The Third Pole by Mark Synnott

Author:Mark Synnott [Synnott, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

The Day Everest Broke

Five days later, I stepped outside the dining tent in Advanced Base Camp with my coffee, shaking off the haze from our first night back up at 21,000 feet. The sun was low in the sky above the Lhakpa La, but I could already feel its strength on my nose and cheeks. A string of prayer flags attached to a nearby boulder hung limp in the still air. High above, up in the troposphere, the heavens were eerily quiet. Michael Fagin had been right. The jet stream had dipped to the south and released the summit of Mount Everest from its grip. I looked around camp, and apart from a few yaks munching on some hay, there was no one around. Every other expedition on the mountain was now up in the Death Zone vying for the summit.

Several sherpas stood nearby, passing around a pair of binoculars and chatting excitedly. After a few minutes, someone handed them to me. I slowly traced the Northeast Ridge, past the three famous steps to the final pyramidal snow slope above which the summit thrust into a cobalt sky.

Thom hovered by my side like a fidgety kid waiting for his turn to play with a new toy. “What do you see?” he said.

A few wispy clouds obscured the First and Second Steps, but the mountain’s upper pyramid was gleaming in the sun. A string of tiny black dots, like little ants, inched their way up the final snow slope below the summit. I handed the binoculars to Thom.

“Look at that conga line!” he said.

Indeed, there were more climbers attempting to summit Everest that day than ever before in history. When I later looked it up in the Himalayan Database, I found the names of 158 people, including both paying clients and support staff, who attempted to summit that morning on the north side alone. That number was less than half the swarm on the south side.

We didn’t know it yet, but the photograph of the traffic jam that would come to define the spring 2019 Everest season was already going viral. It was taken the morning before, May 22, at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the Nepali side, a few hundred feet below the summit, by a Gurkha soldier named Nirmal Purja, whom everyone calls Nims. It shows a rainbow-colored line of people, all sharing the same fixed rope, crammed together precariously on a skinny ridge of rock and snow. It looks like a crowded line you would expect to see at Disneyland—if you swapped the down suits and oxygen masks for T-shirts and flip-flops.

The photo illustrates the commonly held opinion that Everest has turned into nothing less than an overrun, soulless tourist attraction. The media response to the photo was swift and damning, along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with these people? What a bunch of fools.” The headlines that ran alongside the image lamented the crowds, the environmental degradation, and the fly-by-night outfitters willing to take any warm body that was able to pony up the cash.

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