Today comes the news that a gang of unruly Sherpas threatened and beat three climbers on Everest.
To understand this story it is necessary to understand that Everest is big business. Lots of people are willing to pay a lot of money to climb the mountain. Nepalis can earn quite a good living - at least by local standards - helping to ferry parties up and down. In this instance a party of Sherpas appear to have been fixing ropes (a great time-saving device) when the Europeans may or may not have got in their way.
A couple of years ago I went to hear a climber give a lecture which included an account of his ascent of Everest. He described how the mountain is littered with the bodies of the 1 in 10 who failed to make it back down, frozen where they gave up. And how, whilst passing beneath the Lhotse face, a Japanese climber fell on the glacier a matter of yards away. The lecturer, a GP in civilian life, said that he had seen enough road traffic accident victims to know that the climber had broken just about every bone in his body.
None of this seemed to put him off however, and he duly got to the top.
To me the GP did not seem a proper mountaineer. Sure, he was fit and determined, but somehow he had missed the point of it. The aim of climbing is not just the summit. It is about what happens on the way. I've often thought that the effort, expense and risk of going to the Himalaya was disproportionate for a fleeting moment on top of the world; but when you must step around the dead to do it, what then?
The pioneering Scottish climber, writer and environmentalist, W H Murray, was deputy leader of the Everest reconaissance expedition of 1951, and, had things worked out slightly differently, could have been on John Hunt's successful expedition two years later. Murray must be turning in his grave. Even then he had grasped what moral and cultural effect sustained attempts on the mountain would have.
"Because it's there", replied George Mallory, when someone asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. That was a good answer at the time because Everest was unclimbed. Now hundreds of people have done it, it's a less good one.
A much better explanation of climbing had been given a generation previously by the Cambridge academic, philosopher and Alpine pioneer Sir Leslie Stephen. "We climb", he said, "to remind ourselves what it's like". And this nails it. It's about the experience while it's happening. Not the end result.
"High camps in the Himalaya and Everest itself are becoming dumps strewn with every conceivable detritus of previous expeditions", wrote Bill Murray, "from discarded oxygen cylinders to discarded bodies". That's how it is on Everest. Why remind yourself what it's like?
