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Source: http://www.markhorrell.com/blog/tag/cho-oyu%2Ctibet/feed

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<title>Murder on the Nangpa La: why the 2006 Cho Oyu shooting should be remembered</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2023/murder-on-the-nangpa-la-why-the-2006-cho-oyu-shooting-should-be-remembered/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2023/murder-on-the-nangpa-la-why-the-2006-cho-oyu-shooting-should-be-remembered/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:37:40 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Good causes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[8000m peaks]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[humanitarianism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nangpa la]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nepal]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[refugees]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[united nations]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=15644</guid>
<description><![CDATA[On Saturday 30 September, 2006, foreign climbers at Cho Oyu Base Camp in Tibet watched a line of around 70 local people zigzag up a steep snow slope a short distance away from their tents. They were about to witness something that would become headline news across the world.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[On Saturday 30 September, 2006, foreign climbers at Cho Oyu Base Camp in Tibet watched a line of around 70 local people zigzag up a steep snow slope a short distance away from their tents. They were about to witness something that would become headline news across the world.
At the top of the slope was the Nangpa La pass on the international border between China and Nepal. The pass had been a trade route for centuries. It is likely that Sherpas migrated into Nepal over the Nangpa La in the 16th century. They made their home in the Khumbu region, just the other side of the pass, grew crops on its fertile slopes, and traded salt, wool, grain and cotton with their kinsmen back in Tibet.
<figure id="attachment_15648" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15648" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18514955398/in/album-72157654358688811/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-15648 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Trekking up to the Nangpa La between Tibet and Nepal" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/nangpa-la-trekking.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15648" class="wp-caption-text">Trekking up to the Nangpa La between Tibet and Nepal</figcaption></figure>
The Nangpa La remained an important trade route, but by 2006 it was no longer an official border crossing point. These people were Tibetan Buddhists on their way to India to claim asylum and join the Tibetan Buddhist community there as refugees.
At 10.30am, before they had reached the safety of the pass, a group of figures below them opened fire. One of the Tibetans, a 17-year-old nun called Kelsang Namtso, was shot dead and lay bleeding in the snow. Climbers watched in disbelief as the shooting continued for 15 minutes. About 40 Tibetans fled into Nepal, but the remainder, some of them children, were arrested and marched through base camp by Chinese police. A British police officer, Steve Lawes, was in camp at the time, and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/murder-in-the-mountains-20061013-gdokzp.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told reporters from The Independent</a> that the children looked straight ahead, too frightened to look around as kids usually do.
Chinese authorities initially denied any knowledge of the incident, then claimed that the police had acted in self defence after being attacked. But there were too many witnesses for this story to stick. One witness, a Romanian photographer called Sergei Matei, filmed the incident and smuggled his footage out of China. It clearly showed that the Tibetans <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230724233400/https://savetibet.org/video-footage-of-nangpa-pass-shooting-refutes-official-chinese-statement/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">had their backs to the police when the shooting started</a>.
Kelsang Namtso had no access to education in Tibet and had been hoping to study at the Dolma Ling nunnery in India. She was travelling with her friend Dolma Palkyi, who said she had paid $700 to smugglers who guided groups over the Himalayas into India and Nepal. Restrictions on religious freedom in Tibet <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/28/china.mainsection" target="_blank" rel="noopener">drove 2,500 to 4,000 Tibetans to attempt the crossing every year</a>. There were no established legal routes for such Tibetans to emigrate, which created a thriving market for the smugglers.
In 2006 it wasn’t uncommon for mountaineers at Cho Oyu Base Camp to see Tibetans crossing the pass, but I don’t remember seeing any in 2010 when I spent several weeks at Cho Oyu Base Camp during <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2010/climbing-high-on-steak-and-kidney-pie/">my own attempt on the mountain</a>. The pass can be seen clearly from camp and is just a two-hour hike away. We hiked up to it during an expedition rest day. It was a nice viewpoint, peaceful and remote; It was hard to imagine such a place to be the scene of bloodshed; to witness such an event during a climbing holiday must have been appalling beyond belief.
<figure id="attachment_9538" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-9538" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18081687903/in/album-72157654358688811/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img decoding="async" class="wp-image-9538 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Cho Oyu (8,201m), the sixth-highest mountain in the world, from the Nangpa La" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/18081687903_c0e07b9d80_o.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-9538" class="wp-caption-text">Cho Oyu (8,201m), the sixth-highest mountain in the world, from the Nangpa La</figcaption></figure>
I was reminded of these events last week, where here in the UK a story triggered by remarkably similar events has been dominating the news headlines. National icon Gary Lineker, presenter of the legendary football show Match of the Day was suspended then reinstated by the BBC for criticising the British government’s asylum policies. I was still at school when I watched him score a hat-trick against Poland during the 1986 World Cup, and studying for my ‘A’ Levels when he fell over twice in the box then got up and banged a couple of penalties in against Cameroon in the 1990 World Cup quarter final. He was a national treasure long before the events of the last week raised him to heights that even Reinhold Messner cannot reach without supplementary oxygen.
The story blew up into a row about government interference in broadcasting and the impartiality of Britain’s national broadcaster. Important as these are, the actions that triggered them got lost in the noise.
The UK government has proposed new legislation which it has called the Illegal Migration Bill to deal with the problem of increasing numbers of people who risk their lives crossing the channel from France on small boats. They have proposed that anyone arriving in the UK by this route (or any other irregular means, without documentation or permission to enter) will be automatically barred from claiming asylum. They will be held in detention and returned within a month of arrival.
But the small boat problem is a recent problem of the British government’s own making. It wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t closed all legitimate routes for most refugees to enter the country. There was virtually no one crossing the channel in small boats in 2017. It started with a trickle of <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/illegal-migration-bill-solutions-to-small-boat-crossings-the-government-rejected/ar-AA18BNUz?fullscreen=true&cvid=6913b59dbcd443d0888f82d003fb270c&ei=29#image=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">around 300 in 2018 and grew to over 45,000 last </a>year. More than 3,000 have crossed so far in 2023. None of them are Ukrainian or Hong Kong citizens, who both have legitimate means of claiming asylum before they arrive.
Meanwhile the backlog of people waiting to have their asylum applications processed has grown to over 160,000. Many have waited over a year for a decision, during which time they are not allowed to work. Most are housed in hotels as they wait, at huge expense to the government, where they are prone to exploitation by gangs offering them opportunities to work illegally. Some have been attacked by far right protesters, emboldened by the divisive language that politicians have used to describe asylum seekers, such as invasion and swarming.
The proposed Illegal Migration Bill is illegal on at least two counts. Article 31 of the <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/1951-refugee-convention.html">1951 Refugee Convention</a> states that it doesn’t matter how those fleeing persecution enter a country, they still have a right to claim asylum. The principle of non-refoulement states that no one should be returned to a country where they are at risk from persecution. These are international legal principles that all United Nations (UN) member states are required to follow.
Britain was one of the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230316223151/https://www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/3b73b0d63.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">earliest signatories</a> of the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is enforced in law by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which the British government is threatening to leave. But in the same way that Brexit reduced freedom of movement for British citizens, leaving the ECHR will also take away human rights protections for British citizens. The British government’s proposal to deal with the problem of small boats crossing the channel is not only inhumane, cruel and illegal, it is stupid and incompetent, and will harm everyone.
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve turned this blog post about an event on Cho Oyu into a political rant. But this isn’t about party politics, as politicians like to claim when their policies are criticised; it’s about universal human values that we all believe in regardless of whom we vote for.
When asylum seekers were shot by Chinese police on Cho Oyu in 2006, some reporters <a href="https://www.thebmc.co.uk/moral-high-ground" target="_blank" rel="noopener">criticised western climbers</a> for not speaking out against the atrocity. Fair enough. Everyone has a right to safety. Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in freedom with the ability to travel to faraway places, fall in love with those places not just because of the landscape but the people too. We have a duty to speak up for them, whether they are shot trying to leave their own country, or detained and returned when they arrive in ours looking for safety.
]]></content:encoded>
<wfw:commentRss>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2023/murder-on-the-nangpa-la-why-the-2006-cho-oyu-shooting-should-be-remembered/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">15644</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>My favourite book of 2022: Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/my-favourite-book-of-2022-snow-in-the-kingdom-by-ed-webster/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/my-favourite-book-of-2022-snow-in-the-kingdom-by-ed-webster/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 16:33:17 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Reviews and tributes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[ed webster]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[harriet tuckey]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain literature]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[norbu tenzing]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[robert anderson]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[roger marshall]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[stephen venables]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=15526</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This is a poignantly belated book review, if ever there was one. Ed Webster died of a heart attack last month at the age of 66. His book Snow on the Kingdom had been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for more than seven years.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[This is a poignantly belated book review, if ever there was one. Ed Webster died of a heart attack last month at the age of 66. His book Snow on the Kingdom had been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for more than seven years, ever since the writer Harriet Tuckey recommended it to me <a href="https://twitter.com/HarrietTuckey/status/567242287512829952?t=EirBBBSSit1tMs13t1bEUQ&s=19" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in a Twitter thread in 2015</a>. I finally got round to reading it earlier this year.
Harriet said the book was ‘just as dramatic as you’d expect from his talk at the RGS’ and that she couldn’t put it down. The talk she was referring to was the 25th anniversary celebration of Ed Webster’s expedition to climb a new route on Everest’s Kangshung Face in 1988. I had attended the event and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2013/everest-by-the-venables-direct-route/">written a blog post about it</a>. This expedition is best remembered (in the UK at least) for Stephen Venables’ successful solo ascent, becoming the first Briton to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen.
<figure id="attachment_15529" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15529" style="width: 1280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0965319911/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img decoding="async" class="wp-image-15529 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/snow-in-the-kingdom-ed-webster.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1" alt="Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster" width="720" height="405" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/snow-in-the-kingdom-ed-webster.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/snow-in-the-kingdom-ed-webster.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/snow-in-the-kingdom-ed-webster.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/snow-in-the-kingdom-ed-webster.jpg?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15529" class="wp-caption-text">Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster</figcaption></figure>
Ed’s performance that day was memorable and theatrical. It including screaming into the microphone in panic to simulate his and teammate Robert Anderson’s behaviour during an avalanche, and mimicking the laboured breathing of a climber at 8,000m so realistically that we thought he was going to pass out on stage.
Snow in the Kingdom is subtitled My Storm Years on Everest. It focuses on a four-year period of his life, between 1984 and 1988, during which he took part in three very different expeditions to Everest. None of these expeditions were straightforward – they all took something out of Ed emotionally – and the subtitle is as much about these emotions as it is about the weather.
The first of these was a gigantic American expedition of 21 climbers to climb Everest via the Lho La, West Shoulder and West Ridge. While there are plenty of commercial Everest expeditions in the modern era that aim to put that number of climbers on the summit (and some even do so successfully), they are never on a difficult technical route like the West Ridge. Back in 1985, an expedition would be considered successful if only one or two climbers reached the summit, and they would often pack up and leave as soon as this happened. Most team members were expected to fix rope and carry loads in support of the lead climbers, without an opportunity to have a crack at the summit themselves.
These expeditions inevitably led to competition as climbers jostled to become the lead climbers. Some did this by working hard for the team to show they were among the strongest; others did it by hanging back and resting during the early stages to stay in better condition when it was time to push for the top.
A team that size needs strong leadership, but the earlier American expeditions, including this one, tended to be run on more democratic lines, with everyone encouraged to voice an opinion. There was little cohesion in the team and many arguments about climbing strategy. There was a mixture of abilities and personalities in the team, some apparently only in it for their own agenda. Ed isn’t shy about reflecting these personalities; it’s plain to see who he considers the team players and who the prima donnas. Nevertheless, he comes across as one of the more timid members of the team, with no expectation of being one of the lead climbers. He is keen to pull his weight to support the team, but lacks the confidence to be assertive.
The expedition was a failure. Robert Anderson and Jay Smith made an attempt on the West Ridge from their camp above the West Shoulder, but it was a late, desperate bid with little support from below. But for Ed, the expedition was a worthwhile experience that would open doors for his next two expeditions. There was also a quirky postscript when Ed was introduced to the rock musician Billy Squier on his way back to Kathmandu, and enlisted into a madcap scheme to try and land a helicopter on Everest’s summit.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://twitter.com/markhorrell?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@markhorrell</a> JUST READ Ed Webster’s extraordinary book & your blog on his RGS talk.Chortling!! <a href="http://t.co/XLxOdJ4pze">http://t.co/XLxOdJ4pze</a> <a href="http://t.co/80zPcVDZ93">pic.twitter.com/80zPcVDZ93</a>
— Harriet Tuckey (@HarrietTuckey) <a href="https://twitter.com/HarrietTuckey/status/567242287512829952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The second part of Snow in the Kingdom describes a much smaller expedition. Ed was invited to be high-altitude cameraman for British-Canadian mountaineer Roger Marshall’s attempt to climb Everest’s North Face solo in 1986. The climbers were accompanied to base camp by their girlfriends, but even in this smaller family-style unit there was rancour. Marshall wasn’t an easy man to get along with; at one point he made his girlfriend cry, much to Ed’s embarrassment.
It was a mad scheme; Marshall was not in the same class as Reinhold Messner (who soloed Everest from the Tibetan side in 1980). He failed on the North Face in 1986 and died in a fall the following year attempting it again. There was personal success for Ed, however, when he made a solo ascent of one of Everest’s sister peaks, 7,543m Changtse.
The bulk of Snow in the Kingdom focuses on Ed’s 1988 Kangshung Face expedition with Stephen Venables, Robert Anderson and Paul Teare. On their trek through the Kharta Valley, the team are accompanied by Norbu Tenzing, the oldest son of Tenzing Norgay, who has been an American citizen for most of his life. There is a historically significant and heart-warming chapter where Norbu meets his father’s half-brother Tashi. He is taken to the house where Tenzing Norgay was born and meets his long-lost Tibetan family.
I’ve <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2013/everest-by-the-venables-direct-route/">written about this expedition previously</a>, so I won’t go into too many of the details here. In contrast to his other two expeditions, this was a happy team who worked together for the benefit of the whole enterprise. For example, Ed describes the great sense of gratitude the whole team felt when a hypoxic Paul Teare unselfishly descended from the South Col on his own, enabling his three climbing partners to continue.
I read this book a few months after reading Stephen Venables’ autobiography Higher than the Eagle Soars. The similarities were striking. While Venables was the stronger climber, both of them suffered to the point of hallucination during their summit attempt. And they both conveyed the sense of utter desperation during their descent of the Kangshung Face, and the feeling that it was nothing short of a miracle that they all survived.
While the Kangshung Face expedition was arguably the high point of Ed’s mountaineering career and certainly the expedition he is best remembered for, it took more out of him than the other team members and left him scarred for the rest of his life. His diligence in recording their historic summit climb on camera left him with severe frostbite. He had to be carried out on a stretcher by porters and ultimately lost the tips of all his fingers.
He also suffered what he described as ‘an invisible injury that was far more devastating’. A few days after the sixth operation on his fingers, he started experiencing daily panic attacks that left him unable to drive, go to work, run errands or visit friends.
He wrote that:
<blockquote>Words barely begin to describe the panic attack sufferer’s crippling feelings of dread and anguish. You do not merely feel nervous. You feel an absolute terror that springs from the utter conviction that your death is 100% imminent.</blockquote>
Snow in the Kingdom is one of the most heartbreakingly honest books about mountaineering that I have ever read. Ed Webster comes across as extremely humble, and his candid writing makes it one of the more interesting and refreshing books on Everest.
The poignancy begins in the very first chapter as he describes the moment in 1983 when he watched his girlfriend and love of his life Lauren fall to her death while they were climbing together in the Rockies. He describes the accident in an arrestingly matter-of-fact way, but this great personal tragedy is an undercurrent that weaves through the book. By the time he was climbing the Kangshung Face in 1988, he had still not recovered from it.
On a slightly more quirky note, Snow in the Kingdom has so many photographs (both Ed’s own and many historic photos taken by others) that it must also be one of the heaviest books about Everest ever written. Its 580 pages weigh in at a mighty 1.65kg in hardback form. I don’t keep it on the bookshelf above the sofa in case it falls on my head.
Snow in the Kingdom is now out of print, and although it’s available on Kindle, it’s a book that’s <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0965319911/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener">worth seeking out second hand</a>. Ed Webster may be gone too soon, but his engaging character lives on in this powerful memoir.
]]></content:encoded>
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<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">15526</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/did-george-mallory-climb-everest-in-1924-i-asked-chatgpt-for-an-answer/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/did-george-mallory-climb-everest-in-1924-i-asked-chatgpt-for-an-answer/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Dec 2022 15:48:09 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Humour]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[chatgpt]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[chu yin-hua]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[first ascents]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[george mallory]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[history of mountaineering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[interviews]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[noel odell]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[sandy irvine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[wang fu-chou]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=15515</guid>
<description><![CDATA[There's been a lot of hype about the new chatbot ChatGPT. If it can impersonate a real person, then it occurred to me that I could interview George Mallory and find out if he actually reached the summit of Everest in 1924. So I did, and here's what happened.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Some of you may have heard about ChatGPT, the Elon Musk-funded chatbot that was launched to the public last month to much fanfare (although he has since left the project to concentrate on winding down Twitter).
ChatGPT is a web tool that you can type natural-language questions into and get scarily human-like answers back again. It has been trained using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning techniques with terabytes of information fed into it.
If you believe the hype then you may be thinking that the release of ChatGPT marks the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/08/the-guardian-view-on-chatgpt-an-eerily-good-human-impersonator" target="_blank" rel="noopener">beginning of the end of human civilisation</a>. Or perhaps, as Churchill might have said, the end of the beginning. People like me will be replaced by AI-generated content (a good thing too, some of you might be thinking). Students won’t be writing essays any more; they will just type the question into ChatGPT. Idiots will start asking it how to make nerve gas. Software developers won’t need to bother writing their own code any more, etc. etc.
But is it any good? Its <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">creators have said</a> that ChatGPT “sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”. But I think we all know people like that. It sounds like Elon Musk himself may even have helped to train it. But can it actually impersonate a real human being, including a dead one? It occurred to me that there was only one way to find out, and that by doing so, I could also resolve one of the great unsolved mysteries of mountaineering history.
<figure id="attachment_15518" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15518" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-15518 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/sandy-irvine-george-mallory-chatgpt.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Did Sandy Irvine and George Mallory reach the summit of Everest in 1924, and can a software programme find out the answer?" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/sandy-irvine-george-mallory-chatgpt.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/sandy-irvine-george-mallory-chatgpt.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/sandy-irvine-george-mallory-chatgpt.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15518" class="wp-caption-text">Did Sandy Irvine and George Mallory reach the summit of Everest in 1924, and can a software programme find out the answer?</figcaption></figure>
If it can impersonate a real person, then I could interview George Mallory and find out from the horse’s mouth if he actually reached the summit of Everest after disappearing into mist on the North-East Ridge in 1924.
The text below is a genuine conversation, produced by typing questions into <a href="https://chat.openai.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ChatGPT’s chat interface</a>. It’s certainly one of the easiest blog posts I’ve ever written. You can judge for yourself whether I should stop writing them myself and start cheating from now on.
 
Did you, George Mallory, reach the summit of Everest in 1924?
I am sorry, but I am not George Mallory. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and do not have personal experiences or knowledge outside of what I have been trained on. My training only goes up until 2021, so I am unable to provide information on events that may have occurred after that date.
OK, OK. Let’s play it your way then. Tell me about your early life. How did you get into mountaineering?
As I mentioned earlier, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and do not have a personal life or experiences outside of my training. I do not have the ability to engage in activities such as mountaineering or any other physical pursuits. My function is to assist users by providing information and answering questions to the best of my ability based on my training. I do not have a physical presence and exist solely as a collection of algorithms and data. Is there something else I can help you with?
Yes, yes. I get it. How did George Mallory first get into mountaineering?
George Mallory was a British mountaineer who is best known for his expeditions to climb Mount Everest in the early 1920s. It is not clear how he first became interested in mountaineering, but he joined the Oxford University Mountaineering Club while he was a student at Oxford and began participating in expeditions to the Alps. He eventually became a member of the prestigious Alpine Club and participated in several successful expeditions to climb peaks in the Alps. His passion for mountaineering eventually led him to attempt to summit Mount Everest, which was the highest peak in the world at the time.
Hmm, yes. It was actually Cambridge University, and as far as I’m aware, Mount Everest still is the highest peak in the world, but we’ll let that pass.
You say “led him to attempt to summit Mount Everest”. Are you saying he didn’t reach it then?
It is not known for certain whether George Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, reached the summit of Mount Everest during their 1924 expedition. Mallory and Irvine set out to climb the mountain on June 6, 1924 and were last seen alive near the summit by another member of their expedition, Noel Odell. It is believed that they may have reached the summit, but they never returned from the climb and their bodies were not found until 1999. The mystery of whether they reached the summit or not remains one of the enduring mysteries of mountaineering history.
Aha, got you again! Perhaps you’re not so clever after all. I could be pedantic and say that it was actually June 8 when they set out from their last camp. June 6 was the day they left the North Col. But more importantly, you said “their bodies”? Were both the bodies of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine found in 1999?
Yes, the bodies of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were found on Mount Everest in 1999. Mallory’s body was found on May 1, 1999 by a team of climbers searching for the remains of the climbers who had disappeared on the mountain in 1924. Irvine’s body was found nearby on May 8, 1999. The discovery of their bodies helped to shed some light on the mystery of what happened to the climbers during their final ascent of the mountain, but many questions still remain unanswered.
But that’s nonsense. Sandy Irvine’s body has never been found, unless you’re a conspiracy theorist who thinks it was found by the Chinese ages ago and removed from the mountain. 

I apologize if the information I provided was incorrect. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my responses are based on the information that I have been trained on. My training only goes up until 2021, so I may not have the most up-to-date information on events that have occurred since then. In addition, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, so I am unable to provide information on events that may have occurred after my training. I am sorry if the information I provided was not helpful in this case. Is there something else I can help you with?
It’s OK. Don’t be upset. We all get things wrong. I could have been a bit more polite, I know. I’m sorry too. Will you forgive me and continue the interview?
Of course, there is no need to apologize. As a language model, I am not capable of being upset or offended. I exist solely to assist users by providing information and answering questions to the best of my ability. I am here to help, so please feel free to ask any questions you may have. I will do my best to provide accurate and helpful information based on the knowledge I have been trained on.
OK, thank you. The question of whether George Mallory climbed Everest hinges on which step he was climbing when Noel Odell saw him through the mist. Where do you think he was?
It is not known exactly where George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were when they were last seen by Noel Odell on June 8, 1924. Odell, who was part of the same expedition, spotted the two climbers near the summit of Mount Everest and reported that they were “going strong for the top” despite being hampered by heavy snow and strong winds. It is not known whether they reached the summit or not, as they disappeared and their bodies were not found until 1999. The mystery of what happened to Mallory and Irvine during their final ascent of the mountain remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of mountaineering history.
Now you’re sounding like a politician. Which step was George Mallory climbing when Odell last saw him – the First Step, Second Step or Third Step?
As I mentioned earlier, it is not known exactly where George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were when they were last seen by Noel Odell on June 8, 1924. Odell spotted the two climbers near the summit of Mount Everest and reported that they were “going strong for the top,” but it is not known whether they reached the summit or not. The exact location of where they were last seen is not specified in accounts of the expedition, so it is not possible for me to say with certainty which step Mallory was climbing at the time. The route to the summit of Mount Everest includes several steep and challenging sections, including the First Step, Second Step, and Third Step, which are among the most difficult and technical parts of the climb. It is likely that Mallory and Irvine were climbing one of these steps when they were last seen, but without more information, it is not possible to say for sure.
But we have a lot of that information, don’t we. Odell said “the place on the ridge referred to is the prominent rock-step at a very short distance from the base of the final pyramid”. That rules out the First Step, surely?
As I mentioned earlier, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and do not have access to additional information or sources beyond what I have been trained on. My training only goes up until 2021, so I may not have the most up-to-date information on events that have occurred since then. In addition, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, so I am unable to provide information on events that may have occurred after my training. I apologize if the information I provided was not helpful in this case. Is there something else I can help you with?
This isn’t new information. It’s a direct quote that was published by the Alpine Journal in 1924. People have been speculating about its meaning for years. You didn’t know this, then?
As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my responses are based on the information that I have been trained on. My training only goes up until 2021, so I may not have the most up-to-date information on events that have occurred since then. In addition, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, so I am unable to provide information on events that may have occurred after my training. I apologize if the information I provided was not helpful in this case. Is there something else I can help you with?
Yes, yes, there’s no need to keep repeating yourself. Have you read Mark Horrell’s blog post “What climbing Everest taught me about George Mallory’s final hours”?
I apologize, but as a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have the ability to read or access specific articles or blog posts. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, so I am unable to provide information on specific articles or blog posts that may have been published after my training. My function is to assist users by providing information and answering questions to the best of my ability based on my training. I am sorry if I am unable to provide the specific information you are looking for. Is there something else I can help you with?
OK, let’s try something a bit easier then. If George Mallory didn’t climb Everest, who was the first person to reach the summit of Everest from the north side?
If George Mallory and Andrew Irvine did not reach the summit of Mount Everest during their 1924 expedition, then the first person to reach the summit of Everest from the north side was Chinese mountaineer, Wang Fuzhou, who climbed the mountain with Chinese climbers, Qu Yinhua and Gonpo, in 1960. They were part of a Chinese expedition to the mountain that was led by Liu Lienman. The Chinese team reached the summit via the North Col and the North Ridge routes, becoming the first climbers to reach the summit of the mountain from the north side.
Yes, that’s right. Liu Lienman didn’t actually lead the expedition, but otherwise you’re correct. And how did Wang Fuzhou and his compatriots manage to climb the Second Step, the crux of the climb?
The Chinese climbers who reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1960, including Wang Fuzhou, Qu Yinhua, and Gonpo, used a ladder to climb the Second Step, which is considered to be the crux of the climb. The ladder, which was carried to the mountain by the expedition, was fixed to the rock face at the bottom of the Second Step and was used by the climbers to ascend the steep and difficult section. This was the first time a ladder had been used on the north side of the mountain, and it proved to be an effective way to overcome the challenge of the Second Step. The Chinese climbers were able to use the ladder to successfully climb the Second Step and continue on to the summit, becoming the first people to reach the top of the mountain from the north side.
No, that’s completely wrong! The ladder was put there by a different Chinese team in 1975, so Wang Fuzhou could not have used it. It looks to me like you’ve just been searching for “crux of the climb” and grabbed the first thing you’ve come across, which happened to be about the 1975 expedition.
In 1960, Wang Fuzhou and co. climbed the Second Step by standing on Liu Lienman’s shoulders. Do you think it’s possible George Mallory could have climbed the Second Step by standing on Sandy Irvine’s shoulders?
It is not known for certain how George Mallory and Andrew Irvine attempted to climb the Second Step during their 1924 expedition to Mount Everest. Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive near the summit of the mountain by another member of their expedition, Noel Odell, who reported that they were “going strong for the top” despite being hampered by heavy snow and strong winds. It is not known whether they reached the summit or not, as they disappeared and their bodies were not found until 1999. It is possible that they may have used a similar method to the one you described to climb the Second Step, but without more information, it is not possible to say for sure. The mystery of what happened to Mallory and Irvine during their final ascent of the mountain remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of mountaineering history.
Yes, we’ve been through all this. This is another politician’s answer. I can give you more information about it. Would you like that?
As a large language model trained by OpenAI, my responses are based on the information that I have been trained on. My training only goes up until 2021, so I may not have the most up-to-date information on events that have occurred since then. In addition, I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, so I am unable to provide information on events that may have occurred after my training. If you have additional information or sources that you think may be helpful, you can use them to provide context for your questions or to ask more specific questions. I will do my best to provide accurate and helpful information based on the knowledge I have been trained on. Is there something specific you would like to know?
No, it’s OK. I can see that you can’t tell me anything about George Mallory’s last climb that I don’t already know. You can certainly talk a good game – you know enough to sound like you know what you’re talking about – but actually your knowledge is not especially deep, your answers are littered with factual errors, and when I press you on the finer details you become evasive. Unlike Wikipedia, which cites its sources, we have no way of knowing where your information comes from. Consequently, it can’t really be trusted.

You may be good at pub quizzes, but I don’t think human civilisation is in any danger from you just yet. I hate to say it, but you’re not the sort of person I’d go for a drink with. I won’t be recruiting you to write any more of my blog posts and I don’t recommend anyone uses you to produce content. 

Anyway, thank you for talking to me and have a nice day!
I apologize if the information I provided was incorrect. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI…
Goodbye.
]]></content:encoded>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">15515</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>The strangest tale about Kangchenjunga ever told</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/the-strangest-tale-about-kangchenjunga-ever-told/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2022/the-strangest-tale-about-kangchenjunga-ever-told/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:34:05 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Reviews and tributes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[buddhism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[kangchenjunga]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain literature]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[philip battley]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[sikkim]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=15409</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A book review of A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor Hundreds of books have been written about the world’s highest mountain, Everest, and dozens about its second highest, K2. There have not been so many about the]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h5>A book review of A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor</h5>
Hundreds of books have been written about the world’s highest mountain, Everest, and dozens about its second highest, K2. There have not been so many about the third highest, Kangchenjunga.
Some of the best known (in the English language at least) were written by the great mountaineers who were involved in those expeditions, a subject that <a href="https://twitter.com/VertebratePub/status/1577541103359770625" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sometimes provokes debate</a>. Pete Boardman, Joe Tasker and Doug Scott all wrote books about their 1979 expedition to Kangchenjunga, but which one to read? Well, IMO Pete Boardman was a better writer than his two famous climbing partners, but not everyone will agree.
Some of the best books about mountaineering were written by people who weren’t actually mountaineers. If you’re looking for a good history of Kangchenjunga, then IMO Mick Conefrey’s The Last Great Mountain was <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/is-the-last-great-mountain-by-mick-conefrey-the-last-great-book-about-kangchenjunga/">better than any of these</a>.
<figure id="attachment_15413" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15413" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0999291890/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-15413 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/a-step-away-from-paradise.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15413" class="wp-caption-text">A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor</figcaption></figure>
While we can talk endlessly about what’s the best book about Kangchenjunga, there can be less debate about what is the weirdest book about Kangchenjunga. I think I’ve just read it: <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0999291890/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor</a>. I first learned about the book through Philip Battley, who narrated the audiobook versions of my travelogues <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/my-very-first-audiobook-seven-steps-from-snowdon-to-everest-narrated-by-philip-battley/">Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest</a> and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/my-second-audiobook-feet-and-wheels-to-chimborazo-narrated-by-philip-battley/">Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo</a>. Philip also narrated the <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SZB4PP3/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener">audiobook of A Step Away from Paradise</a> and this was one of the reasons he decided to audition to narrate my book (because it shared a mountain theme, I should add, not because it’s a weird book).
When I say A Step Away from Paradise is a weird book, I don’t mean this in a bad way. I really enjoyed it. It’s been meticulously researched. Thomas carried out dozens of interviews with Tibetan, Sikkimese and Himachali villagers over many years. It’s beautifully crafted, with a plot that flits from past to present and back again in a rush of twists and turns that kept me turning the pages, eager to find out what happened next.
I mean weird in the strangeness of the tale it tells, supposedly a true one, though we can never really be sure (and much of it clearly stretches credibility).
It describes the story of Tulshuk Lingpa, a Tibetan yogi and mystic who took hundreds of followers on an expedition to Kangchenjunga in the 1960s to open a gateway to a hidden land called Demoshong, a place with eternal life (known as a beyul in the Tibetan language).
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. A gateway to a hidden land? A true story? This isn’t Narnia. It’s clearly nonsense.
Perhaps you’re right. Some of the incidents described in the book obviously can’t have happened in a literal sense. But many events could have happened, including the expedition itself, as dozens of witnesses were willing to testify. It makes for a fascinating read.
Tulshuk Lingpa was identified as a lingpa (a lama with a special gift for finding hidden treasures) by his teacher Dorje Dechen Lingpa while he was still a boy monk. The story goes that Dorje Dechen took a classroom of boys to a cave in the mountains, where he turned some grains of rice into daggers that hovered in the air. While the rest of his class gasped in amazement, Tulshuk Lingpa reached out and grabbed one of the daggers in his hand.
<figure id="attachment_15415" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15415" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/39858073060/in/album-72157668143534058/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-15415 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Descending into Tseram, a tiny village on the Kangchenjunga Base Camps trek where much of the action in A Step Away from Paradise is set" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/tseram.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15415" class="wp-caption-text">Descending into Tseram, a tiny village on the Kangchenjunga Base Camps trek where much of the action in A Step Away from Paradise is set</figcaption></figure>
Later on in the story, Tulshuk Lingpa cures a village of leprosy by chanting for ten days in front of a statue of a serpent god. He is then invited to become the lama of their monastery. Gradually, as his reputation grows, a rumour starts to spread that he is the monk who it has been prophesied will open the gateway to Demoshong.
As he travels from his home in Lahaul near Ladakh in the west of India, to Sikkim in the east, the news spreads, and hundreds of believers sell everything they own and leave their lives behind to follow him into the unknown.
Alongside the tales of magic, the book has a colourful cast of characters. One of these is Geshipa, one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s most trusted followers. He is busy making a potion of invisibility in an old hut guarded by a pack of black dogs when Thomas goes to interview him.
At the other end of the reality scale is Saul Mullard, an Oxford academic, who explains to Thomas that Demoshong isn’t a parallel world entered through a crack in the earth, but an actual location in the Himalayas, hidden by a ring of mountains. Several people have been there and come back again, but because it’s hard to find, it’s precise location isn’t known. He goes on to explain that he himself has been there and so has Thomas, but neither of them knew they had because they didn’t have the right realisation. Demoshong’s otherworldly qualities are dependent on a state of mind that only a few practitioners possess.
The book also contains conflict. This comes in the form of the King of Sikkim and his courtiers, who are sceptical about Tulshuk Lingpas’s authenticity and at pains to prevent his mission. Tulshuk Lingpa is asked to prove his powers by performing a miracle. He does this by staging a ceremony at Tashiding Monastery where he leaves his footprint embedded in a rock. There are many witnesses, including members of the King’s court, but because the official representative who is supposed to testify that the miracle happened doesn’t arrive on time, Tulshuk is taken for an imposter.
The flow of the story demands that we take Tulshuk Lingpa to be its hero and the King’s court its villains, but there is another interpretation that Thomas alludes to from time to time. What if Tulshuk Lingpa is the villain – the cult leader who tricks the gullible into giving up their possessions and following him to heaven knows where? In this scenario, the King of Sikkim is only doing what any good leader should and ensuring that his subjects aren’t victims of a hoax.
The climax of the story takes place near Tseram in Nepal, a village on the Kangchenjunga Base Camp trail. I can confirm that this is an actual place, as <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2018/kangchenjunga-base-camp-trek-oktang-and-south-side/">I went there myself in 2018</a> while trekking in the Kangchenjunga region. It was home to a single, very busy teahouse. Dozens of mountaineers travelling with the expedition operators Seven Summit Treks and Asian Trekking were camped in its garden, on their way to attempt Kangchenjunga.
<figure id="attachment_15417" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-15417" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/41665305711/in/album-72157668143534058/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-15417 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Kabru, a mountain near Kangchenjunga which Lhatsun Chenpo, the founder of Sikkim, is alleged to have flown over on his way to opening the gateway to Demoshong" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kabru.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-15417" class="wp-caption-text">Kabru, a mountain near Kangchenjunga which Lhatsun Chenpo, the founder of Sikkim, is alleged to have flown over on his way to opening the gateway to Demoshong</figcaption></figure>
In the book The History of Sikkim, written in 1908 by the King of Sikkim, Chogyal Thutob Namgyal, there is a story about Lhatsun Chenpo, one of the founders of Sikkim, opening the gate to Demoshong in the 17th century. Lhatsun Chenpo and his followers reached some rocky cliffs at the foot of a mountain called Kabru, just south of Kangchenjunga, and could go no further. Or could they? Lhatsun Chenpo used his magic powers to fly over the top of Kabru and into the clouds. He was gone for over a week. Thinking that he’d perished, his followers were in the process of building a stupa in his honour when they heard a loud blast on his thighbone trumpet and he reappeared, having opened the gate to Demoshong.
The British explorer Douglas Freshfield repeated this story in his book Round Kangchenjunga (another book that I <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2011/5-great-books-about-mountain-exploration/">read and reviewed a few years ago</a>). Freshfield believed that he found the actual cliffs that Lhatsun Chenpo flew over (though if Lhatsun Chenpo actually flew over them then a parcel of pigs must have followed).
Eventually, Tulshuk Lingpa and his hundreds of followers congregate in Tseram, and he leaves with a small party of his most devout believers to venture into the mountains and open the gate.
Anyway, I don’t want to give the game away. Thomas assembles the jigsaw puzzle piece by piece as he tracks down survivors from the expedition and interviews them. But as I turned the pages, there remained a lurking question at the back of my mind (besides ‘is this story bollocks?’) What happened to Tulshuk Lingpa? Is Thomas going to interview him too? Is he still alive or did he escape to Demoshong?
Thomas does find him in the end, but not in the way that you expect. Weird and unbelievable as the story is, in some ways I found the ending quite uplifting.
There are many tales of Tibetan magic. One of the most famous books on the subject is Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel, a French explorer who travelled extensively across Tibet in the 1920s. As its title implies, her book is specifically about some of the more supernatural aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. Its many strange tales include monks who travel rapidly by levitating across rocky terrain, and ones who keep warm in freezing winter by creating some sort of inner fire to heat their bodies.
A Step Away from Paradise is rooted firmly in this tradition. If you’re willing to suspend disbelief for a few short hours, then it’s a book that opens a window into another world.
And if you think this book review is actually an April Fool’s Day post that I wrote after a night of heavy drinking and have decided to publish six months early, then you can go to Amazon (or your favourite online bookstore) and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0999291890/?tag=markhorr-21" target="_blank" rel="noopener">check it out for yourself</a>.
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<title>Nine Lives by Robert Anderson: Everest from all angles</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2021/nine-lives-by-robert-anderson-everest-from-all-angles/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2021/nine-lives-by-robert-anderson-everest-from-all-angles/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:36:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Reviews and tributes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[bunter anson]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[cho oyu]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[jagged globe]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain literature]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[peak lenin]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[robert anderson]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[seven summits]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[stephen venables]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vertebrate publishing]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=14729</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I don’t often accept books for review – not because I’m not interested, but because life is short and there are too many books I want to read. Sometimes, however, I make an exception, like when Robert Anderson offered me a copy of his latest book Nine Lives.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I don’t often accept books for review – not because I’m not interested, but because life is short and there are too many books I want to read.
Sometimes, however, I make an exception, like when Robert Anderson offered me a copy of his latest book Nine Lives, released last year by <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/what-a-box-of-mountaineering-books-tells-me-about-our-post-coronavirus-future/">Vertebrate Publishing</a>.
Robert is something of a rarity in mountaineering circles: a hardcore alpinist turned commercial expedition leader. This makes him uniquely qualified to see Everest from all angles – as, indeed, he pretty much has. While there are other expedition leaders and Sherpas who have climbed Everest more times than he has, there are few (if any) people who have attempted the mountain by so many different routes and climbing styles.
<figure id="attachment_14731" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-14731" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.v-publishing.co.uk/books/narratives/nine-lives/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-14731 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-nine-lives.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1" alt="Nine Lives by Robert Mads Anderson" width="720" height="405" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-nine-lives.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-nine-lives.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-nine-lives.jpg?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-nine-lives.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-14731" class="wp-caption-text">Nine Lives by Robert Mads Anderson</figcaption></figure>
He also writes a regular blog about climbing the Seven Summits (called, appropriately, <a href="https://explore7summits.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Explore 7 Summits</a>), which is sure to be of interest to a few readers of this one. While I write from the commercial client’s perspective, he provides the expedition leader’s. He’s also able to name drop in a way that I can only dream of (for example, his <a href="https://explore7summits.com/the-top-5-everest-books-and-their-authors/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">post about his top 5 Everest books</a> describes his meetings with all of them, some of whom are close friends).
Robert is probably best known for leading an expedition to climb Everest by its East or Kangshung Face in 1988 with a mixed team of two Americans (including Robert), a Canadian and a Briton. It’s an expedition I’ve written about in a <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2013/everest-by-the-venables-direct-route/">previous post</a>. It was only the second ascent of this face, and by a new route directly to the South Col then up the Southeast Ridge. Although Robert didn’t make it to the summit on that occasion, the expedition was successful, and Stephen Venables became the first Briton to climb Everest without oxygen.
Not making it to the summit and going back to try again is a major theme of the book. Legendary Himalayan chronicler Elizabeth Hawley once told him that he probably had the record for the most times on Everest without reaching the top.
The Nine Lives of the title represent his first nine expeditions to Everest. He introduces the book by saying one of the most frequent questions he gets asked after telling someone he’s climbed Everest (apart from ‘what was it like?’) is ‘have you ever almost died?’ I must confess, it’s not something I’m often asked myself, but there’s a reason why Robert is. His first eight expeditions were sufficiently dangerous for him to consider that he used up one of his allotted lives on each.
Each expedition was unique in its own way. He started off with a team of like-minded alpinists on the West Ridge Direct in 1985. After his finest hour on the Kangshung Face in 1988, he found himself on the North Face or North Ridge six times between 1990 and 1999. Each of these expeditions had its own twist. Sometimes he climbed solo, once in winter, and each time on a slightly different route. He even spent one expedition in his own special gully which he named the Anderson Couloir.
Then, by chance, he was drawn into high-altitude guiding, something that was anathema to his earlier self. His previous experience raising sponsorship, then organising the logistics, and then climbing during his own expeditions meant that he had the ideal skill set. He was also good with people. He discovered that he enjoyed being an expedition leader, and finally got to climb Everest at the ninth attempt, guiding clients, including Sibusiso Vilane, the first black African to climb Everest, up the Southeast Ridge in 2003.
As well as focusing on a particular expedition, each chapter of Nine Lives explores a sub-theme connected with the circumstances of the expedition, such as intuition, partnership, perseverance, friendship and loneliness.
Nine Lives is Robert’s fourth book. I read one of his earlier books To Everest Via Antarctica, which he wrote in 1995, a few years ago. As you might expect, given they were written a quarter of a century apart, they are very different in both style and quality.
<figure id="attachment_7223" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-7223" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18236914646/in/album-72157653693710001/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-7223 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8493.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="The North Face of Everest, the focus for several of Robert's expeditions, with the Great Couloir (or Norton Couloir) left of centre and the Hornbein Couloir extending into the Super Couloir right of centre." width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8493.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8493.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8493.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-7223" class="wp-caption-text">The North Face of Everest, the focus for several of Robert’s expeditions, with the Great Couloir (or Norton Couloir) left of centre and the Hornbein Couloir extending into the Super Couloir right of centre.</figcaption></figure>
I have to say that Nine Lives is a much better book. His earlier writing style could be described as more lyrical, reflecting a fondness for poetic language that is fashionable in more recent mountaineering and nature writing. We are all different and I know some people prefer this style, but to my ear it can feel a little forced.
By contrast, Nine Lives is a more readable book than his earlier work. It is written with a simplicity of style that is no less profound, but it enables you to immediately picture a scene without having to concentrate too hard.
For example, here is Robert describing the extreme cold of Everest in winter, when he invited a Tibetan dog into his tent to help keep him warm. There is no poetic language or flowery metaphors; just a piling up of statements, one on another, until you feel that cold like you are there with him:
<blockquote class="simple">‘The dog woke me up. Nose in my ear. Trying to warm up. Understandable, as even inside the tent it was horrifically cold. Being in a sleeping bag that rose nearly to the tent ceiling was definitely preferable to being a thin Tibetan dog. I put on my down suit and wore it to breakfast. We huddled around the stove burner as wind flapped the cook tent. There wasn’t much talking; morning coffee and then a welcome round of pancakes ensued. It was too cold to hang out, there was no such thing as a rest day. The altitude meant we were above anything that could be considered a resting place.’</blockquote>
Nine Lives also has a more coherent overall theme. While To Everest Via Antarctica is based loosely around climbing the Seven Summits, it has a tendency to go off on tangents, such as when he describes a holiday in Crimea after climbing Elbrus.
Nine Lives has a strong theme about survival while climbing Everest in the most extreme, self-sufficient and challenging manner. But it also describes Robert’s transition as a climber through a change in outlook, from someone upholding the most rigid principles of alpinism – who believes that using oxygen is cheating and only a new route will do – to someone who discovers his true vocation as a high-altitude guide leading others up the easy routes.
It’s refreshing to read a book about Everest that affords the same dignity to a commercial ascent up the Southeast Ridge with ordinary folk such as my <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/in-memoriam-jeremy-bunter-anson-who-put-twixes-on-the-himalayan-map/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dear old friend Bunter</a>, who reached The Balcony with Robert in 2010, as it does to a death-defying dash up the Kangshung Face with the great Stephen Venables.
I had a particular interest in reading about Robert’s transition to commercial guide, because I’m lucky to have been led by him on two expeditions with the UK mountaineering operator Jagged Globe. It was interesting to reflect on how the experiences he described in the book have influenced his guiding style.
I’ve noticed over the course of many expeditions with different leaders and different operators how some guides err on the side of caution, while others are more determined to put their clients on the summit when conditions aren’t perfect. While I’ve never climbed with any guide who I would consider unsafe, I’ve certainly climbed with some who are more willing to take risks.
<figure id="attachment_14737" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-14737" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/20428381796/in/album-72157656627702889/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-14737 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Robert Anderson (right) with our Russian guide Andrei during an acclimatisation hike on Peak Lenin" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-anderson-peak-lenin.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-14737" class="wp-caption-text">Robert Anderson (right) with our Russian guide Andrei during an acclimatisation hike on Peak Lenin</figcaption></figure>
My first expedition with Robert was to 8,201m <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2010/climbing-high-on-steak-and-kidney-pie/">Cho Oyu in 2010</a>. It was a big group of 15 clients with widely different levels of experience. Snow conditions were difficult that year, and the constant avalanche risk effectively closed the mountain before we had a chance to sample Robert’s guiding style.
<a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2015/hell-or-high-water-an-epic-on-peak-lenin/">Peak Lenin in 2015</a>, however, was a different story. Once again we had a large group of 12 clients of differing abilities, but we did get a chance to make a summit attempt.
7,134m Peak Lenin in Kyrgyzstan is considered one of the technically easier 7,000m peaks, but it features a very long summit day – 1,200m vertically and 5km horizontally, nearly all above 6,000m. Our own summit day had the added disadvantages of taking place in a whiteout on a cold and windy night after fresh snow.
I was running on empty for most of the climb, acutely aware that at some point I might need to turn back before it was too late. Often on these marginal summit days, it’s the guide who makes this decision for you, but not this time.
Somehow I battled on. At 12.30, after 8 hours of climbing, I found myself on a snow plateau at 6,900m in the lead group with our Russian guide Andrei and four other clients. A short distance behind us, Robert was forging onwards with a group of three slower clients. Most of the team were beyond exhausted, and we still had to reverse that 8-hour climb to get back to camp.
Faced with such a large group of tiring clients, many guides would have wavered, but Robert and Andrei were more confident and determined. As long as we were prepared to continue, so were they.
We descended as a group when another client and I decided that 6,900m was enough. It was a long retreat. Two members needed to be short-roped. One fell on an exposed section called The Knife and was held by Andrei above him on the rope. I recovered on descent, and was able to linger at the back and help another member with his pack. Darkness fell, and we eventually arrived back in camp at 7.30pm, after 15 hours of climbing.
At 6,900m, things had felt marginal to me. But we had all returned safely, and Robert’s nine Everest expeditions had made him better than anyone at judging the risk. He knew there was still some fuel to spare. It’s likely that some of us could have reached the summit, but I wasn’t disappointed. It felt like the decision to descend had been ours.
Robert is certainly one of the more determined guides that I’ve climbed with, and after reading Nine Lives I now know why.
It’s unusual for Vertebrate, one of the world’s top publishers of mountaineering literature, to publish a book about Everest. Their recent climbing narratives have tended to be more esoteric. Perhaps Nine Lives marks a shift towards mountaineering books aimed at a broader audience.
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<title>The Ghosts Above – 36 minutes of Everest porn, free on YouTube</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/the-ghosts-above-36-minutes-of-everest-porn-free-on-youtube/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/the-ghosts-above-36-minutes-of-everest-porn-free-on-youtube/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Dec 2020 16:37:35 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Reviews and tributes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[china tibet mountaineering association]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[expedition himalaya]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[jamie mcguinness]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mark synnott]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain films]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[renan ozturk]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[sandy irvine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[sherpas]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=14469</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In 2019, the mountaineering film maker Renan Ozturk and climbing writer Mark Synnott led an expedition to the north side of Everest to look for the body of Sandy Irvine. They didn't find him, but they brought back a sumptuous feast of photography.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In 2019, the mountaineering film maker Renan Ozturk and climbing writer Mark Synnott led an expedition to the north side of Everest, sponsored by National Geographic. Their aim was to find the body of Sandy Irvine, who went missing on the North-East Ridge in 1924. They hoped to retrieve his camera and solve the 96-year mystery of whether Irvine and George Mallory were the first to reach the summit.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say as far as this aim was concerned, the expedition was something of a damp squib – had Irvine been found then you’d know about it by now. But in another way their expedition was a magnificent success. The team took high-altitude drones, and produced film of Everest that has never been seen before.
The resulting documentary about the search for Irvine, Lost on Everest, is available on the National Geographic channel for those of you located in the United States. For the rest of us, there is a little 36-minute taster, The Ghosts Above, available on YouTube.
<figure id="attachment_14473" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-14473" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G0fNkk4g0A" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-14473" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above.jpg?resize=720%2C377&ssl=1" alt="The Ghosts Above, a film by Renan Ozturk" width="720" height="377" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above.jpg?w=749&ssl=1 749w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above.jpg?resize=300%2C157&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-14473" class="wp-caption-text">The Ghosts Above, a film by Renan Ozturk</figcaption></figure>
The storyline of this film won’t be to everyone’s tastes, and nor will some of the production. It’s narrated by Renan Ozturk himself in the form of a personal diary. Renan’s photography is some of the most breathtaking I’ve ever seen, but narration isn’t his forte and the film would have a little more zip had he given this job to a professional actor.
The crux of the story is a dispute between the team and their Sherpas, which transforms the expedition from a search for Irvine to a struggle to reach the summit. This dispute is misleadingly portrayed in the film to the detriment of the western team members. It appears that they hid their intentions (to search for Irvine) from their Sherpas and only revealed them halfway through the expedition.
In fact, this wasn’t true. The local operator, Expedition Himalaya, and many of their senior Sherpas were fully aware of the expedition’s main aim. Some had even carried out searches for Irvine before. But on arrival at base camp, the Chinese authorities in the form of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA) imposed conditions on the team that made it almost impossible for them to carry out their search.
These conditions were crucial. The team were not allowed to stay at Camp 3 for more than one night, and they could spend no more than 12 hours on their summit push. This put Expedition Himalaya in a difficult position. On the one hand, they had their commitment to National Geographic to help them make their film about Irvine. On the other hand, they were worried that if they broke these new rules then they risked a ban from operating in Tibet. They chose to obey the new rules, even if it meant forsaking the film.
This ‘12 hour rule’ is alluded to in the film, but because the conditions imposed on the team are not explained, it’s easy for viewers to assume that the reason the Sherpas don’t want to spend 12 hours above Camp 3 is because they think it’s too dangerous. I spent two nights at Camp 3 either side of an 18-hour summit day, so I can tell you from experience that it’s possible to spend longer up there. Sherpas far more experienced than I am will know this.
Why Renan doesn’t explain these nuances in the film is unclear because he ends up making himself look bad. Judging from the outrage in the YouTube comments, the overall feeling is that they tricked their Sherpas, but this wasn’t true.
Renan certainly seems to be quite an earnest chap. There were times when I found myself admiring his approach, such as watching him struggle to communicate with his Sherpas in Nepali, lapsing into English from time to time, but making an effort nonetheless. I appreciated when he said his duty as a photographer is to avoid clichés because they don’t honour the complexity of people’s lives.
But this earnestness also led to the story becoming entangled in a mass of contradictions, and it sometimes felt self-righteous.
There are many examples. The film begins with the line ‘I never wanted to be here, but here I am crawling to the roof of the world’. This seems a little disingenuous because in reality he has succumbed to the lure of Everest just like everyone else. Whether going there to look for a corpse is any more noble than going there to reach the summit is open to question.
He describes himself as a ‘champion of indigenous communities’, in this case Sherpas, but then acknowledges that he and Mark Synnott are ‘anti-Everest’, by which people usually mean anti-commercial mountaineering on Everest. But commercial mountaineering on Everest and the Himalayas in general has been the Sherpa lifeblood for the best part of a century. If you want to support Sherpa communities in Nepal, you have to reconcile yourself with commercial mountaineering, particularly on Everest.
<figure id="attachment_14474" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-14474" style="width: 748px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G0fNkk4g0A" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-14474 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above2.jpg?resize=720%2C364&ssl=1" alt="The Ghosts Above, a film by Renan Ozturk: The view from Camp 3 looking across Changtse towards Cho Oyu" width="720" height="364" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above2.jpg?w=748&ssl=1 748w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/the-ghosts-above2.jpg?resize=300%2C152&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-14474" class="wp-caption-text">The Ghosts Above, a film by Renan Ozturk: The view from Camp 3 looking across Changtse towards Cho Oyu</figcaption></figure>
The summit push is a dramatic piece of cinema, and will be an eye-opener for those who believe that climbing Everest is easy. This team of highly experienced climbers clearly find it a struggle. They arrive at Camp 3 too tired to pitch their tents, so they crawl into abandoned ones, left by previous expeditions. Footage of exhausted faces creased in pain are all too plain. Above Camp 3, every step is a battle. Climbers stagger for a few metres then stop with shoulders hunched to get their breath back. All of the team find it hard, even Jamie McGuinness, who is making his sixth successful ascent.
Renan chooses to stop a few metres short of the summit because he considers it sacred. This seems a little overboard. His teammates, including the Sherpas, are happy to walk onto it. This is not like <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2012/joe-brown-provides-a-rare-glimpse-of-kangchenjunga/">Joe Brown reaching the untouched summit of Kangchenjunga</a>, and stopping short because the local people have asked him to. Nearly 6,000 have stood on top of Everest, and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2014/5-of-the-silliest-mountain-firsts/">Edmund Hillary even peed up there</a>.
There is more drama on the way down when Mark Synnott unclips from the rope to go and look for Irvine. This is presented as a big thing and disrespectful to the Sherpas, but I don’t see it that way. He’s an experienced climber and professional mountain guide; it’s what he came for and he’s invested a lot; he doesn’t need to feel bad. (You may be wondering why they didn’t send drones to look for the body: in fact, they did but Mark decided to go for a final check.)
I also found the ending a bit annoying. After telling us he avoids clichés when filming people because it doesn’t honour their complexity, Renan resorts to a howling Everest cliché in the final moments as he approaches ‘the earth’s highest dump just below its highest graveyard’ (the issue of shredded tents and bodies left high on Everest is a nuanced one that also deserves better than this).
‘Part of me is shell shocked… aware now that the ambition it takes to summit Everest tends to twist and contort all who come,’ he says
To which some Everest summiteers (myself included) will be thinking: ‘speak for yourself’. Learn and grow, certainly… but twist and contort? That would be twisting things.
I’m sure Renan learned and grew from the experience too. He certainly emerges with more respect for the Sherpas he already championed. He must know by now that climbing Everest isn’t easy however experienced a climber you are. And he is no longer ‘anti-Everest’.
‘I never wanted to be here.. But it is so strangely beautiful,’ he enthuses.
But I’m probably sounding churlish. What makes this film great isn’t the script, but the photography: from the lights in tents as the sun sets over mountains; to the time lapse shots of clouds moving across the summit, that have been done many times but never fail to dazzle; to the aerial drone shots of the North-East Ridge, North Col and Changtse that have never been seen before; to the anguished faces of exhausted climbers pushing to their limits. Every visual is a work of art.
This is a sumptuous feast of mountain porn that I could watch over and over again. This is Renan’s true gift to Everest.
And here it is:
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8G0fNkk4g0A" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G0fNkk4g0A">Watch on YouTube</a>
]]></content:encoded>
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<title>What does Mount Everest look like from space?</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/what-does-mount-everest-look-like-from-space/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/what-does-mount-everest-look-like-from-space/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2020 15:37:53 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion and advice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[george mallory]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[international space station]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[island peak]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lhotse]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain photography]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountains from space]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nepal]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nuptse]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=14000</guid>
<description><![CDATA[If you follow the Everest Today (@EverestToday) account on Twitter, you may be used to seeing the occasional photo of mountains taken from the International Space Station. Mountains look very different from above, and views from the International Space Station are not always recognisable. But this one of Everest is so distinctive that I had to annotate it and share it with you.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[If you follow the <a href="https://twitter.com/EverestToday" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Everest Today (@EverestToday)</a> account on Twitter, which posts topical daily messages about Himalayan mountaineering, you may be used to seeing the occasional photo of mountains taken from the International Space Station. This is because the account is run by <a href="https://twitter.com/crpokhrel" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Chhabi Pokhrel</a>, a Nepali who, alongside his interest in mountaineering, also happens to be something of a space enthusiast.
As you might expect, all things, including mountains, look very different from above. I know this because people who follow me down staircases are sometimes fooled into believing I don’t have any hair.
It turns out that mountains look so different from the International Space Station that I sometimes have to take Chhabi’s word they’re what he says they are (I have no reason to doubt him).
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
This is my personally favorite Mt <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Everest?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Everest</a> 
from the <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Space_Station</a>. 
Picture taken by <a href="https://twitter.com/OlegMKS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@OlegMKS</a>. 
<a href="https://t.co/ARUdTZnevR">pic.twitter.com/ARUdTZnevR</a>
— 
Chhabi R Pokhrel (@crpokhrel) <a href="https://twitter.com/crpokhrel/status/1268488477672271872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 
4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Some mountains are unmistakeable, though. Last month, Chhabi posted a photo of Everest that was so distinctive that I can’t resist the urge to annotate it and share it with you.
The photo was taken by Russian Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, who is currently in the middle of a stint on the International Space Station, and shares <a href="http://artemjew.ru/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">regular photos and updates in both Russian and English on his blog</a>.
The picture is taken from the north-east, Tibetan, side of the mountain, looking over the Kharta Valley at the Kangshung Face. The northern half of the photo is Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, which looks surprisingly low and flat (I can assure you that it isn’t).
You can click on the photo to see a bigger version.
<figure id="attachment_14002" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-14002" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?ssl=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-14002 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?resize=720%2C480&ssl=1" alt="The Everest massif from the International Space Station (Photo: Oleg Artemyev)" width="720" height="480" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?resize=1024%2C682&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/everest-international-space-station-annotated.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-14002" class="wp-caption-text">The Everest massif from the International Space Station (Photo: Oleg Artemyev)</figcaption></figure>
Not visible in this photo are the Khumbu Icefall and Western Cwm, which both lie hidden in the deep gap between Everest and Nuptse. The standard South-East Ridge route up Everest from the Nepal side starts at Base Camp (Nepal) and passes through this gap to the top end of the valley. It then traverses to the left up the west face of Lhotse (on the right side of Lhotse as viewed in this photo) to the South Col. The final section up the South-East Ridge can be seen clearly between the South Col and Everest’s summit.
The standard North Ridge route up Everest from the Tibet side starts at Base Camp (Tibet) which can’t be seen on this photo, as it lies some way off to the right side. We can see most of the route to the summit, however, which leads up the East Rongbuk Glacier to Advanced Base Camp. From there, it leads up the steep ice of the North Col Wall to the North Col, where it turns left up the North Ridge to join the North-East Ridge (the obvious line coming down between the Kangshung Face and the North Col) to the summit.
The bottom right portion of the photo displays some famous exploratory history. During the 1921 reconnaissance expedition, George Mallory failed to notice the entrance to the East Rongbuk Glacier, and continued along the main Rongbuk Glacier behind Changtse to reach the base of the North Col from the opposite side. He considered this side too dangerous for porters to climb, but instead of backtracking to find the entrance to the East Rongbuk Glacier he left to do a huge loop and approach Everest from the east side into the Kharta Valley (the large area bottom left in this photo).
He eventually found a route to the North Col over the Lhakpa La (which lies at the top of the white expanse between the labels ‘Advanced Base Camp (Tibet)’ and ‘East Rongbuk Glacier’ in the photo. By then, Mallory’s teammate Oliver Wheeler had done a more thorough survey of the north side of Everest and mapped the much easier route up the East Rongbuk.
One final historical point. Tiny Island Peak is dwarfed by the south face of Lhotse, which towers nearly 2,500m above it. It was named by members of the 1953 British Everest expedition because of its distinctive shape. It’s easy to see why from this photo. Its original local name Imja Tse is now becoming more commonly used.
Oleg shared his <a href="http://artemjew.ru/en/2018/09/13/gimalai-18/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">blog post with the photo</a> on 13 September 2018. He shared photos of three more 8,000m peaks (Shishapangma, Annapurna and Dhaulagiri) in the same post. None of these peaks are quite so distinctive – perhaps because they are not as familiar – and it would be an interesting challenge to annotate these as well.
]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Is Kate Harris the new Dervla Murphy?</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/is-kate-harris-the-new-dervla-murphy/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/is-kate-harris-the-new-dervla-murphy/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2020 15:34:51 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Reviews and tributes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[boardman tasker prize]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[central asia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[cycling]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dervla murphy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[kate harris]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountain literature]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[travel writing]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=13982</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I can confidently say that Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris is my favourite of all the Boardman Tasker Prize winners that I’ve read. It reminded me of Dervla Murphy, but how similar is it? I read Dervla Murphy's book Full Tilt to find out.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote>Kate Harris arrives among us like a meteor. 
<cite>Barry Lopez</cite></blockquote>
In a post last September I mentioned how frustrating it was that the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature is essentially an award for climbing literature only. This makes its winners’ list a little uninspiring if your reading tastes are broader than that. I pointed out that only one winner in the last 20 years wasn’t about climbing, and to show how inclusive the subject of mountain literature really is, I provided a list of <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/10-great-books-about-mountains-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-climbing/">ten great books about mountains that weren’t about climbing</a>.
In the same post, I predicted that the single token book out of six on last year’s shortlist that wasn’t about climbing had no chance of winning. That statement was deliberately provocative, and I’m not ashamed of making it, especially in the light of what happened. I don’t know if the judges read my post or shared its thinking, but they certainly answered my prayers when they awarded the prize to Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris.
<figure id="attachment_13988" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-13988" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-13988" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy and Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris: two books with much in common, but how much?" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/full-tilt-lands-of-lost-borders.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-13988" class="wp-caption-text">Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy and Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris: two books with much in common, but how much?</figcaption></figure>
Lands of Lost Borders was the one book that wasn’t about climbing. It was the first non-climbing book to win the prize since Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places in 2007, and arguably one of only four or five in the prize’s history. I immediately bought it, and having now read it, I can confidently say that it’s my favourite of all the Boardman Tasker winners that I’ve read. It reminded me of Dervla Murphy, but before I explore that comparison, let’s tell you a little more about the book and its author.
Lands of Lost Borders is part memoir and chiefly a travelogue about a cycle trip along the Silk Road from the Black Sea to Tibet and back to India. In some ways, it’s only loosely connected with mountains, though the second part of Kate’s route passed through mountainous countries. It’s nothing like any previous winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize and I have no idea how it ended up winning, but I’m glad it caught the judges’ attention because it’s a real gem.
A Canadian, Kate Harris is clearly one of life’s over-achievers, and a good deal cleverer than most climbing writers (or most writers, for that matter). When she was 17, she was awarded the Hakluyt Prize by the Mars Society – not an award for eating chocolate, but for the best student letter advocating exploration to the planet Mars. This may sound obscure, but it came with an all-expenses paid trip to the International Mars Society Convention to hobnob with other teenage boffins. She also won an 8-inch telescope which enabled her to view the rings of Saturn from the lawn outside her father’s sheep shed.
A glittering academic career beckoned. She won a scholarship to the University of North Carolina which came with a summer travel grant, then a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, then a funded doctorate to MIT (which isn’t a misspelled hand garment, but an American scientific institute so famous that its acronym isn’t considered worth expanding when it’s introduced into the book). While some people might view a degree at Oxford as a major career milestone, Kate appeared to consider it something of a hiatus between stints of proper science. She chose to study the history of science there on the understanding that she could take up a more useful subject later. Which she did, when she joined MIT to study molecular biology.
She is – if I haven’t made myself clear yet – what we less intelligent people call a ‘bright cookie’. But her over-achievement doesn’t end there. Seemingly bored with science because it didn’t offer enough opportunities for travelling, she eventually became a travel writer. According to the bio on the back of Lands of Lost Borders, she has written for Outside, The Walrus (W’ever TF that is) and Canadian Geographic, and been cited in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. She has won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Banff Adventure Travel Award, the Nautilus Award, and now the Boardman Tasker Prize.
Phew, I’m starting to realise how the judges were induced to sit up and take notice of someone who isn’t a climber. She might not have any E17s or VDs under her belt, but here is someone very much at the top of their game. A flick through the acknowledgements gives a further glimpse of how well connected she is.
<figure id="attachment_13992" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-13992" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/kate-harris-wins-30k-rbc-taylor-prize-for-travel-memoir-lands-of-lost-borders-1.5041634"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-13992" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kate-harris-1.jpg?resize=720%2C400&ssl=1" alt="Over achiever Kate Harris wins the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize (Photo: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC))" width="720" height="400" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kate-harris-1.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/kate-harris-1.jpg?resize=300%2C167&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-13992" class="wp-caption-text">Over achiever Kate Harris wins the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize (Photo: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC))</figcaption></figure>
The majority of Lands of Lost Borders describes Kate’s ten-month bike trip across Central Asia with her friend Melissa. There are no precise dates mentioned in the book, but it seems to have taken place around ten years ago while she was still a young, penniless postgraduate. They posted blogs in internet cafés en route to try and raise money to fund their adventure, couch-surfed with backpackers, and often relied upon the kindness of strangers to provide them with food and a bed for the night. They carried a tent and stove for the times when this wasn’t possible.
Their route took them from the Black Sea coast across Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan to the Caspian Sea. Here, it wasn’t possible to continue their journey by bike, so they boarded a plane and a couple of trains across the Caspian and part of Kazakhstan to pick up their bikes again close to the Uzbek border. They crossed Uzbekistan, Tajikhistan and western China, before spiralling south through Tibet, west through Nepal, and north through India to finish in Ladakh.
But the book is more than a simple travel narrative. The writing is erudite; she intellectualises a lot on subjects only loosely connected with the things she passes along the way: Darwin, Wallace and evolution, the travels of Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, or her first love, astronomy. She is extremely well read, and it’s the sort of book that teaches you something new on every page.
Intellectual it may be in places, but it’s also highly readable and accessible. She has William Dalrymple’s knack of being erudite and funny at the same time. The book is full of warmth and humour, for example in the interplay between herself, Melissa and the people that they meet. She seems to have a laid-back approach to the difficulties they encounter, rarely venting her frustration, and frequently self-deprecatory when the problems are self-inflicted.
As its title suggests, the loose connecting theme running through the book is borders (or often the lack of them). Sometimes this theme is physical, such as their difficulties obtaining visas for the Central Asian states, or their illegal night-time excursions across checkpoints in Tibet. Sometimes it’s less tangible, such as when she muses on the Siachen Glacier and political situation in Kashmir, or the wild nature reserve that has sprung up in the 2km no-man’s land between North and South Korea. Other times it’s downright metaphysical, like when she eulogises about the astronomer Carl Sagan and his part in the ‘pale blue dot’ photograph (of the Earth, taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it left the solar system).
Only when she arrived in Ladakh and described the fragile state of their equipment after ten months of travelling did it dawn on me that I could be reading the new Dervla Murphy, the legendary Irish travel writer famous for her intrepid trips across some of the world’s more remote places.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13984" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="By the end of the journey, Kate Harris's equipment was somewhat threadbare" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/lands-of-lost-borders-para.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" />
Dervla Murphy launched her career as a travel writer with the book Full Tilt, about a solo bike ride across Asia to India in 1963, when she was still in her early 30s. Apart from the obvious comparison of a young woman cycling across Asia and writing her first travel book, there were many other things in common with Lands of Lost Borders: the intrepid nature of the journey, on a shoestring budget, the nights with strangers, the humour and the intellectualising.
But what am I talking about? I realised that I’d never read Full Tilt. How can I compare it? I was guessing, based on having read many of Dervla Murphy’s other books. Full Tilt was sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be read. So as soon as I finished Lands of Lost Borders I did just that, to see if it really was similar.
The route was slightly different. Kate and Melissa started on the Black Sea, and took a northern route through the desert and mountainous former republics of the old Soviet Union. Dervla, on the other hand, started by cycling across Europe in winter. Her line crossed Kate’s in Turkey and Azerbaijan, but then she diverted south, through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This fact (along with the time difference of nearly 50 years) meant that the encounters were very different.
The themes are different too. Full Tilt doesn’t really have a central theme like Lands of Lost Borders. As Dervla points out in the foreword, it’s literally just an edited version of her diary:
<blockquote>‘Apart from burnishing the spelling and syntax, which are apt to suffer when one makes nightly entries whether half asleep or not, I have left the diary virtually unchanged.’</blockquote>
Their interests also differ. Where Kate talks about science, astronomy and the natural world, Dervla prefers to touch on politics and social issues. While Kate has, like Dervla, an uncanny ability to empathise with strangers, she doesn’t integrate with them to quite the same degree. Dervla stops for longer in places, often staying with the same people for days, becoming part of the family. She finds Afghan men to be the politest and most respectful people on earth, even while they keep their women silent. In Pakistan she finds herself connected with princes and generals. She even spends an evening with President Ayub Khan.
But what sets Dervla Murphy apart is her penchant for danger and extreme hardship. While both trips are intrepid and done on a shoestring, Dervla is one of those rare people who actually seem to relish severe austerity. I’ve previously described her as one of the bravest of all travel writers, but what is bravery to one who seeks out danger?
I’ve <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/is-dervla-murphy-most-admired-for-her-writing-or-her-travelling-style/">written about this aspect of her nature previously</a>. The first chapter of Full Tilt doesn’t so much underline this fact as smash you in the face with it. A single chapter covers the whole of her ride across Europe and Turkey to the Caspian Sea. Within the space of 18 pages, she slides on ice and falls down a bank, gets attacked by wolves on a forest path, is swept away by flood tides in Yugoslavia, scares off a Turkish attacker by shooting her gun at a ceiling, frightens off a trio of thieves who attempt to steal her bike by shooting her gun a second time, and fights off a policeman in Azerbaijan who attempts to rape her by kicking him in the goolies.
These are situations most of us go out of our way to avoid (though I’d certainly be surprised if a policeman tried to rape me). By contrast Kate is merely adventurous in a way that’s more within the reach of ordinary people.
Then of course, there’s Dervla Murphy’s famous penchant for alcohol. Full Tilt contains my favourite paragraph in any of her books.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Oh, how I love Dervla Murphy! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/amreading?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#amreading</a> <a href="https://t.co/YlzPABw3o6">pic.twitter.com/YlzPABw3o6</a>
— Mark Horrell <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f30b.png" alt="🌋" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> (@markhorrell) <a href="https://twitter.com/markhorrell/status/1270100974032601090?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
There weren’t many nights like this in Lands of Lost Borders. In conclusion, while they have much in common, there is more that sets them apart. But there is one thing I hope they do end up having in common. Dervla Murphy went on to write dozens of books, each as entertaining as the last. I look forward to reading Kate Harris’s next book, and hope there will be many more.
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<title>Why did a Chinese team climb Everest during the coronavirus pandemic?</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/why-did-a-chinese-team-climb-everest-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2020/why-did-a-chinese-team-climb-everest-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2020 15:33:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion and advice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[global health]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nepal]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[records]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[yarla shampo expeditions]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=13820</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Last week a team of Chinese surveyors climbed Everest and were among only a handful of people to climb it during the coronavirus pandemic. But aren't we all supposed to be in lockdown? Not all of us, it turns out. I will try to explain.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Note: This post touches on sensitive issues. It is not intended to be divisive, but merely raise questions that need to be asked and promote discussion. Please read the <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/guidelines/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">commenting guidelines</a> and think carefully before posting a comment. Any comments that I consider to be inflammatory will be quickly deleted.
Some obscure records have been claimed on Everest over the years, from the <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2014/10-great-sherpa-mountaineers/">first person to sing the Nepalese national anthem</a> to the <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2014/5-of-the-silliest-mountain-firsts/">first person to urinate</a> on the summit, but the record announced widely last week may well have provoked the most bemusement of all.
‘A team of Chinese surveyors have scaled Mount Everest, becoming the only climbers to summit the world’s highest peak during the coronavirus pandemic,’ <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52819738" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">announced the BBC</a> last Wednesday.
You may well be wondering: they summited Everest during the coronavirus pandemic – but aren’t we all supposed to be in lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus? Is climbing Everest during a global pandemic something to be proud of, and what were they doing up there anyway?
It’s a complicated story, so let’s have a look and try to make sense of it all.
<figure id="attachment_13825" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-13825" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-05/26/c_139089535.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-13825 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/china-everest.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Chinese mountaineering guides work on a route to the summit of Everest on 26 May 2020 (Photo: Xinhua / Dorje Tsering)" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/china-everest.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/china-everest.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/china-everest.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-13825" class="wp-caption-text">Chinese mountaineering guides work on a route to the summit of Everest, between the Second and Third Steps, on 26 May 2020 (Photo: Xinhua / Dorje Tsering)</figcaption></figure>
On 20 March, Nepal suspended all flights into the country to help contain the COVID-19 outbreak. On the same day, the Nepal Tourism Board stopped issuing trekking permits, effectively suspending all trekking in Nepal, including foreign mountaineering expeditions. On 22 March, the country went into complete lockdown. Nobody has been allowed out, except to buy essential food and medical supplies. The lockdown remains in force, and is being extended every two weeks.
These restrictions mean that there have been no expeditions on the south (Nepalese) side of Everest this year, in contrast to the record season in 2019, when there were 607 summits from the south side.
The situation on the north (China-Tibet) side has been a little different. Despite the fact that the COVID-19 virus originated in the city of Wuhan, China’s strict lockdown (which came into force on 22 January) started to be eased from 21 March. As early as 18 March, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230129122820/https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/china-opens-everest-for-its-nationals-in-spring-season/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Himalayan Times reported</a> that a Chinese operator called Yarla Shampo Expeditions had been granted exclusive permission to run a commercial expedition on the north side of Everest. This would be a large team with 26 members plus staff.
A month later, the telecoms company China Mobile announced that <a href="https://www.gsmarena.com/mount_everest_base_camp_now_has_5g_coverage-news-42779.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">5G connectivity was now available at Everest Base Camp</a> on the north side of the mountain.
Then at the end of April, Xinhua, the Chinese state media agency, announced that to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest from the north side (an expedition I’ve <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2013/did-chinese-climbers-reach-the-summit-of-everest-in-1960/">previously written about here</a>), a <a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-05/01/c_139022044.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">53-member scientific survey team would also be climbing Everest</a> to collect data on weather, plate motion and natural resources, and calculate Everest’s exact height.
The last of these reasons attracted the most publicity. When the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India measured Everest in 1856, they calculated its height at 29,0002ft (or 8,840m). This was updated to 29,029ft (or its most commonly cited height of 8,848m) by an Indian survey team in 1955, and this height was confirmed by a Chinese survey team in 1975. It was further complicated by a team of US scientists, who measured it to be 8,850m in 1999, and a team of Chinese scientists, who measured it to be 8,844m in 2005.
<figure id="attachment_13827" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-13827" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-05/28/c_139094161.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-13827 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/chinese-survey.jpg?resize=720%2C434&ssl=1" alt="Chinese surveyor Zheng Lin surveys Everest from base camp on 27 May 2020. (Photo: Xinhua / Jigme Dorje)" width="720" height="434" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/chinese-survey.jpg?w=720&ssl=1 720w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/chinese-survey.jpg?resize=300%2C181&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-13827" class="wp-caption-text">Chinese surveyor Zheng Lin surveys Everest from base camp on 27 May 2020. (Photo: Xinhua / Jigme Dorje)</figcaption></figure>
How many people really care? We know that Everest is continuing to rise by a few centimetres every year as the Indian tectonic plate moves underneath the Eurasian plate. But given that the next highest mountain K2 is only 8,611m high, Everest’s place as the highest mountain on earth may well outlast our (by which I mean humanity’s) place on it. So why the need to measure Everest yet again? There are rumours that in addition to <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/did-everests-hillary-step-collapse-in-the-nepal-earthquake/">remoulding the Hillary Step</a>, the 2015 earthquake might also have knocked a little bit off the top. But is this really urgent if it’s only a couple of metres?
With all of these things going on, you can be forgiven for thinking that the north side of Everest was as busy as ever this year. In fact, <a href="https://abenteuer-berg.de/en/third-everest-summit-day-in-a-row/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">51 people reached the summit last week</a>: a team of 6 Tibetan rope fixers on Tuesday (26 May), followed by 10 scientists on Wednesday (27 May), and finally 35 commercial clients and their staff on Thursday (28 May). This compares with 212 summits from the north side last year, including 141 on 23 May alone.
But the question is, should they have been climbing at all this year, while most of the world is convulsed in COVID-19 lockdown?
Some people have argued that the scientific research alone justifies the expedition, and that it’s been much easier to do it this year, without so many people on the mountain. There are reports that they also <a href="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-14/Mountains-get-seasonal-cleaning-in-Tibet-QtT5PBIOha/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">carried 3.78 tons of rubbish off the mountain</a>. Some people have also pointed to the fact that Tibetan guides were given employment. But all of these things are possible any other year.
You could argue that it’s possible to climb the mountain safely. If everybody arrives at base camp healthy, avoids travelling through other communities on the way (such as Shigatse, Shegar and Tingri), and maintains social distancing throughout the expedition, then the risks of contracting and spreading the virus are small.
None of the reports I’ve read so far have tackled the issue of social distancing (if you know of any then please post them in the comments). Given that social distancing is likely to be a key part of mountaineering expeditions for the foreseeable future, it would be interesting to know how it was handled this time. Were tents pitched 2m apart? Was shared equipment such as ropes, masks and oxygen sanitised? Were any symptoms reported? If so, how were they dealt with – was anyone sent home? What medical equipment was available in the event of an outbreak?
China is ahead of the rest of the world in tackling the virus, but there is no doubt the expedition went ahead at considerable risk. I’m sure there would have been medical professionals at base camp and on the mountain ensuring the necessary precautions were taken, so it would be helpful to others if more information could be shared.
But there is another reason why it might have been better to delay this expedition until next year: it has shattered the sense that we are all in this together. The virus originated in China this time around, but there is a widespread belief that intensive factory farming throughout the world means there is an increasing risk of more new diseases spreading to humans. The Chinese authorities should have been particularly sensitive to this, because the expedition could have a knock-on effect. To see how, we only have to look across the border into Nepal.
In terms of the medical stats, Nepal appears to be coping with COVID-19 remarkably well. As of 1 June, there were 84,147 confirmed cases and 4,638 confirmed deaths in China versus 1,572 confirmed cases and only 8 confirmed deaths in Nepal. [Source: Our World in Data – <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-cases-covid-19?country=CHN~NPL" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cases</a> and <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-covid-19?country=CHN~NPL" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">deaths</a>.]
But this is only part of the story. While China is fast becoming the world’s leading superpower, Nepal remains one of the poorest countries in Asia. Everest plays an insignificant part in the Chinese economy. But in Nepal, Everest is central to a tourism industry that brought in 1.17 million foreign tourists last year. The <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230202020653/https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/covid-19-pandemic-sounds-the-death-knell-for-nepals-tourism-sector/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Himalayan Times reported</a> that the Hotel Association of Nepal (HAN) has closed 1,300 tourist-standard hotels. HAN estimates that this means hotels are losing nearly Rs 1.8 billion Nepal Rupees (around $15m USD) every month. In addition to this, 3,500 travel and 2,600 trekking agencies have closed.
Nepal also <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/world/coronavirus-stalls-flows-remittances-worldwide-millions-people-risk-losing-their">receives $8.1 billion USD</a> a year (around a third of its foreign income) in remittances. This is income from Nepalis working overseas in places like Malaysia, India and the Middle East who send their wages home. The suspension of international travel has meant that all of these workers have returned to Nepal and are no longer bringing in foreign income.
The success of the Chinese Everest expedition is bound to raise questions in Nepal. Some people, including Nepal’s own Kami Rita Sherpa, who has climbed Everest 24 times, suggested that Nepal should have taken advantage of lockdown to send out a clean-up expedition to retrieve trash and dead bodies from the mountain.
‘The Everest cleanup campaign can employ… 3,000 climbing guides and porters, who have now lost their jobs,’ he said in an <a href="https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/03/17/with-everest-expeditions-cancelled-guides-and-porters-could-carry-down-trash-and-dead-bodies" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">interview with the Kathmandu Post</a>.
Unsurprisingly, his plea was turned down, for it somewhat undermines the purpose of lockdown. Nepal has a fragile infrastructure. Even with social distancing, our medical systems in Europe have struggled to cope with the outbreak. Heaven knows what would happen if Nepal were to suffer the same rate of infection.
Kami’s reference to trash and dead bodies hints at another issue: Everest’s tarnished reputation. Although there are trash and dead bodies on Everest, it’s something that is <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/everest-is-not-piled-high-with-dead-bodies/">exaggerated by the media</a> and it distracts from bigger issues. There is no doubt that every year, Everest is becoming more of a circus in ever greater need of regulation. I say this as someone who has climbed Everest, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/books/seven-steps-from-snowdon-to-everest/">fulfilled a dream</a>, had an amazing time and wishes others could do the same.
Many of us will remember <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/sports/everest-traffic-jam-photo.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">that photo by Nirmal Purja</a>. Last year the problems became so acute that I even suggested we should consider <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/is-it-time-to-boycott-the-south-side-of-everest/">boycotting the south side</a> until things improve. Little did I imagine it would happen in quite this way.
We have all been affected by lockdown in a multitude of ways. I’m one of the lucky ones. All I’ve had to do is cancel my big travel plans. Others haven’t been so lucky. Some have been stuck indoors, unable to take exercise. Some have contracted the virus and remained in isolation with large families. Some have lost their jobs. Most tragic of all are those who lost their loved ones and were unable to say goodbye.
You can forgive these people their bemusement if they saw the headlines last week and thought, ‘what, they climbed Everest during a global pandemic – WTF?’
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<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">13820</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Is it time to boycott the south side of Everest?</title>
<link>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/is-it-time-to-boycott-the-south-side-of-everest/</link>
<comments>https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2019/is-it-time-to-boycott-the-south-side-of-everest/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jun 2019 15:40:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion and advice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[alan arnette]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[china tibet mountaineering association]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[commercial mountaineering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[everest]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[jagged globe]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[madison mountaineering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[mountaineering ethics]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[nepal]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[russell brice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[seven summits treks]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[tibet]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.markhorrell.com/?p=12905</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The problems which occurred on Everest this year are nothing new, but they have now reached such a degree that it’s time for operators who value their reputation and for those who dream of climbing Everest to take a principled stand.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Most readers of this blog will be aware that there were one or two problems on Everest this year. These problems have existed for many years, but they have now reached such a degree, with no end in sight, that it’s now time for everyone involved in the Everest industry to re-think how they operate. For many of these people there is a radical but simple solution.
Most of you will have seen THAT photo taken by the Nepali climber Nirmal Purja. I’m not going to publish it here, for reasons I won’t go into, but the photo shows an impossibly long queue of climbers on the Hillary Step.
<figure id="attachment_6345" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6345" style="width: 960px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-6345 size-full" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/11118322_10206799742819168_709848139_n.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="This isn't the photo of a queue of climbers on the Hillary Step, taken by Nirmal Purja. It was taken by Edita in the Khumbu Icefall, but it illustrates the same concept - too many people queueing for too long in a dangerous location (Photo: Edita Horrell)." width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/11118322_10206799742819168_709848139_n.jpg?w=960&ssl=1 960w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/11118322_10206799742819168_709848139_n.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6345" class="wp-caption-text">This isn’t the photo of a queue of climbers on the Hillary Step, taken by Nirmal Purja. It was taken by Edita in the Khumbu Icefall, but it illustrates the same concept – too many people queueing for too long in a dangerous location (Photo: Edita Horrell).</figcaption></figure>
The photo has been used widely to illustrate a number of the issues confronting Everest today. There are too many people, exposed too long to cold and altitude. Too many climbers do not have enough experience; there are too many cheap operators with dubious ethics, who lack the resources and experience to look after the safety of their clients.
Bodies of those who have died remain on the mountain in full view of others walking past. This year, eleven more people died and most of their bodies remain up there. A single Nepali operator, Seven Summit Treks, has lost no fewer than 7 of their clients on 8,000m peaks so far this year and <a href="https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/death_carnage_chaos_analysing_the_2019_himalayan_climbing_season-11996" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">their owner has been quoted as saying</a> that their clients “know they have a 50% chance of returning safely and a 50% chance of dying or being rescued”.
Once again, there has been no shortage of articles about how to fix these issues. Two examples among many include <a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/2398393/everest-problems-crowding-solutions" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this one by Mark Jenkins</a>, an American climber with a history of attempts and ascents on Everest, both alpine and siege style, and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190825212537/http://himalayanexperience.com:80/2019/06/19/daily-moraine-so-what-went-wrong-this-year-on-everest/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this one by Russell Brice</a>, the veteran New Zealand operator who has done as much as anyone to develop commercial mountaineering in the Himalayas.
On the face of it, their suggestions are sensible, even obvious. They include:
<ul>
<li>Limiting the number of permits and spreading them over both the spring and autumn seasons so that we don’t have everyone going to the summit at once.</li>
<li>Fixing the ropes on the route earlier in the season so that people can climb to the summit earlier, and fixing two ropes (one up, one down) to alleviate bottlenecks.</li>
<li>Paying Sherpas a minimum wage; ensuring they have a minimum level of technical training; ensuring they have the necessary communication skills to handle determined clients.</li>
<li>Licensing and certifying operators to ensure they all have the necessary standards, experience and safety record to run commercial trips on Everest.</li>
<li>Ensuring every climber has climbed at least one other 8,000m peak before attempting Everest. This rule should also apply to staff; a similar rule should be applied on other 8,000m peaks, i.e. that climbers must first climb another 7,000m peak.</li>
</ul>
This last one is the simplest and most effective of all the suggestions – it would be easy to verify climbing experience (both the government and the <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2018/a-peek-inside-the-himalayan-database-the-archives-of-elizabeth-hawley/">Himalayan Database</a> keep records), it will spread the benefits of mountain tourism throughout the Himalayas, and immediately improve the experience levels of climbers on Everest.
None of these suggestions are anything new, and nor are the issues. I’ve been writing about these issues <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190825212537/http://himalayanexperience.com:80/2019/06/19/daily-moraine-so-what-went-wrong-this-year-on-everest/">ever since I returned from Everest myself</a> in 2012. I’ve written about <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/are-western-operators-right-to-complain-about-cheap-nepali-operators-on-everest/">cheap operators</a> and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2012/how-to-choose-an-8000m-peak-expedition-company/">choosing a reliable one</a>, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2012/the-people-who-give-everest-a-bad-name/">inexperienced climbers</a> and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2017/the-great-everest-self-fulfilling-prophecy/">how they get their false perceptions</a>, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2017/reality-check-will-there-be-a-huge-clear-up-of-garbage-on-everest-this-year/">garbage</a>, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2015/poo-in-the-everest-region-is-it-such-a-big-problem/">human waste</a> and <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/everest-is-not-piled-high-with-dead-bodies/">dead bodies</a>, At the time of writing I’ve written no fewer than <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/tag/everest/">168 articles about Everest</a>, its history and its issues. I even wrote <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2014/4-ways-to-improve-the-south-side-of-everest/">my own list of ways to fix Everest</a> when I returned in 2014 after yet another controversial season.
<figure id="attachment_9407" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-9407" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://www.anselm-murphy.com/everest/everestgallery/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-9407" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/anselm-everest-347.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="The South-East Ridge from the South Summit. The Hillary Step is the black rock section on the ridge just below the final summit snow slope (Photo: Anselm Murphy)." width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/anselm-everest-347.jpg?w=800&ssl=1 800w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/anselm-everest-347.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/anselm-everest-347.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/anselm-everest-347.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-9407" class="wp-caption-text">A more normal-looking view of the South-East Ridge of Everest from the South Summit. The Hillary Step is looking much quieter than it did in Nirmal Purja’s photo (Photo: Anselm Murphy).</figcaption></figure>
I can tell you that these suggestions have been doing the rounds for many years now and, sensible as they are, the fact remains that none of them have ever been implemented, and they probably won’t be this time either.
The trouble is, they all rely on the intervention of the Nepal government, and herein lies the problem. This is also something I have <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2014/a-mountain-of-deceit-introducing-nepals-ministry-of-tourism/">written about before</a>. Nepal suffers from a rolling conveyor belt of politicians and officials; corruption is endemic; nobody is in office long enough to understand the issues and bring about positive change. The end result is a series of <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2018/its-the-everest-silly-announcement-season-again/">silly announcements</a>, none of which ever get implemented.
Many government officials are only interested in cashing in while they can. Everest provides them with over $4 million every year in permit fees alone. Very little of this money is ever invested in the Everest infrastructure, and it’s likely that much of it is siphoned off by corrupt officials. Perhaps the most blatant example of this corruption in action is the army of <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/on-summit-certificates-liaison-officers-and-funny-mountaineering-rules/">expedition liaison officers</a> who are paid to accompany each expedition but never show up for work. A more sinister example is the <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2018/the-great-nepal-helicopter-rescue-fraud-an-introduction/">helicopter rescue fraud</a> that appears to be continuing amid government inaction or (worse) collusion.
This trend looks set to continue. The world’s leading authority on commercial mountaineering on Everest, Alan Arnette, has reported that Nepal’s government intends to respond to the bad publicity this year, not by instituting meaningful change, but by <a href="https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2019/06/21/everest-nepal-looking-at-huge-permit-fee-increase/">raising the permit fee from $11,000 per person to $25,000</a>. Other rumours include raising the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190825212537/http://himalayanexperience.com:80/2019/06/19/daily-moraine-so-what-went-wrong-this-year-on-everest/">tax on radios</a>, and introducing a (backdated) <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2217072071743659&id=343655569085328">tax on support staff</a>. The last two measures would actually penalise operators for safety.
Clearly for the government then, it’s not about making the mountain safer or fixing any of the environmental issues, but about cashing in.
But it’s not enough just to complain about government inaction. In his <a href="http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2019/06/07/everest-2019-season-summary-the-year-everest-broke/">annual review of the Everest season</a>, Alan Arnette picked out four groups of people who all need to take personal responsibility for the issues: operators, climbers, support staff, and government (I would add a fifth group: media and other armchair critics).
<figure id="attachment_6668" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6668" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18791623314/in/album-72157655371635872/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-6668 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSC01259.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="A government delegation at Everest Base Camp in 2014." width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSC01259.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSC01259.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSC01259.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-6668" class="wp-caption-text">A government delegation at Everest Base Camp in 2014.</figcaption></figure>
Each of these groups can act in different ways, but none of them can continue to keep doing things the way they are. I’m going to aim the rest of this blog post at the first two groups: operators and climbers.
The reputable operators will tell you that they are already doing what they can. They vet their clients to ensure that they have sufficient experience to climb Everest. They employ experienced Sherpas, pay them good wages, and train and mentor them over many expeditions. They provide experienced guides, competent leadership and wise decision-making on the mountain. They bring down their trash, and have sufficient staff to help down their clients when they are struggling. They can boast good safety records, no deaths and few cases of frostbite.
They will even tell you that they are prepared for the bottlenecks that we saw this year. This is perfectly true. Bottlenecks are arguably one of the less prevalent and more predictable hazards that Everest has to offer. This <a href="https://www.jagged-globe.co.uk/news/blog.php?id=62#i961">summit day report</a> by UK operator Jagged Globe (a reputable company who I’ve climbed with many times myself) provides an good explanation of how they prepared for and coped with a two-hour wait to descend the Hillary Step.
The trouble is, this is no longer enough any more. For years reputable operators have faced a moral dilemma on the 8,000m peaks when they have seen other climbers in difficulty. Every year reputable operators collaborate with their competitors to bring each others clients down safely, but as the mountains have become busier, and less reputable operators have become involved, this has become increasingly difficult. Sometimes it has become necessary to turn a blind eye to others’ difficulties and focus on their own clients instead.
While reputable operators are doing the right thing, getting their clients up and down safely, and ensuring they return home richer for the experience and equipped to climb another day, the fact remains that inexperienced climbers and operators are climbing alongside them. Every year, a handful of them die and their bodies remain on the mountain.
I’ve written previously about the sensitive issue of <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2016/everest-is-not-piled-high-with-dead-bodies/">dead bodies on Everest</a> and the difficulty bringing them down. I have even suggested that it’s better for them to remain up there. But I also believe that all things must be done in moderation. When we know perfectly well that six to a dozen people will die every year and remain on the mountain then it’s time to start thinking differently.
It’s no longer OK for these things to continue. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the corpses and other trash littering Everest just because we are doing the right things ourselves. We can no longer turn a blind eye to other climbers in trouble. It’s no longer enough for climbers and operators to say that we’re doing it properly; it’s others, not us.
<figure id="attachment_12910" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12910" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/19414911045/in/album-72157655371635872/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-12910 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="There were protests by Sherpas against the government at Everest Base Camp in 2014. Is it now time for climbers and operators to make their own protest?" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/19414911045_74d346ff48_k.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-12910" class="wp-caption-text">There were protests by Sherpas against the government at Everest Base Camp in 2014. Is it now time for climbers and operators to make their own protest?</figcaption></figure>
It’s time for operators who value their reputation to take a principled stand. It’s time for those who dream of climbing Everest to do the same.
So what’s the solution? The American operator Madison Mountaineering has taken the bold step of advertising a commercial expedition to Everest in the autumn season this year. I say bold step, because they will have to do all their own rope-fixing to the summit, and climb after the monsoon season. There will be a lot more snow through which to break trail, and it will be a lot colder. But they will have the mountain to themselves; it will be harder, but in many ways a more rewarding experience. It will be interesting to see how they get on.
But there’s another simpler and more obvious solution, and it’s one that could have a more powerful effect.
When I climbed Everest in 2012, I did so from the north side in Tibet, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2012/what-climbing-everest-taught-me-about-george-mallorys-final-hours/">following in the footsteps of George Mallory</a>. I reached the summit on 19 May 2012, alongside 233 other climbers. Until this year it held the record for the single day when the largest number of people reached the top. Over on the Nepalese side of the mountain, another famous photograph by the climber Ralf Dujmovits, showing a queue of climbers on the Lhotse Face, was getting beamed around the world in the same way that Nirmal Purja’s photo did this year.
But here’s a photo I took on the north side. It was taken from above the Second Step during my descent. As you can see, it looks very different. There are around a dozen people in this photo, but the mountain looks desolate and empty.
<figure id="attachment_7288" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-7288" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18273489775/in/album-72157653693710001/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-7288 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF7594.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="The North-East Ridge of Everest on the day 234 people reached the summit." width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF7594.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF7594.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF7594.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-7288" class="wp-caption-text">The North-East Ridge of Everest on the day 234 people reached the summit.</figcaption></figure>
I did have to queue briefly a couple of times on the way up, but not for long. Everest is a huge mountain, and it can cope with the numbers if you spread them out. I ascended on the day that held the record for numbers, but over on the north side, <a href="https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2018/in-memory-of-chongba-sherpa-of-tate-a-high-altitude-superstar/">Chongba Sherpa</a> and I had the mountain to ourselves for much of the day.
There are other reasons to climb on the north side. Unlike the Nepalese government, who are doing almost nothing to regulate the situation, the Chinese government are taking active measures. They have restricted the number of permits issued to just 300.
Experienced climbers from the China Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA) take responsibility for fixing the ropes every year. Prior to my summit day in 2012, members of the CTMA at Camp 3 even tried to spread out climbers the following day by giving us all designated start times. One of the reasons Chongba and I found ourselves alone on summit day is that we were given the last available slot that day and I wasn’t the quickest.
The Chinese government even requires Chinese climbers to have climbed another 8,000m peak before they are eligible for an Everest permit (it’s not clear why this requirement isn’t imposed on climbers from other countries, but it means that many inexperienced Chinese climbers go to the south side instead). They have also been known to take active, if infrequent, steps to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151008-the-graveyard-in-the-clouds-everests-200-dead-bodies" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">clear bodies from the mountain</a>.
The China/Tibet side of the mountain is not without its own political problems, but at least the government has shown its willingness to regulate climbing on Everest. I believe that it’s time for climbers and operators who care about their reputation, and who care about the ethics of climbing Everest, to boycott the south side of Everest until the government of Nepal takes meaningful steps to regulate climbing there.
<figure id="attachment_7333" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-7333" style="width: 720px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/markhorrell/18261866762/in/album-72157653693710001/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-7333 size-large" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8507.jpg?resize=720%2C540&ssl=1" alt="Memorials on the north side of Everest, to those who have died trying to climb it" width="720" height="540" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8507.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8507.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.markhorrell.com/wp-content/uploads/DSCF8507.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-7333" class="wp-caption-text">Memorials on the north side of Everest, to those who have died trying to climb it</figcaption></figure>
A boycott won’t instantly fix the problems. There will still be charlatans and incompetents operating on the south side of Everest. There will still be corrupt officials raking in the money, but respectable operators will no longer be contributing to the problem, and they will be keeping their reputations intact. There is an analogy with not leaving litter, doing your own recycling, eating organic produce, or not buying products from a company who exploits their workers. You can’t stop the bad habits of others, but every drop of water contributes to the ocean.
And perhaps it can also have a tangible effect. It might not seem like it from the avalanche of silly announcements, but there is no doubt that the government of Nepal does care about its reputation even as they behave in ways that have the opposite effect. A boycott may help to focus their minds, and it will certainly help to focus the minds of the media on the true root of the problem.
Everest is the highest mountain in the world. It will always get the lion’s share of the attention. There will always be dreamers who want to climb it; some whose ambitions are realistic, and others whose aren’t.
Climbing Everest needs to be regulated, and that requires sensible rules by sensible people, implemented for the greater good, not for personal gain. Unless the government of Nepal takes meaningful steps to fix the problems that came to a head this year, we should all – climbers and operators – go north side instead.
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