James McEachen

 Mount Everest And The Death of Adventure

Predictable Tragedies

Every year in late May and early June, pages of print and hours of broadcast time are slavishly devoted to the predictable insanity of unqualified people attempting to climb Mt. Everest.  Every year traffic jams worsen and tragedies mount on the slopes of what used to be one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.  Human beings, in their endless quest for social status and the selfiesthey use to prove it, have changed all that.  Even back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when I was climbing Himalayan peaks we gave Everest a wide berth, avoiding the six hundred or so climbers that descended upon it like a plague every year.  Now those numbers have stretched into the thousands, with two lanes of traffic on a single lane track to a crowded summit.

Tourism is not Adventure

In light of all this, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that most people who climb Mt. Everest as guided clients are not mountaineers at all.  They are really just tourists with some fancy equipment. This generalization exempts the guides (Sherpa and Western) who make it possible for the completely uninitiated to “climb” Mt. Everest.  For everyone else, Everest is a pay-to-play concession and if you have a spare $70,000 lying around, can run a 10k in an an hour and are foolish enough, or naïve enough to think that standing on the summit of Everest will mean anything to you, you’re in.  But, you are also part of a larger ethical problem. 

The Assumption of Risk

All adventure requires a conscious assumption of risk and an understanding that desired outcomes are not guaranteed.  In fact, real adventure requires that they are completely unknown. Sherpas who fix the unbroken rope banister from the base of Everest to its summit; who set their clients’ camps, carry their gear, and haul the thousands of pounds of oxygen that clients need to survive above seven thousand meters, are well aware of the risks they are taking, as well as how much moreelevated their risk is.  And this is where the moral problem lies, because on most commercial Everest expeditions Sherpa guides do one other thing that almost no one talks about: they makerepeated trips through the Khumbu Icefall (the most objectively dangerous part of the mountain) so clients don’t have to.  This is significant.  On every Himalayan expedition, particularly those that shun the use of oxygen and high-altitude Sherpas, every climber must acclimatize himself or herself to the extreme elevation before venturing above seven and eight thousand meters.  On most expeditions we do this as we carry loads, set camps and fix the route at gradually higher elevations.  But on Everest that route goes through a crumbling, unstable, notoriously dangerous icefall that has claimed more lives than any other section of the mountain.  In order to protect clients from this objective danger, a Western client will acclimatize on a “safe” trekking peak near basecamp, while their Sherpa guides assume that risk for them, carrying their equipment and supplies through the deadly icefall, made even more dangerous in recent years by climate change.  In most cases, an average client will go through the Khumbu Icefall twice, maybe three times on an Everest expedition. The average Sherpa climbs through the Icefall twenty to thirty times – and he does it for a barista’s wage.  

Now I don’t necessarily have a problem with Sherpas choosing to assume risk in order to make a living, or even paying them to do so, but it seems to me that paying a person to assume mortal risks that you don’t assume is another ugly extension of imperialism, racial privilege and capitalist exploitation.  Everest clients, assuming they are conscientious and ethically sensitive, should be willing to assume an amount of risk that is at least commensurate with the risk they pay their Sherpas to assume. Anything else is akin to the Confederate Army practice of a conscripted man excusing himself from service by paying an exempted man to take his place.  In those days, as now, the individual paying to excuse himself from risk was wealthy and the man substituting for him was poor.  This led to the general understanding in the nineteenth century that “a rich man’s war was a poor man’s fight.”  This is just as applicable today on Mt. Everest.

In fairness, this moral argument is not as relevant to attempts made on the mountain from the northern, Tibetan side, which is safer for Sherpas. Nevertheless, Sherpa guides will still be forced to assume risk for marginally qualified clients who get into trouble when they run out of oxygen in a traffic jam on the long, extremely high north ridge, or for the repeated trips Sherpas must still make over the avalanche prone slopes of the North Col.

Lost and Soon to be Lost Friends

I have lost a few friends in the Himalayas over the years, one very good friend in the avalanche that hit Everest basecamp after the earthquake in 2015. But another was buried alive in the Khumbu Icefall some years earlier.  Phinjoo Sherpa was a sweet, gentle man, with a perpetual smile, who was quick to laugh, cheerful, and generous.  He was also the only Sherpa I have ever known who wasn’t entirely comfortable in the mountains – which is like finding a bear who doesn’t like living in the woods.  Somehow, he must have known the fate that awaited him.  When I last saw him it was high on Makalu, the fifth highest mountain in the world and just a few miles from Everest.  He was working for a British team that year and was descending from 26,000 feet with a large pack filled with tents.  He was smiling broadly, almost laughing.  As I headed up, he paused to greet me and I asked him why he seemed so happy.  He said, “Expedition finished, Mr. Jim.  All members going down!”  He laughed outright and continued down with a wave.  For him, the mountaineering season was over.  He had escaped from yet another Himalayan giant unscathed and was headed home to his wife and family.  In April of 2006, Phinjoo made one last trip up into the Khumbu Icefall.  On this, his 49thexpedition, he would be bearing the burden of yet another foreign bucket list.  He still strains under it, and we bear the responsibility for his loss.  

My many good friends in the Himalayan guiding world will likely not be happy with my position on this, but I am not sure how to avoid it.  Those of us who have travelled in the Himalaya and have grown to love it have all transgressed in some way, great or small. The imbalance between the developed economies of the West and the marginal, developing economies found in the remotest corners of our world make the exploitation of inequity impossible to avoid. But, we need to do better, become more conscious of how we move through the world, and take less for granted.  We can start by thinking a lot more carefully about what we are really doing on Mt. Everest.