Death in the Mountains

But not all trekkers are as lucky as (or is it as tough?) as Miles.  Which brings me to the subject of death in the mountains.  Much of my trek felt faintly morbid as I encountered signs and stories of how the mountains always have the last word.  While climbers might love the mountains, the mountains don't always reciprocate.

On three separate occasions, I saw “missing” posters that chilled me to the marrow.  The format was pretty much the same on all of them – some wraithlike, hollow-eyed figure stared out from the bill – a photo from when the person was last seen alive – with words below to the effect that he had last been seen in the vicinity of village x heading for village y.  Since then no word had been received nor trace of him found.  Any information leading to his recovery (living or dead) would be greatly appreciated.  I shuddered when I considered such cases – of the lonely, freezing demises they must have suffered.  Of heartbroken parents sitting at home waiting desperately for news.

Then there was a chat I had with my guide Madan the night before we left Kathmandu.  This was his 91^st  outing to the Everest region and he had recently returned from a trek on the Annapurna Circuit.  Nearly six weeks after a cyclone had killed over 42 people in a single night, Madan and two clients had discovered the body of a Nepalese herdsman behind a rocky outcrop on the Thorung La.  The route, which had seen so much tragedy, was still littered with jettisoned gear – a chilling reminder of the terror and tragedy that accompanied that panic- stricken retreat from the summit.

Yet the most piercing reminder of man’s utter vulnerability to the whim of the mountains (and, I suppose, to his own unfettered ambitions as well) came 6 days out from Lukla when we arrived at an exposed outpost called Thukla.  Wedged between a trio of 6000m peaks and with sweeping views of the Lobuche Khola, Thukla boasts a single lodge with a tearoom.  We stopped there for a glass of lemon tea before undertaking a tortuous climb up the pass to the village of Lobuche.

The climb comes to an abrupt end on a serene meadow whose grassy expanse is heavily punctuated with cairns and memorials to mountaineers who have died on Everest.  I’d read much about the Mountaineers Memorial and was looking forward to seeing it.  But now that I was there, things didn’t feel right.  You could argue this is all part of the mountain’s history – that for decades a lot of very brave and sometimes reckless adventurers have accepted the risk that comes with climbing and that such risk all to often results in death.  Yet Deaths on Everest – certainly the ones I’ve read about – have a tendency to be almost tabloid in their ability to capture the public’s imagination. I couldn’t fight the feeling that I was somehow bingeing on the misfortune of the dead not to mention intruding on the collective grief of the loved ones who’d been left behind.

View east from the Mountaineers Memorial atop the Thukla Pass

When I came to the memorial stone of Scott Fisher, a one time commercial guide on Everest and, some would say, one of the greatest climbers of his generation, I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo.  If you have read John Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air”, you’ll know all about Scott.  His death in a killer storm on May 10 1996, as well as that of his friend and competitor Rob Hall, serves as a reminder of all that is wrong with Everest.  Rampant commercialism, reckless ambition and a desire to summit no matter the cost or moral compromise. 

I also came across the heartbreaking epitaph for the legendary Sherpa mountaineer Babu Chiri.  His epitaph remembers his achievements three of which are records (and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future):

·      Reached the summit of Everest 10 times

·      Reached the summit twice in 2 weeks (record)

·      Spent 21 hours on the summit without oxygen in 1999 (record)

·      Fastest summit on Everest – 16 hours and 56 minutes (record)

Babu Chiri died after a fall into a crevasse on 29 April, 2001.

For the remainder of the walk to Lobuche I pondered whether mountains like Everest were supposed to be climbed in the first place.  At very least, I thought, Ed Viesturs’ famous admonition to climbers should be immortalized alongside the other cairns in that lonely meadow:  “Getting to the top is optional.  Getting home, mandatory”