Any other year, the month of May would see big crowds on Mt Everest as climbers waited a weather window to climb the world’s highest mountain. But this year, the COVID-19 lockdown means the mountain is deserted.
The lone Chinese survey expedition from the north side put climbers on the summit on 28 May, after being delayed due to Cyclone Amphan. It will remeasure the mountains’s exact height.
Next week is the 67th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt Everest on 29 May 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of a British expedition led by John Hunt. Many are saying the mountain is getting a much needed rest this year from the impact of commercial expeditions and climate change.
Overkill on Everest, Damien Francois
The Everest Industry, Kunda Dixit
The southern flanks of what was known as Peak XV when it was discovered to be the world’s highest point, lie in Nepal’s Khumbu region, while her northern and eastern slopes sweep down to the Tibetan plateau.
Everest is a western imperialistic and masculine label, named after the Surveyor General of India George Everest. In Tibet she is referred to as Chomolungma, The Mother Goddess of the Earth, the Snows, the Sky, the Winds.
Tenzing Norgay’s mother called her ‘The Great Hen’ (protecting her chicks below her wings). Nepal’s eminent historian, the late Baburam Acharya, penned the Nepali name Sagarmatha, meaning The Brow of the Earth touching heaven.
The peak itself is a magnificent pyramid of metamorphosed limestone and sedimentary rock at the top, covered by snow and ice. Her foundations were laid deep below a primal-sea. Giant plates of rock moved below the waves at the speed human fingernails grow until they rose 65 million years ago to form the Subcontinent, and the Himalaya.
Up to 1810 the world’s highest peaks were thought to be in the Andes. That year W S Webb proved everyone wrong, having calculated summits in the Himalaya to be in excess of 7,900m. By now the British had initiated the mapping of India, and in 1847 of Nepal.
Sherpa Hillary, Michael Dillon
Colonial British paranoia that the Czar of Russia was settings his eyes on the jewel in its crown, India. This resulted in the shameful British invasion of Tibet, the reason for which was similar to the American invasion of Iraq because it supposedly had weapons of mass destruction. The British, too, only found a few old Russian hunting rifles in Tibet.
Captain C G Rawling of the Younghusband expedition viewed the North Ridge of Everest from 100km away, and felt it might provide a feasible route to the summit. Plans were made, but World War I stopped play. In 1921 the Tibetans granted permission for the British to climb the mountain. They attempted numerous times, until Tibet closed its borders, a decision based on a horoscope reading warning the Dalai Lama of tourists seeking gold in the Home of the Gods.
Luckily for mountaineers, in 1949/50 Nepal removed its restrictions, and the British quickly fielded two reconnaissance expeditions. However, it was the Swiss who made the first serious attempt in 1952. Their Sherpa team of 12 was led by Tenzing who had added Norgay to his name. They ascended the Khumbu Ice Fall, entered the elusive Western Cwm, climbed the Lhotse Glacier and traversed to the South Col just under 8400m.
The last of the first, Sharad Ojha
Lambert and Tenzing spent a hard night (melting ice over a candle) and next day were only able to gain a further 250m before descending. The Swiss returned later that year, but again were sadly unsuccessful.
Both the North and the South Poles had been reached, the French had climbed Annapurna, and the Swiss had nearly succeeded on Everest. The race had become political and nationalistic, and the British were desperate, considering Everest ‘their mountain’.
12 February 1953, Colonel Hunt and his party set sail from Britain for India, from where they flew to Nepal. They recruited 350 porters to carry their equipment to Tengboche Monastery (3,950m). Here they spent 2 weeks acclimatising and preparing – then to establish a string of camps up the route the Swiss had opened the year before.
They crawled out of the tent, connected up the oxygen apparatus and set off in the early morning light. Hillary’s feet ice-cold, Tenzing led, they then changed places. The snow suddenly gave way without warning, very unnerving. They reached the South Summit at 09.00. Before them lay the virgin ridge that led to the summit, a daunting sight: huge overhanging masses of snow and ice, with giant drops on each side.
They had four and a half hours of oxygen left, with deep breaths they stepped into the void. Here one slip could see them spinning 3000m into space. Hillary noted, ‘I jammed my way into this crack, then kicking backwards with my crampons, I sank their spikes deep into the frozen snow and levered myself off the ground. …with a fervent prayer that the cornice would remain attached to the rock.’
It held. They past the now disappeared Hillary Step, then plodded up the less steep ridge to reach the summit at 11.30. Tenzing recalls, ‘…my mountain did not seem to me to be a lifeless thing of rock and ice, but warm, friendly and living.’
The British Mount Everest Expedition was a success, with Hillary and Tenzing reaching the summit on 29 May, 1953.
“The Swiss understood us better”
Mountaineer David Durkan interviewed Tenzing Norgay in Norway in 1985, a year before he died. Many have asked who set foot on the summit of Everest first, Tenzing or Edmund Hillary. I feel this to be a mundane question as an expedition is a joint effort. One question raised over the years, but to the best of my knowledge never asked, ‘had they fallen out later?’
David Durkan: Many say you and Hillary fell out after Everest?
Tenzing (smiling gently): I heard this too. That people think because you climb one mountains together that you become friends is strange to my way of thinking. Friendship builds up over time, with deeper values than one climb, even if it is Everest.
The British and Germans never treated us Sherpas very well. They were from the upper class, with military backgrounds, colonialists. They treated us as peons. In Kathmandu the members lived with British Embassy staff, we were put in a hut or a barn. We were given poor equipment, poor food, and low wages. Hillary was different, he was a farmer, less complex, but we were never friends. The Swiss were professional mountain guides, born and bred in the mountains, like us. They understood us better, they respected us, paying fair wages, and we were given the same equipment as they had. If I had to name one western mountaineering friend, it was Raymond Lambert.
Extract from Penguins on Everest by David Durkan. Available from Amazon print or ebook version, or book shops in Kathmandu.
