Everest, Inc de Will Cockrell

Date de parution : 05.2024
Format : Relié
Nombre de pages : 352
Résumé : The vivid and authoritative story of the Western and Sherpa adventurers who invented and refined one of the least likely industries on earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest. Leseprobe Prologue PROLOGUE The summit of Mount Everest is split right down the middle by the border between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, but the vast majority of climbers make their attempt from the Nepal side. If they’re clients of a guiding company, as almost all Everest climbers are today, they do so via the South Col Route–the same one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa used during their first ascent. On their way to the 29,035 foot summit, clients pass through five well-stocked camps, from the relatively flat and balmy base camp, at 17,600 feet, to the head-spinning and frigid Camp Four, at 26,250 feet. Camp Four sits on the South Col—a saddle-shaped pass between Everest and the adjacent peak Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. Trekkers and climbers reach base camp by first taking one of a dozen daily flights from Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, to Tenzing-Hillary Airport in the small village of Lukla, at 9,400 feet. From there, they spend ten days ascending and descending narrow switchbacks and rough staircases hand-built out of local granite, crossing swaying cable bridges over churning glacier-fed rivers, and admiring pink rhododendrons in full spring bloom during the most popular climbing season. They bed down each evening in cozy stone teahouses heated by yak-dung furnaces in increasingly small villages with centuries-old Buddhist temples. As base camp nears, the landscape of variegated earth tones becomes monochromatic, all black rock, white snow, and blue ice. While the Khumbu Glacier on which base camp sits looks like a vast rock garden, it is really the surface of a constantly shifting frozen river that has chewed its way through the surrounding metamorphic rock and deposited the crushed-up debris on the surface. When trekkers crest the final moraine before base camp, at last they see the hundreds of brightly colored, dome-shaped tents stretching across nearly a mile of the glacier. Many of those who will be attempting the summit as part of a guided expedition will arrive in base camp to incongruous comforts for such a remote outpost, including carpeted lounges with beanbag chairs, high-speed internet access, masseuses, full bars, baristas, and movie screens. The diversions are meant to help fill the ample downtime, as climbers and their guides spend up to eight weeks on their expedition. It’s often said that Everest expeditions are two weeks of climbing crammed into two months. Climbers spend approximately a week, cumulatively, ascending to Camps Two and Three, and up nearby peaks to acclimatize to the crippling altitude. Then, when it’s time to go for the summit—which usually isn’t until about day thirty-five of the expedition, if all is going smoothly—it takes less than a week to climb from base camp to the peak. Coming back down takes only about three days. Getting from base camp to Camp One requires navigating the mountain’s most treacherous section, where the Khumbu Glacier makes a sudden 2,000-foot cl...