Final Thoughts on Everest

Summit Night.
I am continually asked, which I think is to be expected, how I feel about not summiting. The thing that makes it easier is coming so close. The thing that makes it harder is coming so close. It doesn’t help that I feel confident that I would have summited. I find some consolation that I climbed higher than all but three or four of the world’s highest mountains and I was still able to rappel 1,500’ down to the South Col in the dark without oxygen. Of course, if I had just looked inside my mask I could have broke out the ice in a couple of minutes and Everest very likely would have been history for me.

After my O2 system failed I had an odd experience. Each time I got to a new rope I would turn to the right (because I am right handed I prefer to rappel with my right hand – the brake hand – behind me) to reattach my rappel device. Each time I turned my parka shrouded head away from the wind I would hear an engine running. I kept looking to the east and I was sure I was seeing the landing light on a plane. The only thing I couldn’t understand was why it didn’t get any closer. The next morning, with the benefit of oxygen, I knew it could not have been a plane. I’ve been a pilot 30+ years and there are very few single engine planes that could climb that high much less through Chinese airspace. Besides who would be buzzing us at night? I realized I had been looking at a star. I still couldn’t understand why I thought I had heard it too but I wrote it off to hypoxia. Two days later while packing to go home I noticed the switch on my super duper high tech ski goggles – the ones with the little built in fan that keeps them from fogging – was on. I wasn’t being buzzed – I was buzzed.

On a more serious note, Puchhang wanted to show me a picture he had taken in the daylight at the place where we had tried to fix my regulator the night before. It was of a dead climber’s frozen body. Not to subtle a reminder that getting to the top is always optional but getting down is mandatory.

Teens on Everest
There is a new phenomena in climbing – the teen mountain climber. By my count there were 4 teenagers on Everest this year. In recent years there have been other even younger teens on Everest. Three of the teens this year were 17! I have tried to be as positive as possible in this blog but I have real issues with parents allowing kids that young to attempt something so dangerous. Make no mistake Everest is dangerous and anyone who goes there without appreciating this is foolish. To put it in perspective in the worst months in Iraq the death rate was around 1 soldier per 1,000. In some years fatality rates on Everest have approached 1 climber in 50. That is 20 times more dangerous. I don’t expect teenagers to appreciate the dangers but I think adults should know better. Considering that most teens probably haven’t squirreled away $35,000 mowing grass to pay for a trip to Everest these parents are more than just consenting they are sponsoring. In one case I heard (because they hired one of the best guides on Everest) the parents had dropped a $100,000.

I think it is theoretically possible for teens to acquire the experience necessary to climb Everest but I know for a fact that not all the teens that where there had that experience. I personally heard a young lady calling for her “Sherpa” in the middle of the night at Camp 2. I was later told it was because her feet had got cold! If you haven’t learned how to keep your feet warm inside a sleeping bag in a tent you have no business on Everest. There is also some increased risk to young people of High Altitude Cerebral Edema or HACE. The only physical advantage that age gives you mountain climbing is a reduced danger from HACE. Apparently as you get older your brain shrinks (some of us more than others) and consequently has more room to swell. At one time some commercial guiding companies would not take climbers below 21 on extreme altitude climbs.

I think at least one of these young people was climbing with their father. I do feel better about that but that is probably my own personal “father” bias coming through. Especially when you consider Dad could no more stop an avalanche from crushing his kid than any of us could have saved Lapka.

The $64,000 Question
Okay more like the $34,000 question – will I go back? This post has been stuck at this point for a couple of weeks because I really don’t know. The short answer is probably. The longer version is I really don’t need to and I can think of a thousand reasons I shouldn’t and very few good reasons I should. The biggest hindrance for me is the time commitment. Two months is a very long time to be gone – to me anyway. My dad who was career military and did a couple of tours in Vietnam says two months is nothing. I also have to concede that my wife and staff did a great job in my absence. That is reassuring and scary at the same time. None of us are irreplaceable.

So I have begun to mentally work the problem of reducing the time needed away from home. There are ways to pre-acclimatize. Everest has been climbed alpine style (although very rarely) which is a steady moving higher without returning to base camp. That has been mostly by people not using oxygen. However by going on O2 at the base of the Lhotse Face there is no physiological reason it couldn’t be done by a traditional climber. A pre-acclimatized climber could helicopter to Gorak Shep, within a few hours of base camp, with relative ease (although not cheaply) and knock 9 or 10 days off the trip. If I could get the trip length down to 4 or 5 weeks, maybe 6, I would be a lot less hesitant.

Someone used the “moth to a flame” analogy which I dislike intensely because it seldom ends well for the moth. I prefer “completing the circle”. It takes two attributes to be a mountain climber: 1) a belief that the statistics do not apply to you; and 2) a short memory. Maybe I should add a third “contentment challenged”. Fortunately I don’t have to make that final decision right away.