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On 12 May 1992, 32 men and women reached the summit of Everest. The crush of
people was so great that at a difficult point on the summit ridge where 40
years ago Sir Edmund Hillary had used all his legendary strength and skill
to continue (a place still known as the Hillary Step), a queue formed as
those going up paused to let those coming down get by. But even that record
was bettered on 10 May this year, when 38 reached the summit.

Everest’s unique status has made it an increasingly popular attraction as
the Nepalese government has relaxed restrictions on the numbers climbing it.
After Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit on 29 May 1953, the
mountain was only climbed 36 more times in the next 20 years. In the
following decade there were 100 ascents, and in the past decade – to the end
of the post-monsoon climbing season of 1992 – it was climbed 349 times. By
the end of October 1992 there had been 485 verified independent ascents.

It has been climbed by a 17-year-old French boy and by a 55-year-old
American millionaire who ‘collected’ the summits of the seven continents’
seven highest peaks, and last year by a Frenchman as his first route in the
mountains on a guided expedition. It has been skied down, parapented off,
raced up in less than a day, climbed in winter, and climbed without bottled
oxygen (51 times). If you are rich enough, you could book a place on an
ascent today – have about £21 000 handy. Most people who
climb Everest follow more or less the route taken in 1953, although there
are 13, of varying difficulty. The original line is, technically, only as
hard as climbing Mont Blanc in the Alps; the real problems are posed by
altitude and weather.

The British expedition of 1953 was then the best-equipped and best-prepared
ever. They had the latest equipment, including tents tried and tested in the
mountains and boots specially designed for the job in hand, carefully
calculated rations and the best available medical advice. This gave them a
psychological edge, perhaps the most important commodity in climbing
mountains.

But compared with what is now available their equipment was rudimentary and
heavy. They had recognised the need to replace previous expeditions’ leather
climbing boots, which became wet and heavy and then froze overnight
(threatening frostbite), and designed a rubber overboot that kept the foot
dry. But they were unwieldy – each boot weighed almost a kilogram – and did
not last through the expedition. Climbers nowadays use plastic boots
developed in the early 1980s which are warmer and lighter, weighing only
half a kilogram each. As a result, frostbite is far less common. More recent
developments have made boots more flexible, and so suitable for difficult
climbing.

THE SHAPE OF TENTS TO COME

The tents have also changed significantly since the 1953 expedition, when
they were made of cotton and nylon, supported by aluminium poles in the
classic wedge shape: a two-person tent weighed 6.8 kilograms. Today’s tents,
based on designs which first appeared in the early 1980s, are geodesic domes
or tunnels made of nylon or ‘breathable’ fabrics and weigh about 2
kilograms for a two-person tent. These shapes minimise wind resistance – an
important consideration when winds can reach speeds of 160 kilometres per
hour. In such conditions the old shape would collapse; the new ones,
designed in wind tunnels, last longer. Ropes have become lighter and
stronger, stoves changed from heavy Primus models to lighter butane-fuelled
models, and crampons (spikes under the boot to increase grip on ice) are no
longer attached with straps, but clip on like a ski binding.

The biggest changes have come in clothing. Silk underwear has been replaced
by artificial fabrics which draw sweat away from the body. Artificial
‘fleece’ made from polyester offers more efficient insulation than wool,
especially when wet. Down-filled jackets and trousers were available in
1953, but the top layer is now a fabric such as Gore-Tex, which is wind
proof and waterproof, while allowing water vapour out. Eating patterns have
also changed: freeze-dried foods have replaced the bulky cans that the
Sherpas had to hump up to the South Col in 1953.

Far more is known too about the effects and needs of high-altitude climbing.
The key in many of these equations is oxygen. Everest certainly can be
climbed without bottled oxygen, and doing so is still a hugely respected
feat among mountaineers. It takes about a month of acclimatisation for the
body to adjust to the reduced oxygen level, which is less than 30 per cent
of that at sea level. If Everest was only 300 metres higher, it would be
physically impossible to reach the summit without bottled oxygen. If you
travelled to the summit without preparation you would be unconscious in
seconds and dead in minutes. The body slowly acclimatises by generating more
red haemoglobin cells to absorb what oxygen there is, but this makes the
blood thicker and increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke. A
naturally low pulse rate is an advantage.

There is also a heightened risk of cerebral or pulmonary oedema. The heart
pumps harder to compensate for the lower oxygen content in the blood; in the
brain and lungs, where the tissue walls are thin, fluid may leak out of the
blood, causing symptoms such as headaches and loss of coordination. Cerebral
oedema often causes double vision; the pulmonary form, gurgling in the lungs
and cyanosis. These can be rapid killers on a mountain, where any treatment
is difficult, but medical understanding of these problems has improved
dramatically in the past 40 years. In 1953, neither pulmonary nor cerebral
oedema had been linked to high altitude. Charles Houston, the American
mountaineer and doctor who climbed in the Himalaya before and after the
Second World War, described pulmonary oedema in 1960 in a skier he was
called to treat in the mountains of Colorado. His paper soon afterwards in
The Lancet filled a large hole in the understanding of how the body reacts
at altitude: around two per cent of those who stay above 5000 metres will
develop high-altitude pulmonary oedema. In Kathmandu in 1970 he described
cerebral oedema, which is in many ways the more deadly form, causing people
to slip into a coma after a few hours. Worse still, the early stages of both
conditions are often masked by headaches and nausea, some of the symptoms of
the more common (and less serious) acute mountain sickness caused during
acclimatisation.

The general lack of oxygen also makes coherent thinking difficult – one
Himalayan climber describes it as ‘like not having any thoughts for minutes
on end’ – so errors of judgment happen more easily. The lack of oxygen also
makes concentration so difficult that even basic functions like eating
become severe tests of motivation. The body also dehydrates rapidly because
of the higher breathing rate (to compensate for the lack of oxygen) and
sweating caused by the exertion of climbing. This means that ideally
climbers should drink eight litres of fluid daily – a target rarely achieved
in an environment where just making a cup of tea is exhausting and
time-consuming.

The lack of oxygen in the blood also brings a greater risk of hypothermia
and frostbite in the fingers and toes. Fingers can freeze without being
noticed in minutes if the gloves are removed to take a picture; frostbite
then follows within hours. Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb
Everest without extra oxygen, had three and a half toes amputated after his
ascent in 1988. And above 8000 metres – the region known as the ‘death
zone’ – the body’s energy and fat stores begin running down more quickly
than they can be replaced: climbers have only a few days to reach the
summit and then descend below this height before the process overtakes them
and death follows.

Modern mountaineers who want to climb without Sherpas harbour huge
ambitions, and feel such risks are justified, but for people who want just
to get up Everest those odds are too great. By relying on Sherpas, they have
a far greater chance of success, especially using bottled oxygen above 8000
metres.

RUINED WILDERNESS

But this, allied to the mountain’s increasing popularity, has created an
environmental problem that has caused the Everest team of 1953 some dismay,
as areas they knew as unspoilt have been ruined. Swathes have been cut
through forests for fuel to support climbers and trekkers approaching the
mountain. The base camp at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall has been described
by Lord Hunt, the team leader of the 1953 expedition, as ‘a debris dump of
monumental proportions’. It is a waste ground of abandoned tents, discarded
equipment and human excrement. Chris Bonington, who climbed the mountain in
1985 and led expeditions there in 1972, 1975 and 1982, has suggested that
the base camp may need a warden to oversee good environmental practice and
to pre-empt battles between the various international teams, competing for
the use of fixed ropes used to secure the route up the Khumbu Icefall and
the Lhotse Face and for space at base camp. It is a surprising problem for
mountaineers, who are generally an easygoing breed, and reflects the
increased tensions that rising numbers of visitors have brought.

In 1992 the Nepalese government announced a rise in the ‘peak fee’, payable
by a team of up to five people, from $10 000 to $50 000. Each
person after the first five costs an extra $10 000. The intention is
to meet the costs of repairing degradation and discourage large teams. But
many feel it will simply discourage all but the richest, and mean more and
more guided expeditions with their consequent reliance on fixed ropes,
caches of oxygen, fuel and food, and the support of Sherpas, the people of
the Sola Khumbu who live all their lives at high altitude and are supremely
adapted for the conditions.

The original route of 1953 leads to the South Col, where climbers stop
before the final assault. A large, flat area at about 8000 metres, this has
also become an environmental hazard, with the bodies – some unburied – of
23 dead climbers and Sherpas, more than 1500 discarded bright yellow oxygen
bottles (each about the size of a scuba air bottle) and ruined tents.
Nothing decomposes due to the cold and the thin oxygen. An estimated 17
tonnes of rubbish remains, some of it from the successful 1953 expedition. A
number of expeditions have been organised to clear up some of this debris
but each one is a hazardous undertaking, requiring its own logistical
support of food, oxygen and shelter which compounds the problem. But they do
not address the central issue, which is the increasing number of people
climbing the mountain.

Yet there are still some things that the 1953 expedition did that the modern
climber cannot. Most important, they were first. In addition, they went
higher – at least officially. Everest has recently been calculated as being
6 feet (2 metres) shorter than was previously thought, thus reducing it from
a mighty 29 028 feet (8848 metres) to an uninspiring 29 022 feet.

However, measuring Everest has become as competitive as climbing it. The new
height has yet to be accepted. In the mid-1980s, American climbers in the
Karakoram using the satellite-based Global Positioning System calculated
that K2, previously known as the world’s second-highest mountain, was higher
than Everest. This sent Italian mountaineers into a frenzy of excitement:
they had climbed K2 first, in 1954.

Fortunately for the history books, the Americans had misread their
equipment, but the news had already propelled Ardito Desio of the University
of Milan into the field in 1987. His calculations, based on a network of
satellites and laser prisms placed on the summit by a climber, could still
be flawed; the summit is a large snowdrift of varying depth, and
adjustments for the gravity exerted by the mountain itself and the Earth’s
curvature are hard to calculate. Two metres seems a small variation.
Perhaps the biggest favour Everest could receive would be if the
measurements knocked 200 metres off the top – and so discourage those who
want to climb it just because it’s there.

Ed Douglas is editor of Mountain Review and a freelance journalist.