As adventurers flock to Everest, some dreams will turn deadlyBy Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers
EVEREST BASE CAMP, Tibet — Wim Hof likes extreme challenges. The Dutchman has held his breath under polar ice for more than six minutes and run a half marathon barefoot in the snow. This year he's climbing Mount Everest — in shorts.
Hundreds of climbers from 30 nations are on the slopes of the 29,035-foot Mount Everest for this year's 10-week climbing season. As of Wednesday, about 50 reached the summit.
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The violent and icy landscape of Mount Everest has become a magnet for a blend of commercial interests, individual achievement and runaway vanity, turning the peak into a venue of bravery and folly, a place where egos rise in thin air and life can evanesce like oxygen. Scaling the jagged peak is a brutal feat. Climbers must acclimate their bodies to thin air that contains only a third as much oxygen as air at sea level. Fierce winds and huge temperature drops occur routinely. Death stalks the ill-equipped. Yet people are arriving for the trek in ever-greater numbers, lured by the low cost of climbing from Tibet.
They include veteran guides, wealthy and inexperienced clients, independent mountaineers long on passion but untested in the high-altitude "death zone," climbers with disabilities hoping to overcome huge odds, and adventurers seeking fame through often wild stunts.
Hof, an affable 48-year-old, leads the derring-do crowd this year. Last year, among those making headlines for reaching the summit were a Playboy playmate from Poland and a New Zealand double-amputee climbing on prosthetic legs. Also on the mountain this year are a Norwegian who lost his arms in an electrical accident and a Canadian with an artificial heart valve.
Fatalities will occur in the 2007 season. Still unknown is how it will rank next to 2006, when 11 climbers died in the second-deadliest season on record.
Economic factors
One reason for the death toll is money. Word has gotten out that Everest can be climbed on the cheap. Some no-frills climbers plan to rely on the safety ropes and weather reports of large expeditions. They climb without guides, radios or Sherpas, ethnic Nepalese from high-altitude regions, to help them if they encounter distress.
"Not all people who are here really should be here," said Simen Moedre, a 42-year-old Norwegian chief executive and an experienced climber.
Added Duncan Chessell, an Australian expedition leader: "The standard routes are where all the pogo-stick people, all the crazies, are congregating."
Most climbers tackle Everest during a short season in April, May and the first weeks of June, when the weather clears and ice remains firm. Expeditions generally spend two months, making one or two forays to advanced camps on the mountain, then returning to base camp at 17,200 feet to recover, before making the summit push.
Camaraderie prevails among climbers, but bad vibes also waft in the air. Some veterans look down on the rich clients, who they think are buying their way up the mountain. Purist climbers dismiss those who use bottled oxygen at high altitude. And climbers from small teams commonly gripe that commercial interests have taken over the mountain.
As the death toll mounts, life-and-death ethical issues also arise: Who's responsible for rescuing climbers in distress? Should some inexperienced climbers be barred from the mountain? When a climber in the "death zone," above 26,000 feet, is deeply frostbitten and delirious, and a rescue attempt would endanger the lives of rescuers, should the distressed climber be left to die?
Such questions took on renewed urgency after last year's season, when more than three dozen climbers passed Briton David Sharp as he froze to death in a small cave at close to 28,000 feet.
Commercial expeditions, under pressure to get clients to the summit, have been accused of ignoring distressed climbers. When they do conduct rescues, it can affect business, as Daniel Mazur, a veteran U.S. guide, learned. Mazur, 47, was leading Canadian and British clients toward the summit last May when he spotted Australian Lincoln Hall, who'd spent the night at 28,000 feet and was severely frostbitten and near death.
Mazur told his clients to turn around and help him assist Hall down the mountain. "They were pissed," Mazur recalled, noting that they lost their chance to reach the summit.
Instances of climbers walking past distressed colleagues have sent shock waves through the world climbing community. None other than Sir Edmund Hillary, the onetime beekeeper from New Zealand, who along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first to summit Everest in 1953, declared: "I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress."
The "death zone"
Distress and Everest are synonyms. Winds gust to 100 mph near the peak. In the "death zone," climbers can face hallucinations and altitude-related illnesses that fill the lungs with fluid or cause the brain to swell.
Even when breathing bottled oxygen, veterans experience extreme fatigue and impaired judgment.
"Everything is at a very slowed, reduced pace. It's like running around with a plastic bag over your head," said Mark Woodward, 43, a New Zealand guide who's reached the summit three times since 2004.
In the "death zone," climbers say, rescue attempts can cost more lives, pushing already weak and exhausted climbers into new danger.
"Certainly if you walk by someone who asks you for assistance and keep going to the summit, that's not OK," said Chessell, the Australian guide. "But if one person is struggling and dying, there's no point in another six people working themselves up and dying as well."
"It's unfair to expect to be rescued if you put yourself in this danger," said David Tait, a British climber who's attempting a "double-traverse" of Everest, climbing up the Tibetan side, down the Nepalese side, then returning via the same route, an unprecedented feat.
Two South Korean climbers, Oh Hee-joon, 37, and Lee Hyun-jo, 34, fell to their deaths after they reached the altitude of 27,200 feet on their way to the summit Wednesday.
Some climbers ignore their limits.
"The reason that many people die," Chessell said, "is that they push themselves too far and too hard. They collapse and go to sleep for a while, and they die."
That kind of ambition has always infected Everest mountaineers. What's different now, several climbers said, is the gap between the well-financed, high-end expeditions, where clients might pay up to $60,000 each, and the shoestring climbers on the Tibetan side of Everest. More climbers than ever come to Tibet, where climbing fees are less than half of what they are in Nepal to the south. And with the barrier to Everest at a low $4,700 per mountaineer in Tibet, climbers on tight budgets fill base camp here.
"The mountain is a very different place now," Woodward said.
Major commercial expeditions offer clients specialized physicians at base camp, satellite telephones, individual guides and Sherpas to act as porters nearly each step of the way. They also make huge investments in placing safety lines on the mountain and getting detailed weather reports.
Embodying the high end at base camp this year is the "Tiger Dome," a white double-insulated structure that offers a cozy respite for members of the Himalayan Expeditions (or HiMex) team. Inside, HiMex clients can warm themselves near a wood stove, sip a cocktail, gaze out through transparent panels at a panoramic view of Everest, or sit on chairs and couches and watch movies on a widescreen plasma television.
Woodward, who works for Russell Brice, the famed New Zealand guide and owner of the Chamonix, France-based HiMex, said wealthy clients sometimes dismiss the value of support personnel.
The climb "happens on the backs of the Sherpas. They are the real unsung heroes. A lot of these Westerners climb to the summit and say, 'Hooray! I made it!' But it wouldn't have ... happened without the Sherpas," he said.
Most climbers make the summit push in late May. Early weather has been good, but Woodward said risks loom for some climbers.
"There's going to be carnage. It's a horrible thing to say. I hope it doesn't happen. But there are going to be fatalities."
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
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Leader of the 1973 Mt. Kenya Ecosystem Expedition with the University of Calif.
1977 Leader of the First Ascent of the West Ridge of Mt. Foraker, Alaska (17,420’)
Robert S. CARTER Bob Carter, a noted cruising sailor and traveler, died at his home peacefully on September 17, 2006. He was nearly a month past his 91st birthday. Until his early retirement, Bob worked in New York and Chicago as a marine insurance underwriter with The Atlantic Mutual. General of America Insurance (now Safeco) brought him to Seattle in 1951 to set up and head its then new marine insurance division. For many years Bob and his wife, Cynthia, cruised in their 44 ft ketch, the CYNTHIA R, primarily in the Mediterranean and Europe. Their extensive explorations on the southern coast of Turkey led to their discovery of the ruins a substantial ancient seaport, by then partly submerged. Based on this and other archeological finds, Bob became deeply involved both with the American Institute of Archeology and the history department at the University of Washington. After Bob and Cynthia made their return crossing of the Atlantic in 1980, they sailed for many summers on the coasts of Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Bob circumnavigated the North Atlantic, including Cape Verde and the Salvage Islands, in 1991. In 1992 he sailed from Venezuela to Florida and then shipped the boat to Seattle. Bob served as president of the Seattle area Harvard Club and chaired the visiting committee of the history department of the University of Washington. He held offices in the Cruising Club of America and belonged to the Explorers Club and the Ocean Cruising Club. He participated actively in both the Seattle and Corinthian yacht clubs for half a century. Bob described his sailing adventures in his book, SAIL FAR AWAY (1978). In the summer of 2005 he completed and published an English translation of a World War I diary, TAGEBUCH IM KRIEGE, by the German physician and poet, Hans Carossa. He published many articles and essays in a variety of magazines and journals throughout his adult life. He is survived by Cynthia Root Carter, his wife of 68 years, their two children, Lief Carter of Manitou Springs, CO, and Delight Carter Willing of Bainbridge Island, by their grandchildren, Stephen of Brooklyn, NY, Robert of Austin TX, and Laura of Athens, GA, and by their great-granddaughter, Plummy Jean Carter, also of Brooklyn. A private memorial celebration is being planned for later in the year.]]>
