Volkmar Guido Hable | Death in the Clouds

They lie frozen in time, thousands of meters above sea level. The grim death toll on Everest is becoming impossible to ignore, says Rachel Nuwer.

By Volkmar Guido Hable, 9 October 2015

“But when I say our sport is a hazardous one, I do not mean that when we climb mountains there is a large chance that we shall be killed, but that we are surrounded by dangers which will kill us if we let them.”– George Mallory, 1924 

No one knows exactly how many bodies remain on Mount Everest today, but there are certainly more than 200. Climbers and Sherpas lie tucked into crevasses, buried under avalanche snow and exposed on catchment basin slopes – their limbs sun-bleached and distorted. Most are concealed from view, but some are familiar fixtures on the route to Everest’s summit.

Perhaps most well-known of all are the remains of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who lost his life in the infamous 1996 blizzard. For nearly 20 years, Paljor’s body – popularly known as Green Boots, for the neon footwear he was wearing when he died – has rested near the summit of Everest’s north side. When snow cover is light, climbers have had to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak.

(Read part one of this story, exploring who Paljor was and how he got there).

Mountaineers largely view such matters as tragic but unavoidable. For the rest of us, however, the idea that a corpse could remain in plain sight for nearly 20 years can seem mind-boggling. Will bodies like Paljor’s remain in their place forever, or can something be done? And will we ever decide that Mount Everest simply is not worth it? As I discovered in this two-part series, the answer is a story of control, danger, grief, and surprises.

Before answering those questions, however, it is worth asking something more fundamental: when death is all around, why do people gamble their lives on Everest at all?

Reaching the highest point on Earth once served as a symbol of “man’s desire to conquer the Universe,” as British mountaineer George Mallory put it. When a reporter once asked him why he wished to climb Everest’s 8,848m (29,029ft)-high peak, Mallory snapped “Because it’s there!”

Climbing Everest looks like a big joke today – Captain MS Kohli

Everest, however, is no longer the romantic, unconquered place it once was. Since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first men to stand on its summit in 1953, the mountain has been summited more than 7,000 times by more than 4,000 people, who have left a trail of garbage, human waste and bodies in their wake.

“Climbing Everest looks like a big joke today,” says Captain MS Kohli, a mountaineer who in 1965 led India’s first successful expedition to the summit, Mount Everest. “It absolutely does not resemble the old days when there were adventures, challenges, and exploration. It’s just physically going up with the help of others.”

It is a challenge, but the bigger challenge would be to climb it and not tell anybody

For Sherpas and others hired to work on Everest, the reason they keep coming back is that it’s a high-paying job. For everyone else, however, motivations are often difficult to explain, even to oneself. Professional climbers often insist that their drive differs from that of the majority of clients who pay to climb Everest, a group that is frequently accused of the lowliest of motivations: bagging the world’s highest mountain for bragging rights. “Somebody once said that climbing Everest is a challenge, but the bigger challenge would be to climb it and not tell anybody,” says BilliBierling, a Kathmandu-based journalist and climber and personal assistant for Elizabeth Hawley, a former journalist, now 91, who has been chronicling Himalayan expeditions since the 1960s.

But few would actually admit that they climb Everest only so they can boast about it later. Instead, Everest tends to assume a symbolic importance for those who set their sights on it, often articulated terms of transformation, triumph over personal obstacles or the crown jewel in a bucket list of lifelong goals. “Everyone has a different motivation,” Bierling says. “Someone wants to spread the ashes of their dead husband, another does it for their mother, others want to kill a personal demon.”

“In some cases, it’s just ego,” Hawley adds. “In fact, you have to have a certain amount of ego to get up the damn thing.”

As for professional climbers, whose love of mountaineering extends well beyond Everest, psychologists have tried to weed their motivations out for decades. Some concluded that high-risk athletes – mountaineers included – are sensation-seekers who thrive off thrill. Yet think for a moment about what climbing a mountain like Everest entails – weeks spent at various camps, allowing the body to adapt to altitude; inching up the mountain, step-by-step; using sheer willpower to push through unrelenting discomfort and exhaustion – and this explanation makes less sense. High altitude climbing, in fact, is a slog. As Matthew Barlow, a postdoctoral researcher in sports psychology at Bangor University, Wales, puts it: “Climbing something like Everest is boring, toilsome and about as far from an adrenaline rush as you can get.”

Compared to other athletes, mountaineers crave a feeling of control over their lives

A climber himself, Barlow suspected that sensation-seeking theory has long been misapplied to mountaineers. His research suggests that, compared to other athletes, mountaineers tend to possess an exaggerated “expectancy of agency”. In other words, they crave a feeling of control over their lives. Because the complexities of modern life defy such control, they are forced to seek agency elsewhere. As Barlow explains: “To demonstrate that I have influence over my life, I might go into an environment that is incredibly difficult to control – like the high mountains.”

Flirting with mortality, in other words, is part of the appeal. “If you can escape death or dodge fatal accidents, it allows you the illusion of heroism, even though I don’t think it’s truly heroic,” says David Roberts, a mountaineer, journalist, and author based in Massachusetts. “It’s not like playing poker where the worst that could happen is you lose some money. The stakes are ultimate ones.”