At 6.45 a.m. on 18 April 2014 an enormous chunk of ice broke free from the glacier on the western shoulder of Everest.
Some three hours earlier at Base Camp, Sherpas from a number of expeditions had crawled out of their cosy sleeping bags into the inhospitably cold atmosphere that pervades Everest Base Camp before dawn. After a warming hot drink and some snatched nourishment they then helped each other to lift enormous loads on to their backs, loads which had been packed the evening before. They then adjusted the straps around their foreheads which were tied to their packs, which historically is the way Sherpas have carried loads for centuries, before moving off into the cold pre-dawn light. The Sherpas didn’t say much, as dozens of them started to grind their way up through the Icefall. This was just another work day on Everest and the Sherpas needed to establish and supply the higher camps so that the hundreds of clients, amongst a growing number of commercial climbing companies, could then move up and sleep and eat at camps 1 and 2 and so start their acclimatisation process.
The huge loads the Sherpas were carrying made them move very slowly and they had to stop at intervals to pace their efforts and to gain some respite. By the time they reached an area in the Icefall known as the ‘Popcorn Field’ they were moving in a long line, aching from the exertion, with heads bowed, looking down at the back of the legs of the Sherpa in front of them.
The large block of ice which had broken off the western shoulder hurtled across the upper reaches of the Icefall and smashed into the long line of Sherpas. Several must have died instantly, while others were buried under snow and ice. Within a very short space of time, sixteen Sherpas had perished and many others were injured, doing what they did to make a living to support themselves and their families. In a fleeting moment many lives were extinguished and the avalanche resulted in the largest single death toll from any accident on Everest.
Climbing has always been commercial given that it has always been expensive to mount expeditions to the Himalayan peaks. Organisations such as the Royal Geographical Society supported the early expeditions to Everest, but it then became the norm to seek companies to provide the funds to pay for expeditions, such as the 1975 British South-West Face Expedition which was sponsored by Barclays Bank. The funding was provided to achieve success and, therefore, only the climbing elite had the opportunity to climb the Himalayan giants. In the 1980s this changed somewhat with an increase in the number of small expeditions seeking to climb hard routes on mountains that few outside the mountaineering fraternity had heard of.
The commercial climbing period as we know it started to come into being from 1990 and its evolution since then has depended on four groups: the Nepalese government, who want to make money by creating a permit system; the commercial companies who run the expeditions, who need a certain number of clients to make their operation commercially viable; the Sherpas who do the vast majority of work on the mountains; and the client climbers who fund the system.
Historically, it is the government of Nepal who has been the most dominant of the four groups, but they have to maintain a system which allows commercial companies to operate and make a profit and, to some extent, companies have a certain amount of influence – some cynics might suggest that in part this influence has had to be paid for. In addition, the commercial companies have to be able to keep prices at a level to attract the necessary number of climbers each year and statistics indicate that they have been successful in doing this.
The last group, the Sherpas, have the least amount of power within the four interested parties. Nepal is a very poor nation and although Sherpas are relatively well paid compared with the average national income, they are not well paid when the profits of the climbing companies for whom they work are taken into account.
There had been an argument, some would describe it as a brawl, at Camp 2 in 2013 involving Sherpas and some Western climbers and in 2014 the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, as the government body responsible for mountaineering in the country, decided to base officials at Everest Base Camp. Following the avalanche on 18 April, a meeting was held at Base Camp attended by expedition and Sherpa leaders, but the ministry officials were nowhere to be seen.
In the early years of commercial climbing, companies were generally Western-owned and run, but over the years the number of Nepalese-owned commercial ventures has grown. This has been good for Nepal, but it has also made the Sherpas more aware of the relatively large amounts of money which were being made by both the government and the expedition organisers when all of the hard work on the mountains – much of it in very dangerous conditions – was being done by the Sherpas for a comparative pittance.
This avalanche was an awful tragedy which was going to become a significant crossroads in the development of climbing on the mountain.
If Everest could be climbed without a permit or the use of a commercial company it would cost roughly US$4,000 for clothing and personal climbing equipment, $1,000 for food, $1,000 for oxygen and another $1,000 to get the climber and kit to Base Camp – a total of $7,000. The commercial climbing companies in 2014 tended to charge on average some $60,000. Clothing and personal climbing equipment was not included, but food, oxygen and the journey to Base Camp was covered which amounts to, say, $3,000. The question is, where did the additional $57,000 go?
$10,000 was paid per person to the Nepal Government for the Everest permit and, being generous, another $2,000 per client went towards other government fees, such as the cost of clothing and paying for the liaison officer, which each expedition had to have – leaving a remainder of $45,000 left to be accounted for. Some $1,000 per person went towards paying for mountain guides, while another $1,000 went towards the cost of fixing the Icefall with ladders and ropes and another $1,000 paid for the fixed ropes between camps on the mountain. The ropes along the route and the cost of maintaining the route through the Icefall are generally shared between expeditions.
Of the remaining $42,000 it would be over-generous to say that $10,000 per person would go towards the costs of Sherpas and camp staff, but even erring on the side of caution, expeditions who charged $60,000 to climb Everest were making a gross profit based on ten clients of around $320,000.
At the same time, the Nepalese government was making huge sums from simply issuing permits, whereas the Sherpas who do all of the hard work and take the risks were likely to receive about $3,000–$6,000 per expedition, and for those killed in the avalanche their families would get a reported $10,000 each.
Part of the fees which commercial climbing expeditions pay to the government of Nepal goes towards insuring the Sherpas against injury or death. The amount payable in 2014 in the event of death had been more than doubled, but at $10,000 per Sherpa it was only the equivalent of about two years of work and many who died were young, with decades of earning potential ahead of them.
Furthermore, it was said that there were 330 climbers on Everest in the spring of 2014, which would have earned the Nepalese government some $3,000,000 in revenue just for the issuing of the climbing permits.
It can be argued that commercial companies are charging too much, but to be fair to them the prices haven’t changed much since 1996. What has changed is the huge growth in climbers who want to reach the summit of Everest – something commercial companies can exploit, and this can be shown using the British as an example.
British climbers first reached the summit of Everest in 1975 and, with only one more successful expedition taking place during that decade, by the end of the 1970s the total number of British ascents stood at six (Mick Burke who died in 1975 is not listed as an official summiteer but I have added him to the total). During the 1980s a further three British climbers summited and this was added to in the 1990s by an additional thirty-four, bringing the total of British climbers who had summited Everest before 2000 to forty-three (of these, three climbers had reached the summit for a second time).
During the next ten years, a further 168 British climbers reached the summit (with some making more than one ascent, bringing the number of British ascents during the period to 194), almost four times the number of climbers who got to the top in the first twenty-four years. It is also worthy of note that between 2000 and 2004, only thirty-seven British climbers were successful, but in the same five-year period from 2005 to 2009 a further 131 Britons reached the summit. Commercial climbing on Everest had become established and there were clearly lots of clients seeking to reach the top of the world.
Another question which needs to be addressed is: has the mountain become more dangerous in line with the increase in successful summits? Again, using the British as an example and looking at the period between 1975 and 2009, a total of twelve British climbers had died on Everest. During the period 1975 to 1999, there were nine deaths with forty-three individuals reaching the summit. Or, looking at it in another way, a death to summit ratio of 1:4.7. But in the next decade when there were 168 British climbers reaching the summit there were only three deaths, or a ratio of 1:56.
Although the number of expeditions also increased significantly from 2000 to 2009, the number of Sherpas who died in that decade was eight, less than half of the number killed between 1990 and 1999, when there were far fewer expeditions attempting to climb Everest.
I would be the first to look beyond statistics for answers, but in simple terms the risks of climbing Everest appear to have been significantly reduced. This is hardly surprising given that commercial expeditions have been focusing on one route each on the north and south sides of the mountain. The nuances of the routes and the weather patterns which indicate when it is the best time to go for the summit have become well known – but what will never be mastered is the ice, rock and snow which make up the giant that is Everest. The risk that climbers could be in the wrong place at the wrong time has always and will always be a gamble that no amount of experience can influence, and the avalanche that cost the huge loss of life on 18 April 2014 was a costly reminder that nothing is guaranteed for those who climb Everest.