Twenty years ago today, a group of Irish climbers pitched their tents in one of the harshest places on earth. Located high on the Tibetan Plateau at over 5,000 metres, Everest Base Camp North is cold, windswept and marvellously bleak. The Irish hardly noticed, however, for they were solely focused on becoming the first national expedition to summit the roof of the world.
Mountain lovers with a lifetime’s commitment to climbing, they had all served long climbing apprenticeships. Typical of the time, hillwalking would lead on to rock-climbing. This would be followed by summer and later hard winter ascents in Scotland. Appetites would then inevitably be whetted for a series of pilgrimages aimed at tackling tough Alpine routes. This apprenticeship ensured that by the time they reached Everest, the Irish expedition members were toughened by years of rigorous climbing, experienced and self-reliant as mountaineers and eminently capable of making informed decisions about climbing safety.
At Base Camp they mixed with a couple of other national expeditions. Again these were genuine mountaineers who, like the Irish, took pride in their competence as climbers and now fervently wished to reinforce this by placing their national flag atop the most dangerous landscape on earth. Otherwise, the only reward anyone sought was the peer group respect arising from pushing back the frontiers of the possible for later generations.
Nobody would have known it then, but the successful Irish Expedition to Everest summit of 1993 took place when a paradigm shift in mountaineering was taking place. The almost 40-year long, golden age of Everest, when nobody could – or indeed wanted to – make money from the mountain was about to disappear. Increasingly, accessibility meant that invaders had arrived in the form of commercial expeditions. In 1992, New Zealanders, Rob Hall and Gary Ball successfully guided six paying clients to the top of Everest. Inevitably, other canny entrepreneurs were soon concluding after this success that the world’s highest mountain could now be packaged like a Caribbean cruise.
The clients of these new businesses arrive, for the most part, blissfully unencumbered by previous mountaineering experience. Crucially, however, they are prepared to pay jaw-dropping sums and accept huge risk for the prestige of a summit photo. Often more wannabe celebrities than mountaineers, some of the more self-obsessed undoubtedly regard Everest as a convenient vaulting horse for ambition.
The overriding need for the new commercial expeditions to keep these high paying ingénues safe, means that much of the risk is now transferred to Sherpa guides. These doughty individuals climb the mountain at the beginning of the season and place fixed security ropes most of the way up. Then when the big day – or more correctly big midnight – arrives, the clients clip into these ropes and trudge upwards in darkness behind professional guides. Success depends, not on innate mountain craft but, on fitness, ability to acclimatise and luck with the weather. The most important factor is, however, determination in bucketfuls. Many a naive wannabe soon discovers, that even when well supported on a commercial expedition, only the mahogany tough can withstand the huge psychological pressure and long drawn out physical torture demanded by an Everest ascent.
Despite these privations, the popularity of what must now be regarded as the world’s most elevated tourist attraction has increased exponentially, while on the converse side, cutting-edge climbers have largely abandoned the place. An iconic picture taken last year shows a Disneyland-style queue snaking up the mountain. This crystallised for many what is happening on Everest. Over 40 commercial expeditions a year means that dangerous bottlenecks are now developinging at places where climbers can only ascend singly and those less able are increasingly depending on bottled oxygen for virtually the entire ascent.
Many now wonder if it was for this that the unassuming Edmund Hillary blazed a spectacular trail in 1953. Certainly the great man himself had doubts and suggested that commercial expeditions engendered disrespect for Everest. Purists will certainly decry the trend towards commercialisation of the celebrated Himalayan landscape, seeing profit motivated expeditions as increasing environmental damage, threatening local cultures and worsening the rubbish problem on the mountainside.
Tibetians and Nepalese are unlikely to agree. The annual influx of commercial expeditions brings badly needed hard currency and a large amount of what – by local standards – is well-paid employment. It also allows the elite, high altitude Sherpas – on whose risk-filled work every commercial expedition depends – to achieve a previously undreamed about standard of living. Everest, it seems, will continue to remain a captivating but contentious enigma.