Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, standing 29,029 feet high
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world at 29,029 feet. To stand on its summit is the grandest single prize for a mountaineer.
Everest is also the best-known mountain in the world, regardless of nationality. Being the highest spot on Earth provides special cachet, and although they all may not aspire to climb it, more people in more places know about Everest’s stature than that of any other mountain.
The pull of Everest has always been great. When George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set off to conquer Everest in 1924, Mallory was asked why he was climbing the mountain. He answered with the pithy comment that has endured in mountaineering lore, “Because it’s there.”
One reason the British were so interested in Everest, of course, was the country’s history in the region. The mountain was charted in 1852 by the Survey of India and named after Sir George Everest, who was the Surveyor General of India at the time. That’s the origin of the mountain’s name, although there are other names applied in native tongues throughout the area. Tibetan people call Everest Chomolungma, which means “Goddess Mother of the Earth.” Nepalis call it Sargamatha, which is translated as “Head of the Sky.”
The British kept after the summit for many years until a British Commonwealth team at last put the first two humans on top. New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his companion, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, finally stood on the summit on May 29, 1953.
The summit of Mount Everest loomed above my head. Almost there. I stepped. I was moving so slowly as I approached the top of the world. My lungs were bursting; my legs felt weighted down. I took another step. The fatigue made me woozy.
Another step, a short one. Another step, a long one. I took a long breath; it was a gasp. I was moving so slow. I had completed the Hillary Step, the last big obstacle before reaching the 29,029-foot summit of Everest. As I traversed the summit ridge, I bent and scooped up a rock. And then another. A few more. They were tiny pieces of Everest to keep for souvenirs, for memories, as precious as any gems. It seemed fitting at the time. Not only did I not know if I would ever be back on this small section of real estate nearing the highest point on the planet, but for two months, the biggest rock of all, this huge mountain, had been chipping off pieces of me. It destroyed my body as I sought to climb it.
The sun was out. I was fortunate that the weather was clear. It was zero degrees, not cold at all for Mount Everest. I could see for a great distance: miles and miles. I looked out and saw China, India, Tibet, and Bhutan. I thought I could see the whole world from there. I believed the view was forever. But I had to keep moving. I tore my eyes from the horizon and looked back at my own feet, willing them upward and forward. Step. Breathe. The rocks became snow. I had reached the end of the summit ridge.
There I was, age thirty-nine, a professional mountain guide from Alaska, only twenty feet shy of the fulfillment of a dream. I was closing in on the summit, the top of the world. I was about to become the third Alaskan ever to climb Everest, and the first Alaskan to climb the world’s Seven Summits: the highest peaks on all seven continents. This was the seventh summit, the hardest of them all. It was a few minutes before noon on May 12, 1992.
I took a short step and a long pressure-breath. I inhaled the thin air. And then, at last, I was there, standing at the top of the world.
For me, it was an extra special moment. I had tried and failed to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1989 and 1991. There had been setbacks and concerns, unforeseen challenges and dangers. Making it to the top this time was even more meaningful because it also represented the conclusion of another personal quest. Only in recent years had the idea of climbing the Seven Summits become a sought-after goal in the world of mountaineering. That, too, was something I very much wished to accomplish.
With those same final steps came a dual achievement. I had climbed Mount Everest, and I had climbed the Seven Summits. At the time, climbing the Seven Summits had been accomplished by a dozen people. It was a rarity. Little did I know that the Seven Summits would define the future of my guiding and climbing careers.
Year after year after that, climbing season after climbing season, my time, energy, and efforts would be devoted to the Seven Summits, traveling the world, relying on the strength of my legs to lead other people to the top of these high mountains in remote places.
At the time, as I gulped for air, trying to drink in the bottled oxygen I was counting on to get me down safely, I had no inkling I would surely be back in this place, this high on the highest mountain. My first-time completion of the Seven Summits was a milestone, yet twenty-five years later, looking back, it represented a fresh beginning.
Now that I have climbed the Seven Summits at least ten times each, that journey of 1992 seems so long ago. Yet it was a critical one. As it was said long ago by the Chinese philosopher Laozi, who dates to around 600 BC, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You cannot climb the Seven Summits over and over again until you complete them a first time.
At the time of my third attempt to climb Mount Everest, I had climbed Denali more than twenty times. I was a regular spring-time guide on the tallest peak in North America and the chief defining characteristic of Alaska. In 1988, I became the first person to complete a solo winter ascent of Denali. It earned me a considerable amount of renown. I was a fairly identifiable figure at the time, anyway. I stood five-foot-nine and weighed about 170 pounds. I also had a very thick, bushy black beard and shaved my head completely except for a small pony tail trailing off the back of my skull. Put it this way, if you saw me walking down the street it would be easy to guess it was me.
I was kind of on a high after I made the solo winter ascent of Denali, and I went to Everest for the first time to guide in 1989. At the time, I was working for Genet Expeditions in Alaska. That was one of the most famous mountaineering guide services in the world. Ray Genet, the Swiss-born mountaineer, had transplanted to Alaska and pioneered guiding on Denali. Genet was the first Alaskan to climb Everest, but he died on the descent in 1979. The company continued on when Anchorage’s Harry Johnson took over the business.
There really had not been any attention paid to climbing the Seven Summits until Dick Bass got the idea to target them with his friend Frank Wells. Bass completed the ascent of the Seven Summits when he reached the summit of Everest on April 30, 1985. Bass’s book about their adventures, Seven Summits, generated a lot of publicity.
Everyone’s imagination was on fire about the Seven Summits. But it was Harry Johnson’s brilliant idea to offer the chance to climb the Seven Summits with Genet Expeditions on guided climbs. I still remember the brochure. After Bass’s book came out everyone wanted to do it.
Naomi Uemura, one of my heroes, who died on Denali trying to become the first to solo winter climb in 1984, had done five of the seven. By the time Harry thought of offering guided climbs, I had been to Denali, Mount Vinson in Antarctica, and Aconcagua in Argentina. On a detour from the Everest trip, I climbed Mount Kosciusko in Australia.
As my first Everest trip approached in 1989, it became clear that Harry Johnson could not go to Nepal. I got bumped up to lead guide. We had four or five clients. At that time, I was not sure I was ready to be an Everest lead guide, particularly organizationally, but there is always a first time.
As it turned out, I was more ready than I thought. Denali is the best training ground for Everest: it is high and cold, has winter storms and conditions, and has crevasses. It has most of the objective dangers Everest has, and all of the subjective hazards of Denali.
Almost all of the good things in my life have flowed from my love of Denali. I had just completed the winter ascent of Denali, and word of that spread my name around. Completing a challenge like that gave me confidence; it was a feather in my cap. It spurred me to think about an international guiding career.
Genet Expeditions was the first company to offer all seven peaks as guided climbs. Until then, only individuals tried to climb the Seven Summits. Genet’s advertising was “Come climb the Seven Summits with us.” That led to work for me in other countries.
The first time I went to Everest as the lead guide, I reached 28,000 feet, but was forced to stay overnight and slept on the ground after stomping a platform in the snow. If I continued on, I felt I would be risking the loss of fingers and toes to frostbite, or being blown off the mountain because the winds were so high. The second time, the trip was cut short because of a lethal rock-fall on the mountain. There is never a guarantee, even if you have the best guide in the world, that you can make it to the summit. So much can happen, and so much can go wrong.
For my third attempt, I left Anchorage on February 28, 1992, guiding for Alpine Ascents International near Seattle, Washington. By then, I was fully aware of the kind of problems anyone could have on Everest. My eyes were open. Everest had beaten me in the past.
Climbers had been fascinated by Everest for decades, but the British achieved the first ascent in 1953 when Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay made it to the summit. A lot of people were beaten by Everest. It took a lot of time, effort, and energy for Everest to be scaled the first time. Ten years later, one of the climbers on the first American expedition to ascend Everest was asked why they were climbing and responded, “Because it is still there.”
One climber on my Everest trip was Mike Gordon of Anchorage. Mike was forty-nine at the time and owned Chilkoot Charlie’s, the largest and most popular bar in Alaska. Mike always gave it his best shot and was kind of in the same situation I was. Two years earlier, 1990, he was afflicted with bronchitis and he had to turn back before the summit. Mike was nicknamed “Mountain Mike” for his climbing and wanted to be the first Alaskan to reach the top of the Seven Summits. Of course, so did I.
As part of his ongoing desire to climb the Seven Summits, Mike covered one wall of his huge bar with mountaineering pictures and paraphernalia that showed him on various climbs. He was convinced that this time he was going to reach the top of Everest. Mike and I both knew that Ray Genet, who was a tremendously strong climber, had perished on his Everest climb.
The Seven Summits had become a hot topic in the climbing world after the publication of Bass’s book. Climbing them all is a geographic challenge, a fitness challenge, and a challenge to the size of your bank account.
Typically, since it is the most difficult and the most expensive to climb, Everest is the last of the Seven Summits approached. In 1992, I believe the climbing fee for Everest was about $50,000 a person. It is around $65,000 now. Much of that stems from permitting fees that must be paid to the Nepalese government and the cost of bottled oxygen. Our group going for the summit in 1992 included me, Mike Gordon, Alpine Ascents owner Todd Burleson, and millionaire Steve Fossett.
From the first organized attempts on Everest, anyone headed to that part of the world understood he would face severe cold, heavy snowfall, whipping winds, hypoxia, and threats from crevasses and avalanches. The biggest danger of all may be the sheer height of the mountain. There are fourteen mountains in the world taller than 8,000 meters, or 26,000 feet. At that height, the air is so thin that it becomes hard to breathe without the use of supplemental oxygen. Being at that altitude clouds one’s judgment and makes it so difficult to climb that a body quickly wears down physically. A climber can be afflicted with pulmonary edema filling the lungs with fluid, or cerebral edema putting fluid pressure on the brain. There are many ways to die on Everest.
Harry Johnson recognized the universal climbing itch within the mountaineering world and said people would want to go to Everest “because it’s the biggest.” He was right. He also said everyone knows Everest. They even saw it mentioned on quiz shows. Practically no one outside of the mountaineering community can name the second-highest mountain in the world, 28,251 foot high K-2 located on the border separating Pakistan and China.
Becoming acclimated to altitude is one of the important intermediate steps between beginning the climb on Everest and going for the summit. Many, many people have turned back because they did not make the adjustment. That is the reason why the 1992 climb began with a long, leisurely paced hike to base camp.
One interesting thing about Everest is that it is in the middle of the tallest mountain range in the world, so it is not easy to see from a distance as trekkers approach from the south. On a clear day in Alaska, Mount McKinley can be seen from downtown Anchorage. It stands out above its landscape. But from the south, Everest is mostly hidden from view until you get fairly close. Lhotse, the world’s fourth tallest mountain at 27,890 feet, and Nuptse, at 25,850 feet, block views of large portions of Everest—except for its distinctive pinnacle.
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, standing 29,029 feet high
Some of the most fantastic photographic images of Everest are taken at sunset when there is a golden glow on the top of the mountain. You see snow, the rock band, and the sunlight reflecting. Another signature sight of Everest is the so-called plume blowing off the summit. It is frequently very windy at the top, and the wind creates a cloud-like stream of snow blowing horizontally. That is not a good time to be at the summit, though. When the winds scream, climbers cannot advance to the top, and those standing at the top might face being blown off the mountain.
When the hiking began, Mike Gordon, who was accompanied by his wife Shelli as far as Shyangboche at 12,000 feet, turned to Todd Burleson and said, “The adventure begins.”
Once the trek finishes, climbers pitch tents. As interest in climbing Everest and the Seven Summits grew, base camp became a bustling international city. It was not as crowded in 1992 as it became in future years, but there were still many groups preparing for assaults on the mountain.
The key obstacle to climbing success is often the Khumbu Icefall. The jumbled-up ice falls 2,000 feet from the Western Cym to the Khumbu Glacier, where base camp is situated. It is a stunning field of crevasses and ice rubble, a danger zone of hanging seracs and unstable footing. The first thing I thought when I saw it was, “Holy smokes! How can a guy go through there?” It is a terribly risky area, and often exacts a price. Many deaths are attributable to problems in the Icefall.
These days on Everest there are many fixed ropes installed for climbs and aluminum ladders extended over crevasses. But the Icefall shifts and changes all the time, so that does not guarantee safety. Sometimes it changes with no warning and huge chunks of ice break free and fall. The Icefall is spread over one-and-a-half miles, and it is nerve-wracking to thread your way through it. Bad things happen there in a split second where there is no taking cover and no way to move out of the way of a fast-rolling avalanche. At different times, the British referred to the Icefall as “Hellfire Alley” and “The Atom Bomb Area.” I referred to a particularly broken area of ice as “the popcorn area” because of its tenuous consistency, and it seems to have stuck.
Approaching from the south, there is no way to reach the South Col and the summit without passing through the Khumbu Icefall. A lot of prayers are said as climbers make their way through that area. At the time of the 1992 expedition, there were eleven climbing teams trying to make it to the top from the same side, including groups from America, Russia, New Zealand, India, and Holland.
For decades, climbing Everest had been essentially a solitary wilderness experience. There was only one climbing group on the peak at a time. The human traffic on the mountain has only grown since. The Everest climbing season concludes at the end of May because of the arrival of the monsoon season. You want to clear the mountain—everybody off—because the snowstorms roll in. Everest is not a place to be during powerful weather like that.
When Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest, word was sent out to the world by messenger. By 1992, demonstrating the dawning of the age of more sophisticated communication, the Dutch brought a telephone and fax machine to the mountain and charged willing users $26 a minute to send a message to a loved one. Mike Gordon took advantage to send a note to his wife.
Although there were a lot of people on Everest’s slopes, it didn’t really faze me. This was a case again of my Denali experience helping me because I had been on that mountain when 400 people were on the peak. I thought it was kind of fun to socialize and talk with the people from all over the world who had arrived on Everest at roughly the same time.
One place numbers can be a problem, though, is in the Icefall. Guide Pete Athans and I saw to installing our route for the group through the Icefall to Camp I, at 20,000 feet. While supplies were being ferried ever higher, Sherpas handled the dirty work of placing ropes and ladders across holes capable of swallowing climbers making a simple misstep. That year, worse than the crevasses, were the seracs, huge blocks of ice just hanging above our heads. If the ground shifted without warning, they could crush one of us in an instant. One serac was nicknamed “the Hand of God.” because it was up to God if the ice remained stable as people passed beneath. It was a scary, spooky feeling to look up and see that ice overhead. Pete and I had to cross through the Icefall repeatedly. Other climbers only had to cut through a few times. The more frequently you went through it, the higher the odds you would get squished.
I probably passed through the Icefall twelve times. It felt like twelve times too many. Once I got used to the route’s idiosyncrasies, I flew through to minimize time in there. Nothing terrible occurred, and Pete and I established Camp II at 21,500 feet. We got very early starts and stopped carrying loads by three p.m. It often snowed in late afternoon, so it was good to be set up early for the night. There were some very high winds, too. By Everest standards—and Denali standards—the cold was not extreme, not dipping below minus-ten.
Steve Fossett dropped back at this point. He had asthma and was fighting too hard to breathe. He said he realized that he could not climb high mountains with his condition and, after that, turned to other adventures. Everest sets limits, one way or another, for all of us. Whether you suffer from asthma or not, Everest can work its way into your lungs. At Camp III, around 23,000 feet, quite a few people started getting sick. Mike Gordon was one of them, coughing so hard he pulled a muscle in his side. The camps sounded like tuberculosis wards. Mike was far from alone.
Actually, I was worse off than he was. When one of our team members became so sick he had to be evacuated, I volunteered to escort him down through the icefall. The rest of the team was preparing to move up to Camp III in two days. I dropped down to base camp with our ill member and re-climbed back to Camp II to guide team members to Camp III the following day. We spent the night without bottled oxygen to help us acclimate. But with all the extra exertion and without the oxygen, it had the opposite effect on me. The next day, I was in super slow mode. Mike told me I looked sicker than hell, and I felt it. When we returned to base camp, I hiked over to my friend Rob Hall’s camp to see his wife Jan Arnold, who was a doctor. She said I had a lung infection and should descend immediately. There was a clinic at Pheriche, at 14,000 feet. Ironically, it had been established by Peter Hackett, the Alaskan doctor and researcher who had preceded me to Everest.
On April 20, nearly two months after I had left Anchorage, I was being looked over by two doctors in Pheriche. They had two stethoscopes pressed against my chest simultaneously and told me to breathe. I said, “I am breathing.” They said they couldn’t hear me. The diagnosis was double pneumonia, viral and bacterial. I thought that was the end of my Everest climb. Zero-for-three loomed in my face.
For a while, all I did was sleep. I tried fortifying myself at a tea house, eating rice, potatoes, noodles, and eggs. I drank gallons of tea. I also read the book One by Richard Bach. Determined to will myself back to health and back onto the mountain, I spent long hours visualizing. I did not allow myself to ponder quitting the climb. I stayed focused and repeatedly visualized the final steps to the summit and (not sure where this came from since I don’t drink) celebrating afterwards in a bar. I did this over and over again while taking medicine and sleeping. Nearly two weeks were lost. That is easily enough to doom a climb.
Instead, rather amazingly, after that recuperation, I was rejuvenated and resumed the climb. When we first started moving back up the mountain—rather quickly, actually—I guessed I was at about eighty percent of full strength. I went up high quickly as my body recovered. Mike didn’t recover as well. When we got back up to 23,000 feet, he was coughing again, so hard it scared him. He even used bottled oxygen to help, but he turned back at Camp III. The climb was over for Mike. While I was reading One, Mike had been reading Moby Dick. It was as if he had been on a quest parallel to Captain Ahab’s. I knew it was very hard for him emotionally.
Mike turning back hit me like a ton of bricks. I was disappointed since we had climbed many of the Seven Summits together. This was his second and final attempt on Everest. He honored the commitment he made to his wife to not continue risking his life on Everest. Our first attempt together in 1989 was dogged by horrific winds, yet it only served to enhance Mike’s desire to stand on top. We were in the same boat then and made a pact to go back and succeed. He had altered his life drastically to train for the attempt Everest, and now his lungs would not allow it. I was all ripped up inside when it was time for him to depart. All I could do was to hug him and try to hold back tears.
I was still not at peak strength after my illness. At the 26,000-foot camp, I tried to shovel in some nutrition. I ate noodles and threw up. Then I ate a warm fruit cocktail and threw that up. The sky was growing ugly, with big, gray clouds moving in and obscuring the peak. I did not feel well again and slept for three hours on oxygen, which made a difference.
The plan was to awaken the group at eleven p.m. to get ready. I ate a half of a Baby Ruth candy bar and some oatmeal and drank some water. It was time to move for the summit. I was with Skip Horner, another guide from Montana; and Louis Bowen, of Hong Kong. We were bundled up in heavy parkas, thick mitts, and goggles, and climbed with three Sherpas. We started on the trek at one a.m., and I led. I felt renewed.
We topped the South Summit, at 28,750 feet, at nine thirty a.m., and the sun was out. The summit looked like a big vanilla ice cream cone. I started thinking, “It might happen. It might happen.” We moved slowly but steadily until we reached the Hillary Step. There was a party of fourteen from New Zealand moving slower in front of us. There is no room to pass another climber on the Step, so we had to wait. We planned to take a short break, but the rest time stretched to an hour-and-a-quarter. We burned oxygen as we waited so we could stay relatively warm.
A human traffic jam near the summit of Mount Everest was unheard of in 1992. There was some irony in going to such an extreme corner of the earth and then standing in line. I think that was the first day there ever was such traffic there.
When it our turn to cross the Hillary Step, our pace was also slowed. It was step, gasp for breath, step again. It was slow-motion progress, but we kept going. The three of us made it to the summit at 11:55 a.m. on May 12. At that time, it was the greatest single summit day in Everest history. The summit is really only about twenty feet long, and there were about twenty people there at the same time. Skip Horner said it was as if we were perched in a row on a wire like crows. Up to that point in time, some 350 people total had climbed Everest since Hillary and Tenzing’s day, but on that day alone, thirty-two made it. Todd and his group went up the next day.
I brought a water bottle to the summit and joked that when I opened it, I filled it with summit air. The view was spectacular. I could see Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, and I took a panoramic view with a video camera. It really felt as if the view extended for hundreds of miles.
The delay in reaching the top, being trapped behind the New Zealand climbers, meant our group had used up considerable oxygen waiting. Skip ran out of oxygen at the Hillary Step, and Louis shared some with him. Then I ran out across the “Death Traverse” below the Hillary Step. I was left gasping for air. A Russian climber I met earlier gave me a bottle. I might have died without it.
We returned to Camp IV at seven p.m., eighteen hours after we began climbing. We were hammered. The next morning I had fresh coughing fits and worried about the pneumonia being back. I staggered as we dropped from Camp IV to Camp II. Once, I was weaving and noticed a nearby 4,000-foot drop. That woke me up. I realized if I didn’t straighten myself out, I was going to die on the descent. I thought of Ray Genet because that’s how he died. I lost twenty-five pounds on the climb, but I made it.