radio messages from climbers or groups in distress. Do they go up to try and rescue them in almost impossible conditions, knowing that they will almost certainly die trying? Opinions on these issues differ within the mountaineering community.
Meanwhile, around 150 bodies are estimated to litter the death zone, and they are often visible to other climbers as they make their ascents, or descents. Those bodies shall doubtless serve as a stark reminder to those who enter the death zone this month and trudge past them that in three days maximum they will have either succeeded in their attempts to climb Everest and descend safely, that they will have abandoned and descended, or that they will be dead.
For it is almost certain that some of them shall die, and that they shall remain up there in the death zone, forever, as a mute yet vivid testament to what is surely one of the most extreme challenges that a human being can attempt to surmount…to stand on top of the world.
