Since the dawn of civilization, man has striven
to do things that he wasn’t supposed to do. Not supposed to be able to see in the dark,
man harnessed the power of fire. Not supposed to be able to cross oceans, man
built ships. Not supposed to be able to fly, man invented
airplanes. And when we found the tallest mountain in
the world nestled in one of the most remote places imaginable, there were men who felt
the urge to climb to the top of it, despite our bodies clearly not being designed to do
so. Today, Mount Everest is visited by more people
than ever before, people willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a chance
to climb to the top. But this is hardly a trip to Yellowstone we’re
talking about here, the mountain is a killer. There are a dozen different ways to die on
the slopes of Everest, the bodies of dead climbers left behind on the mountain for others
to pass by, a grisly reminder of the risks one takes when trying to conquer it. Is it worth it, to brave the dangers to have
the chance to stand on the roof of the world? Judging by how crowded the slopes of Everest
are in a typical climbing season, someone certainly seems to think so. The Mountain As interesting as Everest is, its name is
certainly….uninspiring. It was named by Andrew Scott Waugh, the Surveyor
General of India, in 1856, after Sir George Everest, Waugh’s predecessor and mentor. Everest himself didn’t want the mountain
named for him, he wanted to keep to the traditional names used by the Nepalese and Tibetan peoples
native to the area, as was done with other Himalayan mountains. But finding a commonly used name was difficult,
not least of which because both Nepal and Tibet refused to allow Westerners into their
country. So Mount Everest stuck, even though the Nepalese
name for the mountain, Sagarmatha, meaning “goddess of the sky”, is far more interesting. Mount Everest stands 29,029 feet high, straddling
the border between Nepal and Chinese controlled Tibet, the border between the two countries
actually crosses over the summit of the mountain. The mountain is so tall that the top of it
juts into the stratosphere, exposing it to the howling winds of the jet stream. This contributes to the frigid temperature
on the mountain: an average temperature of -17 degree Fahrenheit, dropping to below -30
in winter. Dangers from Top to Bottom So what exactly is so dangerous about Mount
Everest, anyway? The truth is, there are so many dangers we
have to work our way from the bottom of the mountain to the summit in listing them off,
much like a mountain climber. In fact, let’s pretend that you’re one
of the thousands that flock to Everest every year in order to try to climb it. If you’re anything like me, and an alarming
number of people who attempt Everest every year, you have limited mountaineering experience
in general, and even less high altitude climbing experience, which is an entirely different
animal. The most common place to ascend is on the
Nepalese side of the mountain, so that’s mostly what we’ll be describing. Your journey begins by flying into the capital
city, Kathmandu, and from there, taking a short hop to the small town of Lukla. But from there, most conveniences of modern
civilization end, and you’re going to be walking the rest of the way. It takes about a week for you to hike to Everest
Base Camp, this is a necessary step in the process of climbing the mountain because it
acclimatizes you to the high altitude. A person that has lived their lives at mostly
low altitudes can run into a lot of health problems when climbing, the most serious of
which is altitude sickness. If someone were to invent a transporter and
zap you from sea level to Mount Everest instantaneously, most likely you’d be passed out within minutes
because your body isn’t used to how little oxygen is in the air. The most serious form of altitude sickness
is high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), where your lungs malfunction so badly that fluid
fills them up and left untreated, will kill you very quickly. Base Camp After your journey, your new home is Everest
Base Camp, a massive tent city situated at 17,700 feet. This is where all expeditions from this side
of Everest begin. Climbers will spend several weeks here further
acclimatizing to the altitude, while Sherpas are busy preparing the route ahead for the
upcoming climbing season. Who are the Sherpas? They are the indigneous people to the area,
who’ve spent hundreds of years living in the Himalayas and are thus well acclimated
to the altitude. They have become invaluable to Everest expeditions,
being hired out as climbing guides, porters, and other manual labor tasks. For people who live in one of the most impoverished
countries in the world, Western tourism money can be a lucrative living, but unfortunately
it also comes at a high price: a third of the people who’ve died on Everest have been
Sherpas. Even at Base Camp, things aren’t exactly
safe: the tent city is still vulnerable to the whims of Mother Nature. On April 25, 2015, a massive, 7.8 magnitude
earthquake rocked Nepal, killing around 9,000 people and causing $10 billion in damages. 150 away from the epicenter, the quake started
an avalanche that completely flattened Base Camp on Everest, killing 22 climbers and injuring
over 60. Avalanches are insidious: assuming you aren’t
killed by an object that hits you during the event, or get swept off a cliff and fall to
your death, you can find yourself completely buried in snow. And not snow like you played in as a kid,
either: once the snow settles, it compresses into the consistency of concrete, making it
hard to dig through. If you don’t suffocate, you might just live
long enough to freeze to death while awaiting rescue. Khumbu Icefall Assuming there are no avalanches to kill you
at Base Camp, after a couple weeks of rest, you’re ready to continue. At the bottom of Mount Everest is the Khumbu
Glacier, a slow moving river of ice that travels an estimated four feet a day. At the top of the glacier is the Khumbu Icefall,
where the ice drops off a slope to form the glacier below. The Icefall is one of the most treacherous
sections of the mountain. Huge blocks of ice the size of houses, called
seracs, can collapse or tumble down without warning, and yawning crevasses, or cracks
in the ice, can form suddenly, swallowing anyone unlucky enough to be standing there
at the time. In 2014, a sudden avalanche of ice cascaded
down the Icefall, killing 16 climbers. Once you make it through the Icefall, you
stop at Camp 1, the first of 4 camps situated on Everest to provide rest and acclimatization
to climbers. Climbers will generally spend several days
traversing the Icefall back and forth between Base Camp and Camp 1 to build up their stamina
and get their lungs used to the altitude before continuing upwards to Camp 2, also called
Advanced Base Camp. Into the Death Zone From a technical standpoint, Everest is not
a hard mountain to climb. The routes to the summit are well established
and prep work, like fixing ropes and ladders to sections that require them, is done in
advance by teams of Sherpas to make things easier for the following climbers. This is probably why so many mountaineering
novices attempt it in the first place. So there aren’t as many deaths from falling
on Everest as there might be on other mountains, but it does happen occasionally, either through
equipment malfunctions or human error. This increases in likelihood the higher up
the mountain you go. Once climbers reach Camp 4, at 26,000 feet,
they’ve crossed into the Death Zone: the altitude at which there simply is not enough
breathable oxygen in the atmosphere to support life. Most climbers use oxygen masks at this height,
because while it is possible to go without it, the truth is that you are slowly suffocating
the entire time you’re there. A lack of oxygen to your brain is called hypoxia,
and it impairs your judgment and rational thinking skills, sufferers describe the feeling
as similar to being drunk. At this altitude, any mistake can be fatal. Everything is working against you, from the
tricky terrain to the bitter cold and howling wind. The lack of oxygen in the air only compounds
the problems. If something happens to you, anything from
altitude sickness, an accidental fall, frostbite, hypothermia, or even an ordinary heart attack,
rescue is difficult if not impossible. Until recently, helicopters couldn’t fly
high enough onto Everest to rescue climbers in distress, and even with today’s modern
technology, few pilots are willing to risk it as the weather around Everest is notoriously
unpredictable. Even worse, other climbers will probably be
unable to help you, as they would lack the energy to do anything but keep themselves
moving. Lowering someone down a mountain on ropes
is difficult and dangerous at the best of times, doing it in the Death Zone risks the
lives of everyone involved. So there is often no choice but to leave the
stricken climbers to die. And of course, because recovering a dead body
at that altitude presents many of the same problems as rescuing someone alive but not
able to climb themselves, most of the time the bodies are left where they lay, or covered
by rocks in a rough funeral cairn. The top of Mount Everest is littered with
such corpses, some of whom have been there for almost 100 years, protected from decay
by the frigid temperatures and often serving as landmarks for other climbers. One area strewn with bodies dressed in brightly
colored climbing gear is known as “rainbow valley”. Summit Push In order to make an attempt to summit Everest,
all conditions have to be perfect. You have to have a window of good weather,
which is by no means guaranteed. It’s entirely possible to spend a month
on Everest and end up stuck at Camp 4 without even being able to make an attempt because
of bad weather or high winds. All your equipment and your body have to be
in perfect working order. And most important of all, you need to have
an impeccable sense of timing. An assault on the peak of Everest is structured
like a military mission, and like a military mission, if anything goes wrong, people can
and will die. If the conditions are right, you leave Camp
4 at a precise time. You are breathing supplemental oxygen, but
you only have a finite amount of gas. And you don’t want to be descending the
mountain in the dark, when the temperatures can drop down to forty degrees below zero. Because of all that, you are given a strict
turnaround time: if you don’t make it to the top by a certain time, no matter how close
you are, you must turn around and return to Camp 4. Imagine being only a couple of hundred feet
from the top and having to turn around. You would certainly be reluctant, but continuing
on past the turnaround time puts you in danger, in an already dangerous environment. Everest Disaster These lessons were learned the hard way, in
one of the most famous mountaineering disasters of modern times. On May 10th, 1996, a large group of climbers
set out on their summit push. They were members of two guided climbing expeditions,
Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness. This was the start of Everest’s commercial
era, where clients would pay fees in the tens of thousands to hire professional climbing
guides to escort them up the mountain. On this day, 34 climbers were attempting to
summit Everest, at that time the most in a single day to try for the summit. The group was slowed by several factors: the
ropes that were supposed to be fixed ahead of time to help climbers up the steeper parts
weren’t in place, forcing a delay while the task was completed. The amount of climbers on the mountain contributed
to the bottlenecks, and was compounded by the fact that only one rope was fixed, forcing
people climbing up the mountain and people descending down the mountain to alternate
using it. But the worst delay of all was caused by the
summit itself. There isn’t much on the summit of Mount
Everest. It’s not very big, about the size of a large
dining room table. Buddhist prayer flags are strung across it,
along with other offerings left by summiters over the years. There certainly isn’t a gift shop. Other than admiring the view from the roof
of the world, there’s not much to do. But if you had just spent a month climbing
a mountain, and reached the top, fulfilling what for many climbers is a lifelong dream,
you certainly aren’t going to get up there, take a quick look around, and immediately
head back down. They say that climbers who summit Everest
feel an intense rush of euphoria, almost as though the mountain itself is rewarding them
for braving the dangers to make the pilgrimage. Most likely it’s a combination of an endorphin
rush mixed with a lower than usual oxygen count in the bloodstream, but the idea is
still romantic. The clients of Adventure Consultants and Mountain
Madness certainly felt that euphoria, sticking around on the summit long after they should
have descended. In fact, everyone who summited that day did
so after the agreed upon 1PM turnaround time. Competition between the two groups probably
played a role in this, as well as the fact that when you have paying customers, you try
to get them their money’s worth. But when the climbers descended, they ran
into a storm that they wouldn’t have been exposed to if they had stuck to their turnaround
time. Wind gusts of up to 80 miles an hour buffeted
them, dropping the temperature to 60 below. By now they had all run out of supplemental
oxygen, and were suffering from the effects of hypoxia. And the rush of snow and clouds completely
blinded them, and they lost all sense of orientation. By the time it was over, 5 climbers from the
group were dead, including the leaders of both guided expedition teams. On the north side of the mountain, another
group of three climbers from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police was caught in the storm and
were killed too, bringing the death toll to 8. It was the deadliest day in history at the
top of Everest. One of the climbers on the Adventure Consultants
team, Jon Krakauer, was a reporter on assignment for Outside Magazine and witnessed the tragedy
firsthand. He wrote a book about the experience called
Into Thin Air that became a bestseller and exposed the public at large to the bizarre
and dangerous world of high altitude mountaineering. Modern Day, Modern Problems Rather than deter would be climbers, the 1996
Everest Disaster seemed to trigger an explosion in popularity for tackling Everest. Every year since then, the amount of climbers
applying for permits from the Nepalese and Chinese governments has gone up, and Base
Camp gets more and more crowded. This overcrowding has led to a number of...unpleasant
problems. Garbage, including empty food packages, spent
oxygen bottles, broken climbing gear, and more, is simply left behind by careless climbers,
forcing entire expeditions to be mounted simply to clean up the trash. Even more disgusting to think about is the
estimated 26,000 pounds of human waste left behind on Everest at the end of a climbing
season. Public bathrooms are something found in civilization,
not one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. And while lessons have been learned from the
1996 disaster, climbers are still killed every year on Everest, in many cases their bodies
joining the cadre of frozen corpses already scattered all over the Death Zone. But it is perhaps this danger that draws people
to Everest in the first place. Few other places offer the opportunity to
test yourself against the worst that Mother Nature has to offer, while providing a great
story to tell your grandchildren AND one of the world’s most spectacular views. And, this being the modern age, a perfect
place for a selfie. Mount Everest isn’t for the faint hearted. But for those who brave its slopes, it is
a rite of passage, a chance to push yourself past all known limits to find out what you
are truly capable of. As Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 was one of
the first two people to summit Everest, said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but
ourselves.” Despite that romantic notion, the mountain
still claims its deadly harvest of unfortunate climbers every year: For every 100 people
who summit Everest, 4 die. Which is why Mount Everest will probably forever
be, the World’s Deadliest Tourist Attraction.
