Following John Delaney's death last week, LORNA SIGGINSasks if safety is being overlooked in the rush to scale Mount Everest
‘TODAY, IN A DAY, Tibetan climbers have completed the preparation of the route . . . The way is open. Weather still gives hope for a successful ascent . . . All are doing well.”
The Russian mountaineering guide Alexander Abramov, the leader of the 7 Summits Club expedition, posted this “evening news” from base camp on the northern side of Everest, in Tibet, on May 19th. Two days later, on May 21st, he confirmed that his team had made it to top of the mountain. But one of them, the 42-year-old Kildare-based businessman John Delaney, was not among them.
It was not until May 23rd that his family received confirmation that he wouldn’t be coming home. Abramov reported that the Irishman ran into difficulty and collapsed at 8,800m at about 1.45am on May 21st. “Guides and sherpas assisted John, but he was pronounced dead at 4.30am,” he said. A team doctor at base camp had been consulted by radio, but repeated attempts at resuscitation failed. A reported total of 170 climbers were on the north-ridge route at the time.
The full facts surrounding Delaney’s death are still not clear, but his brother-in-law Liam Hurley spoke eloquently earlier this week of the impact on his family, including his wife, Orla, and their three children, his mother, Marcella, brother Christopher and sister Geraldine, who attended a memorial service yesterday in his home parish of Ballinakill, Co Laois. Orla had given birth to the couple’s third child, Hope, on May 18th, but limited contact on the mountain’s higher reaches meant her husband was unaware of the news. The fact that his body could not be taken down from the mountain, given the altitude and location, made it all the more difficult to accept, said Hurley.
Delaney was remembered as a risk-taker and pioneer by business colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. An accountant early in his career, he founded Trade Exchange Network, which operated online gambling exchanges, in 1999. He was also the founder and CEO of Intrade, an online prediction market platform that allows customers to bet on world political, entertainment and financial events. The New York Times has described Intrade as one of the biggest players in the field.
The Everest summiteer Pat Falvey first met Delaney when he booked a trip with Falvey’s company to Aconcagua, which rises to 6,962m in Argentina. He trained at Falvey’s base in Kerry. A year after Argentina, he booked for Everest with Abramov’s 7 Summits Club. In spite of the high attrition rate in the Himalayas, including several fatalities in 7 Summits Club expeditions in 2005 and 2006, Delaney was drawn back there.
Abramov, who has been unavailable for comment, is an accomplished mountain guide and expedition organiser. One of his guides on this expedition was Noel Hanna, a 44-year-old Irishman who recorded the 17th Irish ascent of Everest in May 2009. The 7 Summits Club expedition cost just under $40,000 (€28,000) per client; a personal guide or Sherpa cost extra.
Delaney is the first Irish fatality on Everest, and the fourth this season. In spite of rapid advances in mountaineering equipment, and in communications and rescue, mountaineering takes it toll, and altitude sickness can hit even the most experienced at any stage.
The industry that has grown up around Everest has been a source of constant debate. When Frank Nugent was deputy leader of the successful first Irish expedition to Everest, led by Dawson Stelfox in 1993, he was one of a team of mountaineers and Sherpas who knew each other from previous trips. He questions whether there is the same level of team spirit and support on commercial expeditions, in which clients with varying levels of experience – and sometimes very little – pay for a guided ascent. Non-commercial climbs, in which climbers tend to be more experienced and to rely on sponsorship, would still use Sherpa support.
Another Irish Everest summiteer, who preferred not be named, disagrees: “You play cards, you chat, watch movies together. You don’t spend the day in your tent alone. You have to stay focused, but that’s harder to do the longer you are there . . . so the bond you form with these people, with whom you share a common goal, protects you from that.”
It is a dilemma that was skilfully explored by the climber and author Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air, his account of one of the worst years for climbing Everest, when eight people died on a single day in May 1996, and 12 died in total that month.
In the midst of initial rushes to judgment, it is “easy to lose sight of the fact that climbing mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise”, he wrote, for it is an activity that “idealises risk-taking”. This continues to be its attraction.
