Messner - Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate

Mount Everest continues to make negative headlines: as a rubbish tip, a fatal magnet for adrenaline-freaks, or as an amusement park for tourists who have been everywhere else. Ever since word got out that you could purchase the climb of your dreams, an ascent of the highest mountain of the world revered as holy by those living to the south or north of 'Sagarmatha or Qomolungma (its local names), it became transformed into a consumer product. In Kathmandu and Lhasa, government departments and service-providers benefit from an Everest boom built upon the mythology which, over almost eighty years, has grown around a couple of dozen expeditionary mountaineers from Mallory to Ang Rita.

Mount Everest tends to shrink in our imagination when we read it has been conquered by a couple of hundred mediocre alpinists, who probably would not trust themselves to climb Mont Blanc without help; but then it grows again, if a half dozen of these trophy-hunters get themselves killed in the process, as happened in 1996 in the course of two commercial climbing trips organised by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. Jon Krakauer has written a profound book upon the subject, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. Despite this, the hordes came again the following year, and once more there were tragedies.

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that humans cannot survive at heights approaching 9,000 metres. While more and more of us climb where we dont belong, the accidents will go on increasing and, with them, because of them in fact, so will the desire to make such an attempt. Treading the footsteps of those before them, waiting in line at the Hillary Step below the summit, growing numbers of people clamber to heights that offer no retreat for the inexperienced when storm, mist or avalanche play havoc with fuddled brains. What makes Mount Everest so dangerous is not the steepness of its flanks, nor the vast masses of rock and ice that can break away without warning. The most dangerous part of climbing Mount Everest is the reduced partial pressure of oxygen in the summit region, which dulls judgment, appreciation, and indeed ones ability to feel anything at all.

With modern, lightweight oxygen apparatus the mountain can be outwitted, but what happens when the bottles are empty, when descent through a storm becomes impossible, when you cant go a step further? An Everest climb cannot be planned like a journey from Zurich to Berlin, and it doesnt end on the summit. In any sports shop you can buy, for a price, the lightest equipment there is, but you cannot purchase survival strategy. The client surrenders responsibility for him- or herself to the guide and the higher the mountain, the more personal responsibility is yielded up, even though this is the basic prerequisite for any mountain experience. And what happens when the leader gets into difficulty? Clients are left hanging in the ropes on a mountain they neither know nor understand.

This Everest is no longer the Everest of the pioneers. Increasingly the apex of vanity, it has also become a substitute for something the summit-traveller wants to flaunt on his lapel, like a badge, without taking any of the responsibility in the field.

The more Mount Everest is turned into a consumer article, the more importance attaches to the key moments of its climbing history with or without supplemental oxygen. As the highest mountain in the world for trekkers, climbers, environmentalists, and aid workers (to say nothing of undertakers) it is guaranteed more publicity than other mountain. Its mythos is continually being misinterpreted, so that it becomes a mountain of fortune and fantasy even for those with no need to go there themselves. For them, I tell this story of climbing by fair means.