Anxiety, Ambition and Death
PETERSEN, CHARLES
Anxiety, Ambition and Death High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed By Michael Kodas Hyperion. 357 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Charles Petersen Editorial staff, “New York Review...
...One expedition that raised $300,000 allocated a mere $1,800 to cleanup...
...Sharp was part of a so-called international expedition, sharing a permit with a few dozen strangers who in practice did not even pretend to team up...
...As for Sharp, although 40 climbers effectively left him for dead, some stopping to help and some simply passing by, he perished because he had essentially set out alone and had limited resources...
...A stream of self-righteous editorials followed the news of Sharp’s death...
...He proved incapable of doing so...
...Decades ago Sir Edmund Hillary, fed up with the trash that had accumulated since he first reached the summit in 1953, proposed closing down the mountain for five years to let it recover from increased traffic...
...As early as 1998, greedy mountaineers began coopting environmental slogans to lure rich trekkers into financing bogus Green luxury climbs...
...Yet Everest tends to be two steps ahead of Green activists...
...I grew up in the shadows of Idaho’s Seven Devils, lived beneath the Bitterroots in Montana, and basked in the great bowl of mountains that surrounds Seattle—all of which I have tried, with occasional success, to climb...
...Trash is now less common on Everest than human corpses...
...In Kodas’ view, many if not most of the deaths on the mountain are preventable, and its “high crimes” are the result of an absence of regulation to curb an exploitative, anyone-can-climb culture...
...The anxieties Kodas details suggest a new kind of mountain sickness: Everest paranoia...
...The most inspiring tale in Kodas’ book concerns Willie and Damian Benegas, twin brothers who arrived at base camp during the international circus celebrating the 50th anniversary of Hillary’s first climb...
...He examines the act of climbing to the point where the sun takes the longest to set as a nexus of anxiety, ambition and death...
...The ecologically minded will pick up High Crimes expecting to read about another symbol of a quickening environmental catastrophe...
...The victims litter the landscape, mute testimonials to an industry that places profit above safety...
...Contrary to initial reports, several groups stopped and tried to revive Sharp...
...Instead, they radioed for 12 highly paid Sherpas (local guides) who got him down...
...With greedy guides offering novices a shot at the top, and China selling cheap permits to underfunded amateurs, anonymity and indifference have set in...
...Reactions grew even more incensed 10 days later, when Lincoln Hall, an Australian who had been left for dead, turned up half-crazed but quite alive after his own night out alone in the death zone...
...More than one ‘environmental expedition,’” Kodas reports, “has been witnessed photographing their own trash and putting it up on their Web site as evidence of the garbage they had collected...
...Rather than a regulatory solution, what is needed is a change in philosophy: an approach more akin to the recently revived local-food movement than the current peak-bagging mindset...
...On Everest you are never on your own,” he had told his mother...
...That is not to suggest every climber should be required to head up the mountain with an expedition the size of a soccer team...
...When Hall’s teammates abandoned him, he was similarly incapacitated and considered a hopeless case...
...Rather than aiming for Everest, they split off for its sister peak Nuptse, blazing a new route the twins dubbed the “Crystal Snake...
...Hall survived because a multiexpedition, cross-language effort was organized instantly in an area so dangerous that a broken leg often leads to death...
...Not only was Sharp without a team, he had not arranged Sherpa support...
...Reviewed by Charles Petersen Editorial staff, “New York Review of Books” WHEN ASKED why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, the indefatigable English mountaineer George Mallory famously retorted, “Because it’s there...
...In the early 1990s, intensive cleanup expeditions effectively addressed Hillary’s concerns...
...For all but elite mountaineers, traveling halfway around the world to climb a mountain seems a failure to perceive the riches of one’s own land...
...But I ’d better stop before I take my Everest paranoia too far, conflate High Crimes with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and compare guided expeditions to factory-farmed beef, slowly led to the slaughter...
...His fatal quest to survey the dimming British Empire from on high earned him a memorial service attended by King George...
...Nevertheless, it would be wrong to deny their ambitions because a relative neophyte like David Sharp died pursuing a similarly independent style...
...The twins abandoned this method for the “alpinist style,” carrying their gear on their backs and assaulting the mountain in a single all-or-nothing effort...
...Kodas persuasively argues that Sharp’s demise should not serve as an indictment of any one group of mountaineers, but rather of the entire economy of climbing Everest...
...First, more than 40 climbers passed by the hypothermic English mountaineer David Sharp, literally unclipping from their rope, moving over his position, and then clipping back in to continue their bids for the summit...
...AJOURNALIST for the Hartford Courant and himself an amateur mountaineer, Kodas probes two widely reported incidents—one fatal, the other nearly so—that occurred while he was ascending the mountain in 2006...
...When you finally reach the top, you gain rare, well-earned perspective...
...Such corrupt tactics are today commonplace...
...Sadly, there is little hope of reasonable regulation as long as China and Nepal are making a killing on adventure tourism...
...Such peaks beckon the youthful and fit...
...The next morning climbers found him delirious yet standing and able to walk...
...If you don’t make it to the top, the mountain remains an ever-present monument to honest effort...
...There are climbers everywhere...
...So it is easy for me to understand why you would head up a mountain simply because it’s there...
...They provided oxygen, water, and—most important—they attempted to stand him on his feet and help him walk...
...But those who discovered him were not strong enough to help him...
...Beyond 26,000 feet, in the aptly named “death zone,” a team of 12 is needed to drag down a body—something most mountaineers are reluctant to do even if that body is still warm...
...Kodas’ rendering of its climax is stunning: “After four days, Willie led them up the last steep pitch of ice to the head of the Snake and was marching up a slope of deep snow when he realized the slope was about to avalanche...
...Since the 1920s most Himalayan peaks have been climbed “siege style,” by building a new camp every thousand meters or so, returning to lower levels for more supplies, and slowly stringing together a chain of fortlike strong points...
...They made their way to a small rock that was poking up through the snow and held on ‘like castaway sailors not wanting to let go of a tiny island.’” Among the world’s top mountaineers, the Benegas brothers could easily have met their end on the epic climb...
...THERE ARE too many climbers on Everest...
...Michael Kodas’ book goes beyond Mallory’s pithy reply...
Vol. 91 • January 2008 • No. 1
