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‘HighTimes

‘

OUTSIDEONLINE.COM OUTSIDE 93

You WEre told That

EvEReST BASE CAMP is

AN iNsult to tHe truespIrITof MountaiNeering.

ButwHy werEN't Youtold

about the ExceLlEntbars,

tHe BUTtER PeOpLE,

aNdthAt friendLy

PLaYBoY BUnNYFROM POLAnD?

-KEVIN FEDARKO

speNds A MoNth at theworld's

most exClusiVe partYTowN.

(HARRUMPH.)

IllustrationSBY

ISTVAN BANYAI

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whatsoever); a 62-year-old Frenchmanwho’d had a kidney removed just prior toleaving for Nepal; a young British climberwho perished next to the north side’s mainclimbing route after reportedly beingpassed by more than 40 people; and astricken Australian who was abandonedhigh on the North Col and later rescued—but only after his guide had descendedsafely and telephoned the man’s wife to tellher the false news of her husband’s death.

Those stories underscored the notionthat, on the tenth anniversary of what isstill the most notorious disaster in Everesthistory—the storm of May 10, 1996,which claimed the lives of eight people in24 hours—things were more out of controlthan ever. And as the climbing world onceagain took note of the self-indulgentgrandstanding and pointless absurdity ofit all, a fresh wave of outrage poured forthfrom mountaineering deacons like Sir Ed-mund Hillary, who told reporters in NewZealand that “the whole attitude towardsclimbing Mount Everest has becomerather horrifying—people just want to getto the top; they don’t give a damn for any-body else who may be in distress.”

When McBride and I left for Nepal, of

course, most of these events had yet to un-fold. Our arrival at Base Camp on May 9coincided with the lull that settles in justbefore the summit rush. The Sherpas whoperform the grunt work that enables com-mercial clients to ascend the mountain hadalready prepared the four camps along theSouth Col route—hauling up tons of foodand bottled oxygen and rigging miles ofladders and fixed rope. By then, almostevery client had completed several ac-climatization trips to Camps II and III (at21,000 and 23,500 feet, respectively), andseveral of the more opulent expeditionshad even taken helicopter rides back toKathmandu to enjoy a “recovery break,”which involved splashing in the pool andplaying roulette at the Hyatt Regency be-fore returning for their summit bids. Thismeant that more than 500 jittery climbersand jaded Sherpas were now sitting in BaseCamp with nothing better to do than drink,gab, and wait for a 72-hour window of clearweather so the summit assaults could start.

It seemed like the perfect time forMcBride and me to start cataloging the

transmitting their own opinions.Five minutes?Bullshit.One minute, OK. Two, maybe. But five?

No way!Hearing the disbelief, Lakpa Tharke

rose to defend himself. “I have three pho-tographs,” he shouted. “That’s got to be atleast three minutes, yes?”

Three? Mmm.Well, who can say? Perhaps this might be

possible...Stupid, yes, but possible.“Oh, and please be sure to note,” Tharke

added, “I am not doing this for the record.I am doing it for world peace.”

“What the fuck?” Kami exclaimed. “Hecould be doing this as a temperature ex-periment, a stunt, a personal statement.But world peace? He could have said any-thing other than that.”

“Hey, Kami,” I interjected, “this busi-ness of being naked on the summit—would that be considered an offense to thegods of Everest?”

“Oh, how the hell should I know?”Kami barked, one of the few signs of exas-peration he’d let slip in the 25 days we’dbeen together.

“Look around you,” he continued, wav-ing his arm in a sweeping arc that seemedto encompass not only Base Camp and themountain looming above it but all theevents—silly, heroic, tragic, and farcical—that had unfolded in this surreal outpostduring the previous month.

“People come up here and they feel likethey can do whatever they like,” he de-clared. “What else do you want me tosay? I have no idea what to think aboutanything anymore. Everybody here iscompletely insane.”

IT’S NOSECRET that during thepast decade or so, Everest has become anexperimental theater for the sort of be-havior that any self-respecting alpinistfinds repugnant—and 2006 offered asvivid a reminder of this as you’d ever wantto see. The 45 expeditions on both thesouth and north sides included a pair ofBahrainians hell-bent on setting a newworld record for the fastest ascent of themountain (this despite having no previ-ous high-altitude-climbing experience

EvEREsT BaSECAMP is PArTREnaisSaNce FAiRE, pArT

CEnTraLAsIAN bAZaAR, AnD

PARt PRE-CHriStMAs PLAyStatION SAlEATwAL-MarT. It’sAlSO—AND

I’M AFRaIDTHERE’S no oTher WAYto SAy

THis— aN ABSOLUTE FRICkINGBLaST.

eVerYyear on Mount Everest seems to generate amilestone of one sort or another, howeverdubious. The 2007 climbing season thatjust wrapped up saw the first use of aPing-Pong table at Base Camp and thefirst summit attempt by a climber with noarms. But even by these standards, theseason of 2006 was weirdly memorable fortwo reasons that, thanks to the ruthlesssymmetry between triumph and catastro-phe in high-altitude mountaineering,neatly canceled each other out. A total of480 climbers reached the summit of theworld’s highest peak: a remarkable figure(the largest number to top out in a singleseason) and one whose symbolic importwas surpassed only by the size of thebutcher’s bill.

By the final week of May 2006, twoclimbers had plummeted to their deaths,three had succumbed to pulmonary orcerebral edema, another had died of ex-posure, two had fallen prey to exhaus-tion, and three had been buried alive by acollapsing serac. Most of those fatalitieshad taken place inside Tibet on the northside of Everest, a world utterly cut offfrom the mountain’s more familiar southside. But thanks to the Internet, news ofthese incidents had reached south-sideBase Camp in Nepal. There, on the morn-ing of May 24, photographer PeterMcBride and I were sitting in our messtent with Kami Tenzing, a sad-eyed andenormously capable Sherpa in his fortieswho served as our guide and translator.

As the three of us morbidly ponderedthe fact that 11 deaths had just made 2006the second-worst season ever, we werehalf-listening to chatter filtering downfrom the summit on Kami’s radio—con-gratulatory whoops announcing the finaltop-outs of the season. Kami had dialedto a channel used by New Zealand–basedAdventure Consultants, one of the largestcommercial expeditions on the southside, when a young climbing Sherpanamed Lakpa Tharke broke in to an-nounce that he had an important messagefor his boss, Ang Tsering, the company’shead Sherpa, or sardar. Given the darkjuju in the air, we braced for the worst.

“Ang Tsering, sir,” crackled a voicecoming down from 29,035 feet. “Couldyou please inform our liaison officer thatLakpa Tharke, 25, from the village ofPhortse, has just posed naked on thesummit for five minutes?”

“This is a really bad idea,” Kami saidafter translating the remarks into English.

From the other side of Base Camp, AngTsering keyed his radio and replied, “Fiveminutes? Naked? Impossible!”

His skepticism was swiftly echoed asSherpas all over the mountain began

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an American company called Interna-tional Mountain Guides (IMG), and twocrews operating under the umbrella ofHenry Todd, the controversial Scotsmanknown as “the Toddfather,” who suppliesmuch of the bottled oxygen on the moun-tain (and who spent nearly eight years inprison during the 1970s for distributingLSD in London).

Luxuristan, as we dubbed it, featuredthe densest concentration of massagetents, solar-powered showers, paddedtoilet seats, Internet-café services, andplastic-flower bouquets in all of BaseCamp—amenities that the managers ofthese camps found mildly embarrassing,but in a pleasantly resigned kind of way.

“Yeah, Everest is a bizarre place,”shrugged one team leader who half-jokingly allowed that the only qualificationhis company imposed on prospectiveclients was that their checks didn’tbounce. “A lot of people really don’t be-long up here because, let’s face it, this isone of those places where you actuallycan buy your way in.”

At the top of Luxuristan’s pyramid was

sandals staggered beneath gargantuanloads of climbing rope, whiskey, and alu-minum ladders. Crampon-clinking Sher-pas mingled with windburned climbers,shuffling trains of exhausted yaks, offi-cious-looking liaison officers from theNepal Ministry of Tourism, and nappy-coated pack ponies whose saddle bells jin-gled merrily in the frost-chilled air.

This, we soon realized, was more thansimply the world’s most rarefied ghettoof dirtbags. It was a United Nations ofmountaineering whose members hadcordoned themselves into boroughs,each boasting its own special zoningcodes and municipal traffic patterns.

To put distance between themselvesand the trails plied by the odoriferous yakcaravans, the bulk of the five-star, com-mercially guided expeditions—whichgenerally charge clients between $30,000and $65,000 a pop—had clustered on theeast and west sides of the moraine. Thiszone was populated by huge outfits inwhich dozens of climbing Sherpas andguides served up to 30 clients per group.They included Adventure Consultants,

excesses that, supposedly, had corruptedthe world’s noblest mountain beyond anyhope of redemption. Having dutifullydone so, I am now able to report that, dur-ing the following three weeks, we wit-nessed a number of things that meritedVery Deep Concern. However, we alsodiscovered something that’s often lost onthose who rush to condemn the Everestcircus but that is gloriously evident to theintrepid tribe of fit, motivated people whocome from all over the world each year topartake in this Himalayan version ofBurning Man.

Namely: In addition to presenting arather grotesque perversion of prettymuch everything that alpinism is sup-posed to represent, Everest Base Campalso happens to be—and I’m afraid there’sjust no other way to put this—an absolutefricking blast.

IT TAKESEIGHT days to getfrom the Nepalese village of Lukla to thefoot of Everest. You know you’ve arrivedwhen the trail slams up against a soaringatrium of ice-enameled rock that servesas a kind of Maginot Line separating theIndian subcontinent from the TibetanPlateau. From this spot, you can see thetops of five world-class leviathans:Khumbutse, Nuptse, Lhotse, Pumori, andLingtren. Everest is here, too, but its sum-mit is invisible, tucked behind the moun-tain’s West Ridge. After a moment, yourgaze peels away from the imperial-lookingridgelines and the cobalt-colored sky andtumbles down the mountain to the di-sheveled surface of the Khumbu Glacier,where roughly 11 bajillion tons of rubbleare convulsing beneath your feet, emittinga grunting chorus of odd pops, ominoushisses, and digestive gurgles.

It’s a weirdly unstable platform. Everycouple of hours a new fissure winks openor another humpbacked stone slides intoa pool of meltwater with a bloopingsplash, like a walrus returning to the sea.And thanks to all that restless heaving,it’s the last place you’d expect to find,say, a small city. Yet as McBride and Icould see, somebody had obviously de-cided it was the perfect spot to stage anentire Renaissance Faire.

Prayer flags streamed in all directions,snapping crisply in the hypoxic breeze at17,600 feet. Beneath those flags sprawledan alpine metropolis of more than a thou-sand people crammed into some 250 tentsthat had been stocked with 3,000 yakloadsof gear, food, and medical equipment (andwhich required a resupply of 200 additionalyakloads every two weeks). The 27 expedi-tions spread along this half-mile strip hadturned the place into a cross between aCentral Asian bazaar and a pre-ChristmasPlayStation sale at Wal-Mart. While cooksbartered everything from flashlight batter-ies to maple syrup, porters clad in shower

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in doing one thing better than the oth-ers. The Swiss had the most accurateweather reports. The Spaniards brewedthe tastiest cappuccino. The Filipinosboasted the most impressive communi-cations setup—a satellite dish brought inby yak and powered by a 360-pound gen-erator airlifted to Base Camp in a Russianhelicopter. And the Indians offered upthe best spiritual counseling. (Theirleader, Brigadier General Sharab Chan-dub Negi, delivered elaborate sermons onthe benefits of pranayama yogic breath-ing and Buddhist meditation.)

Schmoozistan’s eclectic cast also in-cluded the legendary Italian alpinist Simone Moro, 39, a balding and sinewyfigure who was hoping to complete Ever-est’s first solo south-to-north traversefrom Nepal to Tibet; a grimly obsessed40-year-old Indian lawyer namedKalpana Dash who was making her thirdEverest attempt; and Toshiko Ushida, a75-year-old Japanese woman with awarm smile who was intent on becomingthe oldest person ever to summit. Round-ing out the mix were teams from Mongo-lia, Turkey, and South Africa, plus threeexpeditions from South Korea.

Once you made it through the hospital-ity gantlet to Schmoozistan’s southwest-ern border, you crossed into Inebria. This

cluster of mold-coated canvas tents washome to four ragged Sherpas who builtand maintained the climbing routethrough the ever-shifting labyrinth ofthe Khumbu Icefall, the biggest graveyardon Everest. The Ice Doctors, as they’reknown, had one of the most dangerousjobs on the mountain. And when theyweren’t on duty, they loved to sit in frontof their tents bathing in the sun andpounding whatever alcoholic libationsthey could get their hands on.

A stone’s throw away from Inebria satthe tiny municipality of Bunnystan—agroup of tents sheltering a team led byNational Geographic Poland editor Mar-tyna Wojciechowska, who appeared inPolish Playboy’s June 2001 issue and washoping to become the first Bunny to standon top of the world. Martyna was BaseCamp’s favorite topic of gossip, andeveryone delighted in trading apocryphaltales about her cosmetics, her narcissism,

in Camp IV, Minarik failed to witness theaccident. Kalny was found the next day bya group of Chilean climbers who remainedwith him until he died. His body was thenplaced in a sleeping bag, and Minarik re-treated to Base Camp, where he discoveredthat his nightmare was just beginning.

Word of the incident had alreadyreached Paul Adler, an Australian clientwith IMG who was running his own Ever-est blog. In violation of IMG’s policy,Adler fired off an unconfirmed “report,”preempting an official announcement bythe Nepal Ministry of Tourism, statingthat one of the Czechs was dead, withoutsaying who. This threw both climbers’families into a frenzy.

At the same time, having suffered suchsevere frostbite while searching for hispartner that he could no longer walk,Minarik started asking the big commer-cial expeditions if they would order theirclimbing Sherpas to retrieve his friend’sbody. But no one was keen to divert vitalresources on the threshold of their ownsummit pushes. And, in any case, Minarikwas either unwilling or unable to fork overthe total of $2,000 that the Sherpas wouldhave charged. When I paid a visit to histent one evening, he lashed out in fury.

“Oh, these fucking commercial expedi-tions,” he fumed, pounding the air with his

fists while his blackened toes marinated ina pan of lukewarm water. “They are so busygetting caviar and champagne up to CampII, they can’t even bring themselves to helpa fellow human being. It’s disgusting!”

Minarik’s rage evoked both sympathyand exasperation throughout Base Camp’ssecond-biggest neighborhood, Schmooz-istan—a hodgepodge of less affluent non-commercial expeditions whose memberswere devoting most of their pre-summittime to paying social calls on one another.Setting foot anywhere inside this cheerfuldistrict, regardless of the hour, triggered aburst of hearty salutations—

“Bongiorno!”“Dobryi den!”“Yo, dude...Whassup?”—along with a nonrefusable invitation

to drop inside for a toast.Although Schmoozistan’s arrangements

were more spartan than those of Luxuris-tan, each encampment took special pride

a special expedition run by MountainLink, an American firm with about adozen Sherpas, seven guides, a $400,000budget, and only one client. Chris Bal-siger was a sandy-haired, 54-year-oldmulti-millionaire from El Paso who washoping to polish off the final piece in hisSeven Summits campaign. Balsiger andhis entourage enjoyed elaborate mealsprepared by a chef who’d brought in 38coolers stuffed with fresh vegetables, jarsof salad dressing, and steaks. The TeamTexas communications tent was equallyimpressive: Its solar-charged grid pow-ered an array of sat phones, camcorders,laptops, and satellite uplinks that enabledteam members to update their Web siteseach day with podcasts and video footage.The tents also contained a film librarywith 60 DVDs, which the Texans gener-ously shared with McBride and me.

I later reported these details back toKami Tenzing, who gave a knowing nod.

“Fifteen years ago, Base Camp was adifferent place,” he said. “Our only com-munication with the outside world wasthrough the mail runners, who wouldwalk all the way to Kathmandu and back.But now we have kerosene heaters,videos, and e-mail. And the type ofclients who come to the mountain todayare much more sensitive. We call themthe Butter People.”

“The what?”“Mar ke mi. It means ‘butter person’ in

Sherpa. It refers to people who are verypale, and who are always rushing to put onall their clothing the instant that they getcold. But then the minute they get hot,they are rushing to take all their clothesoff again.”

“Basically, they’re soft,” he concluded,“and they tend to melt easily.”

THEButTERPeOPlEembodiedthe Everest excess that we all find so deli-ciously loathsome, so during the next fewdays McBride and I kept sneaking over tothe Texas camp hoping to gather moredirt. Whenever we showed up, however,they wound up doing something nice, likefeeding us eggs Benedict or insisting wejoin them for yet another movie. In theend, their generosity and decency made itimpossible to hate them—although theother commercial juggernauts of Luxu-ristan provoked plenty of rancor, espe-cially among the smaller private groupswho were having a harder time of things.

One of the most beleaguered parties wasa two-man Czech team. It consisted of anexperienced mountaineer with an intensegaze named Martin Minarik who, togetherwith his friend Pavel Kalny, had launchedan ascent of 27,940-foot Lhotse withoutany guides or climbing Sherpas. On May 9,after becoming disoriented and exhausted,Kalny took a fatal fall on the Lhotse Face.Having already forged ahead to prepare tea

A squadron of Nepalese workers

charged $1.05per pouNd to scoopup

the caMp’s66pouNds ofhumaN wasteper daY. the cliMbingsherpas

saNgasoNg aboutthem thaT weNt

LIKE this:“Holy shit, here come THePoop Doctors!”

JUlY 22000077 OUtSIDE 97

come the Poop Doctors!”Another important institution was the

daily baseball game, which started around4 P.M. and was played on a patch of ice thatdoubled as the Khumbu Klassic GolfCourse. Base Camp also had its own mas-cot, a mutt named Shipton the Superdog.In late April, Shipton made canine historyby undertaking an Incredible Journeythrough the Icefall to Camp II, where he al-legedly stole 31 hard-boiled eggs from theIMG cook tent, then dug up a human skullsomewhere out on the Western Cwm.

The only thing lacking in Base Campwas the kind of Club Med–style tent hop-ping that had prevailed two years earlier,when there were 17 women on the moun-tain and, recalls Dr. Luanne, all eight ofthe pregnancy-test kits she’d broughtwith her got used up during the season.Nobody seemed to know why, but thebuzz about 2006 was that romance wasclearly down.

“Some years, it can be a real sausage-fest up here,” sighed one frustrated maleexpedition leader. “All I’m doing this sea-son is sleeping in the dirt by myself.”

If Base Camp had a town center, it wasthe Himalayan Rescue Association’smedical center, run by Dr. Luanne andher assistant, a jolly emergency-roomphysician from Idaho named Eric John-son. Dr. Luanne had started this servicethree years earlier, inspired by Tashi Ten-zing, Tenzing Norgay’s grandson, and itwas a huge hit. In addition to patients,the clinic hosted a three-man BBC filmcrew shooting a documentary calledEverest E.R. The BBC guys spent theirdays lounging on a thick piece of blue en-solite strewn with girlie magazines thatalways drew an appreciative crowd ofSherpas. The ensolite got warm in thesun, so it was known throughout camp asthe Beach.

The best time to visit the clinic was 5 P.M., when Dr. Luanne closed shop, theBeach was rolled up, and everybody duckedinto the HRA mess tent for a popcorn-and-cocktails gossip session. I dropped by onewind-whipped evening just after the gen-erator for the Philippine satellite dish hadbeen delivered—a breach of a long-stand-ing tradition that restricted helicopterlandings to medical emergencies.

“At the rate things are going up here,”Dr. Eric joked as he sipped on a BombaySapphire martini, “pretty soon peoplewill go on supplemental oxygen day andnight, starting at Shangboche [a villageand landing strip at 12,000 feet], andnever even have to acclimatize. I betwe’ll eventually see snow-machineshuttles and oxygenated suits up on theWestern Cwm. And with all that non-sense, you know what? This place willstill draw folks.”

“Really?” said Dr. Luanne.“Absolutely,” he said. “The lure—the

And who wouldn’t? Despite the fric-tions and tragedies, most folks bent overbackwards to behave decently—a state ofaffairs that, given the combustible mixof nationalities and ambitions, we andothers found quite remarkable.

“Like everybody else, I’d read Into ThinAir and thought this place must be an ab-solute shit hole,” said Dr. Luanne Freer,Yellowstone National Park’s medical di-rector and the head of Base Camp’s med-ical clinic. “It’s a weird little place, but itturns out that climbers are pretty fascinat-ing people. And, besides, it’s really fun!”

Indeed it was, often in unexpectedways. Each morning, a special squadronof Nepalese workers fanned out to serv-ice the buckets beneath the toilet tents.Known as the Poop Doctors, they charged$1.05 per pound to gather up all thehuman excrement in camp (around 66pounds per day). Whenever these mend ro p p e d by, t h e c l i m b i n g S h e r pa ssounded off with a little song that wentlike so:

“Ah mo-mo, kekpa kelugkimi!”Rough translation: “Holy shit, here

and the rude manner in which she sup-posedly treated her Sherpas.

“I’ve never actually hoped that some-body wouldn’t get to the summit,” re-marked an American climber who, likemost people peddling anecdotes aboutthe so-called Energizer Bunny, had yet toeven speak to her. “But I’ve heard so manyhorrible stories about the woman, I reallyhope she doesn’t make it.”

Finally, there was the little patch ofblackened mud and half-frozen yakdung that Kami Tenzing had reserved forMcBride and me. We christened theplace Bewilderabad.

BEfORECOMING to Base Camp,I’d been warned that interlopers whoweren’t there to conquer the mountainwere often treated with hostility. Yet amongthe many hospitalities of Luxuristan,Schmoozistan, Bunnystan, and Inebria, wenever encountered the unpleasantness we’dheard so much about.

“You know what I just realized?”McBride said to me one afternoon towardthe end of our first week.“I love this place!”

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replied Patrycja. “Just a lot of bullshit.”“Oh, c’mon, what are they saying?”“Well, Tomasz is saying it feels very

strange because they can’t go any higher,and Wojciech is telling him that they needto initiate their descent because there aresome girls down here waiting for him inthe bathtub.”

“Bathtub?”“And now Tomasz is saying that they’re

going to get the fuck off the fucking sum-mit and come the fuck down.”

While talking to Tomasz, Vortex hadbeen surfing the Internet, where he’d justdiscovered a report that Tomas Olsson, aSwedish climber on the north side, hadfallen more

McBride and I simply called him Vortex.)We arrived just as Vortex and Patrycja

Jonetzko, a Polish physician with shortblond hair and blue eyes, were belting outtheir national anthem to celebrate a minormiracle: Not only had the team summited,but they’d done so on the birthday of thelate Polish pope, John Paul II.

“This is so exciting,” yelled Vortex, “thatI’ve decided to smoke my last cigarette!”

Vortex’s radio was transmitting a bliz-zard of excited Polish chatter. Patrycjasaid the entire team was now on the sum-mit, and that Vortex was speaking withMartyna’s teammate Tomasz Kobielski.

“So what are they saying?” I asked.“Believe me, it’s not worth translating,”

drive—of the world’s highest mountain isirresistible. People just can’t get enoughof this place.”

TwO HOuRS AFTER lunch on thebrilliantly clear afternoon of May 17,cheers erupted on the edge of Schmoozis-tan. A British commercial team had justbecome the first of the season to tag thetop from the south side. The Brits werefollowed by a group of South Koreans, agroup of Filipinos, and a Swiss climbernamed Benedikt Arnold. This signaled thestart of the spring summit frenzy. Up onthe South Col, more than 100 climberswere primed to launch their final assaults,starting around midnight.

First thing the next morning, McBrideand I strolled over to Bunnystan to seehow Martyna Wojciechowska’s summitbid, which was supposed to happen anymoment now, was coming along.

Bunnystan’s communications tent wasrun by Wojciech Trzcionka, a funny andmildly deranged reporter for a Polishnewspaper who’d had such a great time atBase Camp that he was already schemingto return the following year to open up ahyperbaric oxygen bar. (After repeatedfailures at pronouncing his name,

MartYna WoJciechowsKa,a Polish Playboy cover girl,

decided to attempt Everestafter a

2004carwreck ThatshatteredHerspine.

DocTors told hershe’d have to

coOLIt with the adventures.but she

deCided to “fightMywaYback.”

MAP BYL-DOPA

PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 110

“It was actually kind of a shabby moment,” she continued, “fighting tohave a moment of beauty to yourself. Youknow, after my accident, I had thoughtthat standing on top of Mount Everestwould make me the happiest person onearth. But now I know this is simply nottrue. And suddenly it seemed like maybeit wasn’t so important after all.”

D U R I N G T H E F I N A L W E E K S of May, thenorth side turned into a high-altitudemorgue. Two days before Tomas Olsson’sfatal fall on May 16, an Indian climbernamed Constable Sri Kishan had toppledoff the Second Step. A day later, DavidSharp,the young mountaineer from Britainwho’d been passed repeatedly as he hud-dled alongside the main climbing route,froze to death. On May 17, French climberJacques-Hughes Letrange died from un-known causes. Two days after that, theBrazilian climber Vitor Negrete expired inhis tent, probably from pulmonary edema.On May 22, Russian mountaineer IgorPlyushkin died in circumstances similar toNegrete’s. And the last fatality of the sea-son took place on May 25, when ThomasWeber, a semi-blind German climber, suc-cumbed to exhaustion.

By this point, there was still a handfulof teams tagging the summit from thesouth side, but the cheering was gettingdrowned out by the yells of porters dis-mantling tents, packing goods, and re-versing the massive flow of luggagedownvalley.

Meanwhile, Kalpana Dash, the suicidalIndian lawyer who had been safely es-corted back to Base Camp, was crying in-consolably in her tent. She blamed herthird failed summit try on her Sherpas forforcing her to descend, and she’d decidedto file a formal complaint against themthe moment she reached Kathmandu.

I dropped by to ask why it mattered somuch, given that she was still alive.

“Why?” she wailed. “Because Everest ismy life—it is my life! The summit of Ever-est is my dream. It is everything to me!”

Dash wasn’t the only one upset. Twodays earlier, the South Korean cleaningexpedition had, with fanfare, sweptthrough Inebria and Bewilderabad totinggarbage bags and a video camera butsomehow managed to miss a burlap sackand two ancient pairs of underwear lyingin the rocks beside our cook tent.

“Tell me, is this cleaning or not?”fumed Kami Tenzing, who clearly hadreached the limit of his tolerance for BaseCamp high jinks. “You know what theywill do now? They will go to the mediaand report that they have taken hundredsof kilos of garbage down from Everest. Intheir country and in the eyes of the world,they will be heroes. But look at this shit! Ihate these ‘cleaning expedition’ guys—it’ssuch a scam, what they do!”

The South Korean Han Wang-YongCleaning Expedition was supposed to becollecting five tons of refuse, whichmainly meant oxygen bottles and, alas,dead bodies. According to Minarik, theSouth Koreans had promised to bringK a l ny d ow n b u t t h e n mys te r i o u s lywithdrew their offer. On May 21, Mi-narik finally threw in the towel and left,cursing the cruelty of Base Camp fromthe back of a Nepalese porter who wasliterally carrying him. As a final insult,Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism later re-fused to refund his $3,000 “garbage-disposal deposit” because he’d left hisfriend’s body behind.

Later that afternoon, word arrived thatthe Polish cover girl had come down fromthe summit and was available to talk. Iraced over to Bunnystan, where I wasgreeted by a willowy brunette who lookedlike she was having a bad-hair month andhadn’t taken a bath in 56 days.

Martyna Wojciechowska wasn’t quiteas big a star in Poland as the pope, but shecame pretty close. Back in the latenineties she’d hosted Auto Maniac, a TVshow devoted to Formula One racing, be-fore moving on to host Big Brother (Eu-rope’s most popular reality show) andthen starting an exotic-travel programcalled Mission Martyna that featured hersand-surfing in Chile and wrestling ana-condas in Venezuela.

Mission Martyna was a hit until 2004,when the Energizer Bunny, while film-ing an episode that involved searchingfor elves in Iceland, suffered a car acci-dent that killed her cameraman andshattered her spine. Doctors said heradventure days were over and told hershe had to start “living like a normalperson.” At which point she decided toclimb Everest.

“I had to fight my way back,” she toldme. “And the best way was to prove it’spossible for somebody who is not aclimber to get to the top of the world’shighest mountain.”

“So how was the summit?” I asked.“Well, initially it was very foggy, but

then the fog lifted to reveal a beautifulview of Tibet. Mountains upon moun-tains—enough to make you think thewhole world is made of them. But it wasso crowded up there. There was this Ko-rean group, and they were all shoutingand using their sat phones, and I couldn’teven hear my own thoughts!”

“What did you do in the midst of allthat ruckus?”

“Well, I made some calls of my own. Ihad a live satellite connection withTVN2—which is the Polish CNN—andwith my mom, and with my boyfriend,Chris, who is a safari guide in Africa, andwho had proposed to me a few days earlier.I must say, however, the summit was notwhat I expected.

than 5,000 feet to his death after a rappelanchor broke loose.

“This is really quite surreal,” observedPatrycja. “On the one hand, you have allthese people celebrating. On the otherhand, all these other people are dying.”

Vortex, meanwhile, had switched overto a Polish news site and uncovered an-other disturbing piece of information.Apparently, the Polish Everest teamwould be returning home on the very daythat JP2’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI,was scheduled to arrive on his first visitto Poland—an event almost certain toupstage the press conference Vortex hadset up to trumpet the world’s first Play-boy Bunny summit.

“This is terrible!” Vortex exclaimed,slapping his forehead.

“You have to understand,” Patrycja toldme, “that in Poland everything—evenEverest—somehow always relates back tothe pope.”

“Pasang!” cried Vortex, addressing hisSherpa sardar through the walls of thetent. “Do you have a cigarette? I need an-other cigarette immediately!”

THE WEATHER REMAINED stable and clear,and over the next few days the Spaniards, theIndians, and all the big commercial teamsbegan putting climber after climber on top.Meanwhile, weird things were happeninglower on the mountain.

At Camp II, Kalpana Dash, the Indianwoman, had run out of steam and an-nounced that, since she couldn’t summit,she would fling herself into a crevasse—forcing her Sherpas to tie her into a spe-cial safety harness. Around the sametime, Toshiko Ushida, the elderly Japan-ese woman, had bonked as well, and dur-ing her descent she’d taken so long to getthrough the Icefall that her Sherpa hadreportedly considered flinging himselfinto a crevasse. And Chris Balsiger, theTexas millionaire, had stalled out justabove Camp III.

“What a way to spend a million bucks,huh?” he quipped later, keeping a senseof humor about it. “But what else was Igonna do—buy myself another boat?”

The mood was bleaker over at theCzech camp, where the frostbitten Mar-tin Minarik had struck out in his effortsto retrieve the body of Pavel Kalny. Si-mone Moro, the Italian superclimber, hadvolunteered to lower Kalny into a cre-vasse during his solo traverse. But forsome unknown reason, that hadn’t hap-pened—and now Moro was on the northside, apparently trying to argue his wayout of a $50,000 fine for having crossedinto Tibet without a Chinese climbingpermit or visa.

Finally, Minarik had taken his problemto the people who probably should havevolunteered to solve it in the first place.

HIGH TIMES CONTINUED FROM PAGE 98

110 OUTSIDE JULY 2007

Then Kami’s anger took a sharp, unex-pected turn. “So many Western climbersachieve fame on Everest with the help ofus Sherpas,” he said. “But almost none ofthem ever give anything back.”

“Oh?”“Every movie or story I have ever seen

about Everest focuses only on the West-ern climbers—there is never any depic-tion of the Sherpas. I know it’s notnecessary, but I wish they gave somecredit for how hard we work, how heavyour loads are, how many times we go upand down, breaking trail between theSouth Col and the summit, or fixing theroute on the Lhotse Face, and for the riskswe take in doing these things. But theynever do—the Sherpas are always the hid-den story. You don’t have to show every-thing, of course. But there should be somesmall credit given, no? Even just showingour faces? It’s true that we are working foryou and that you are paying us. But it’s al-most like we are slaves.”

Later, McBride and I ran these com-ments past Rodrigo Jordan, the leader ofthe Chilean expedition and the man whohad found Pavel Kalny before he died.Jordan was one of the smartest guys inBase Camp, and he nodded emphaticallywhen I told him about Kami’s remarks.

“They’re paid for what they do, sothey’re not really slaves,” he said. “Butthe commercial clients up here aren’tmountaineers either, at least not realones. Those that make it to the summitwill unfurl their flags and take their pho-tographs, and then the average Americanor German or Japanese who reads about itin the newspaper will never understandthat 90 percent of the work was done en-tirely by the Sherpas. It’s not exactly a se-cret, but people don’t go out of their wayto advertise this fact, either. So, yes,sometimes these men become very upset.And if you were one of them, you’d prob-ably be pissed, too.”

ON MAY 25, McBride and I decided it wastime to hit the trail, and it occurred to methat some of the finest moments in BaseCamp were days like this. Each night, allthe prayer flags froze, and in the morn-ing, when the sun’s first rays hit thesebright little squares of cloth, the icecrystals inside would evaporate and littlepuffs of steam would waft into the air ina way that made the flags look like theywere breathing. Then the light would hitthe Khumbu Icefall and start bouncingamong the seracs, shimmering and cor-uscating until that entire jagged mass ofblue ice seemed to levitate on the irides-cent force of its own beauty. Base Campseemed like a notch below paradise atsuch moments, and I recalled somethingthe Energizer Bunny had said.

“Everything is so concentrated uphere,” she’d told me. “Survival and death,

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suffering and happiness, ambition andhumility. During these two months inBase Camp, you sometimes feel as ifyou’ve lived an entire lifetime in thisplace—don’t you agree?”

I did. Because, more than any other fea-ture on Everest, Base Camp seemed tooffer up a set of ideas that suggested, atleast to me, that Sir Edmund Hillary’scondemnation of what this mountain hasbecome might be profoundly mistaken.

First, there was the notion that everyperson connected with the place—the IceDoctors and Poop Doctors, the ButterPeople and “slaves”—was both a heroand a victim in a drama of his own mak-ing, and that the hunk of rock at the cen-ter of that drama neither ennobled nordiminished those attempting to climb itbut instead was simply there. And be-cause it’s there, looming along the outeredges of human physiology and imagina-tion, Everest had somehow distilled theessence of those drawn into its orbit—their courage and ludicrousness, theirfoibles and fears—and reflected thosequalities back in ways that were bothstark and urgently compelling.

Most climbers probably knew this al-ready or learned it on the mountain. Be-cause you simply can’t return from themost exalted place on earth without ac-knowledging your bottomless frailty,your utter insignificance, and the awk-ward fact that your life represents a be-stowal of grace that you’ve done nothingto deserve. Nor can you fail to considerthe prospect that one reason—maybethe reason—why the world, despite itsm a ny d e so l a t i o n s a n d d e p rav i t i e s,sometimes vibrates with such harrow-ing beauty is that horror and levitymight be linked inside the human heartin the same ineffably mysterious way assadness and love.

Finally, there’s the notion that thesethings may balance on a blasphemousparadox: the possibility that the act ofclimbing Everest might be rather super-fluous. Because the most bewitching fea-ture of the world’s highest peak may not,in fact, be located anywhere near the top.Instead, it may be folded into the absurd,oddly redemptive chaos of Base Camp—right down at the bottom of it all.

Which, in the end, is where the mostinteresting forms of truth abide. Don’tyou agree?

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