[Phil Crampton, a veteran expedition leader and owner of Altitude Junkies, said Nepalese officials were willing to satisfy a list of demands issued by the Sherpas at base camp, and added that he was hopeful that climbing could continue. Sushil Ghimire, one of the government officials planning to visit the base camp on Thursday, said he believed some Sherpas would agree to continue. “Some of the members who lost their relatives and lost their friends, they will not be forced to continue their expeditions,” Mr. Ghimire said. “But they cannot stop the other people who want to climb the peak.”]
By Nida Najar and Bhadra Sharma
International Mountain Guides, one of Everest’s largest
touring agencies, announced late Wednesday that it planned to cancel its
expedition. The decision came as some Sherpas, including the so-called Icefall
doctors who secure the route up the mountain, called for a halt to the season’s
expeditions, dissatisfied with the
government’s response to
the tragedy.
“The Icefall
route is currently unsafe for climbing without repairs,” a partner at the
trekking company wrote in a statement. “We have explored every option and can
find no way to safely continue the expedition.”
Alan Arnette, a climbing expert who runs a
well-respected website, said
that the pullout of International Mountain Guides, an American company, would
affect the decisions of the teams that remain. He said that the company’s
expeditions in the past have employed as many as 60 Sherpas.
“At the end of the day, if the largest team with the most
number of Sherpas leaves, then the other teams will be influenced by that
heavily,” he said.
Tim Rippel, who was leading a team on Everest for his
company Peak Freaks, announced on his website on
Wednesday that he was canceling the climb. “The route, in my professional
opinion, is not safe,” he wrote, describing the condition of the mountain as
deteriorating. He also wrote that the company would “tread softly on future
plans with Everest.”
Canceling the expeditions will have a ripple effect on
the incomes and livelihoods of hundreds of Sherpas, mostly part of a small
ethnic group renowned for mountaineering skills, who assist foreign climbers.
Mr. Arnette said future seasons would probably draw fewer
Western climbers and require a smaller number of guides.
Two foreign tour operators held an emergency meeting with
Nepal
Phil Crampton, a veteran expedition leader and owner of
Altitude Junkies, said Nepalese officials were willing to satisfy a list of
demands issued by the Sherpas at base camp, and added that he was hopeful that
climbing could continue. Sushil Ghimire, one of the government officials
planning to visit the base camp on Thursday, said he believed some Sherpas
would agree to continue. “Some of the members who lost their relatives and lost
their friends, they will not be forced to continue their expeditions,” Mr.
Ghimire said. “But they cannot stop the other people who want to climb the
peak.”
Tulsi Gurung, 32, a guide with Shambhala Trekking, said
that at least 100 Sherpas had decided to leave. A cousin, Ash Bahadur Gurung,
is one of the three guides still missing on the Khumbu Icefall.
Mr. Gurung said he was unimpressed by the government’s
efforts.
“Why do they want to come here?” he asked. “If in a
couple of days the American people or European people die again in that place,
what’s going to happen then? Who is going to take responsibility?”
Nida Najar
reported from New Delhi , and Bhadra
Sharma from Katmandu , Nepal New Delhi .
With Sherpas treated like pack animals by the cretinous rich, the crisis
of the world's highest mountain was inevitable
By Tanya Gold
Mountain Madness was the name of an
expedition whose leader perished in the 1996 Mount Everest
disaster, chronicled by Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air – and it was well-named. There is an
explicit madness attached to serious mountaineering; a desire for pain,
isolation and submission, either of man or mountain, whichever breaks first.
There is something necrophiliac to it. But this is the game, and it is all the
more fascinating to outsiders for being ill-expressed by those in thrall to it.
Why climb Everest, George Mallory was famously asked before it killed him in
1924 and swallowed his corpse. Did he even know? He could only say, and this is
thought quotable, because there is nothing else to print from his testament:
"Because it's there."
Now a new kind of madness has been exposed, made partially of the above
and partially – inevitably – of money. Everest has attracted wealthy amateur
climbers for many years; the kind who would not make it up or down without
bottled oxygen, expensive steroids, pre-laid ropes and ladders and, of course,
the Sherpas native to Nepal. They lay the ropes and ladders; they carry the
supplies (and sometimes beleaguered tourists) in the manner of two-legged pack
animals, all the better to facilitate the disgusting Freudian apogee of these
expensive holidays, which is now expressed in a word fit only for the
illiterate – "summiting".
As conditions are made safe for these blithe cretins they become more
dangerous for Sherpas, whose job is to loiter in the dangerous parts of the
mountain and secure them for ever greater numbers of incompetents to hurry
through, en route to their photographs on the top of the world. You could call
the Everest selfie the ultimate selfie: the true selfie.
A crisis was inevitable, and last Friday
it arrived, an unsurprising epilogue to a job estimated as being 12 times
more deadly than being a US soldier at the height of the Iraq war:
16 people, of whom 13 were Sherpas, were killed in an avalanche as they readied
the slopes for the summit window in May.
Now it is properly named the worst
tragedy in the mountain's history, and Sherpas are agitating for better
insurance, a monument to the dead, and a rescue fund – that is, a fairer share
of the spoils that come to the Nepalese government and western guides.Many have left the mountain
and will not return this year; reports from base camp tell of anger
as climbers who paid up to $100,000 to "summit" feel robbed of their
opportunity for ecstasy. One Sherpa said the tourists "pointed out that
they have spent so much money, so how can we leave?".
This is hubris. As commercial climbing has exploded, Everest has shifted
from an explicit wasteland to a moral and internal one which also serves as a
perfect metaphor for the contempt in which we hold the planet.
It is not simply the ordinary exploitation of the Sherpas, which is
soothed away with the knowledge that in Nepal
To climb to the summit it is usual
to pass dead bodies – they are too difficult and expensive to recover – and
sometimes the dying too. You could call them a macabre attraction, a monument
to the magnitude of your achievement should you make it up and down. This too
is sheer delusion; most climb Everest on Sherpa legs. In 2006 up to 40 people
passed the British
climber David Sharp as he died in the snow. Edmund Hillary, the
first man to climb and survive the summit, called it "horrifying",
and he is right.
The prosaic question for the
armchair mountaineer is, can the dying be saved? Yes, sometimes. In 2012 the
Israeli Nadav Ben-Yehuda rescued the Turkish-born
American Aydin Irmak; in 2006 an entire American-led team rescued the Australian Lincoln Hall. For this they
were lauded as heroes, although such behaviour was considered mere
professionalism when only those fit to do so climbed Everest – that is, before
the money arrived. But more tourists claim "tunnel vision" and
"summit fever". They do not pause; they are slaked on their own
fantasies; they paid too much. Madness indeed.
Twitter: @TanyaGold1
