Who made it "Peak Easy"?
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When in April the Times of India (Crest Edition) called Everest "Peak Easy,’’ mainly because you could climb the world’s highest peak for a fee with few chances of getting killed in the process, I thought of the huffing and puffing I did on all my visits to high altitude. Something was missing in this otherwise decent account of overkill on Everest.
On the one hand it was a delight to see three pages devoted to mountaineering. On the other, the article stopped short of questioning the human mind, which `discovered’ Everest in the mid nineteenth century and then successfully `conquered’ its summit in 1953. Everest is as much Desmond Morris as it is Edmund Hillary. Particularly in the days of it’s trashing. The crocodile tears shed over its commercialization then shuts down the victim as Peak Easy and spares the slimy culprit who is like a mirror to contemporary life, media included. Everest, the peak, is easy target. What we don’t explore even when we stand atop the peak is the Everest mentality within us. In 2010, a report on Everest must go beyond the obvious peak to the metaphor. For what is killing Everest is the ideal it evokes in us.
By some accounts Everest has eighteen routes ranging from very popular ones to very rarely attempted routes where on a low base of climbers the fatality rate used to range from 50 per cent to 100 per cent. In mountaineering, if a peak isn’t good enough for you, the sport asks you to find another that is challenging or a climbing route on the same peak that is more demanding. Because conquering the summit is important for the human mind as validation of effort, most climbers choose the easy way up. Easy routes everywhere remind of industrial process. From reverse engineering somebody’s successful ascent to industrial repeatability, is a short step. There is nothing wrong with either this practice or hiring the best process managers for it. Except that the full truth is rarely said by the new breed of triumphant climbers as the partial truth suffices for records and media attention.
Mountaineering, like journalism, is a doer’s art (even ethic) in an unpredictable environment. It cannot be reported the way you would a game with assigned rules; often the take-home is perspective, not verdict. Unfortunately, with life increasingly the stuff of verdict, the summit gained is reported as though it was a goal scored in a football match or a blow landed in a boxing ring. That’s how, tracking the distortion of so many other things in life through lack of nuance, the caricaturing of the 29,028ft-Everest also starts.
Every night a newspaper craves for a headline. Everest is the world’s highest peak; a clear, albeit fading, headline. For the bulk of humanity, the person on its top is exceptional. In general, keeping aside exceptions like those tough, cash starved East European climbers, people attempting Everest fall into three categories. There are those genuinely good at climbing, short of resources and therefore part of a sponsored expedition, state-supported or otherwise. There are those into climbing and also quite wealthy, doing it because they have the money to throw around (the pursuit of climbing the highest peaks on all seven continents often fetches such folks).
Then there are those chasing goals, wealthy or otherwise, for whom the distinction between commercial and non-commercial expedition doesn’t matter. It takes a lot of resources to attempt the mountain just as it takes a lot to land a headline. The world’s 8000m peaks are all costly affairs. The resources needed for an attempt are raised by marketing the motifs of the climb, typically pared to altitude and climber’s background. Both are potent. Nothing showcases the altitude of a mountain like its summit, an Everest of a summit. Details like the vernacular co-ordinates of the expedition or climber make the attempt personal to readers / viewers and saleable for the media. It attracts funds.
Sponsors backing Everest typically fall into two categories. On the one hand are large mainstream companies willing to endorse a mainstream fascination. Everest is alpha male at large; a modern day tiger hunt. An Indian ascent of Everest was among early reality TV shows in the sub continent. On the other hand are niche marketers (manufacturers of climbing equipment for instance) and highly evolved sub-markets in climbing who have outgrown Everest in the mind. They know the formidability of the smaller Thalay Sagar or a particular climbing line up the Shark’s Fin on Meru. Or for that matter, the less popular routes on Everest. They join the bandwagon to ensure good business. Equipping an Everest expedition is healthy for income and publicity.
Funds in hand, news of attempt in the media and compelled thereby to get the maximum bang for the sponsor’s buck, the Everest expedition or Everest climber then seeks the summit at any cost. The best way to ensure this is to eliminate risk and other variables. Difficult routes are avoided. Enter mountain guides and mountaineering agencies. Having done the climb many times they know the mountain’s rituals well. Adventure now lurks in camera angles, narration and post-climb interviews. The potential for publicity is proportionate to the ever splintering, ever localizing nature of the media capable of showcasing `conquerors’ deeper and deeper in the hinterland.
In the Indian case, there is one more reason for availing commercial expeditions, be it for Everest, any other peak or even a trek. Most of us have jobs and limited holidays. This available time is inadequate for wilderness given variables from weather to snow and ice conditions. Hurry is the hallmark of outdoor trips by Indian civilians. Commercial expeditions, structured to appreciate clients’ difficulties and deliver results, find favor. This contrasts the attitude of committed mountaineers, especially those from overseas. They spend weeks on the mountain, accept a reversal of fortune as part of the game and wait out setbacks. Maybe Indians have too ruthless a rat race that pushes us to seek maximum gain for less effort?
Every year thanks to rising affordability worldwide, Everest gets a large number of clients for guided expeditions. More than anything else, it is this commercial approach (it provides precious employment and business to a mountain region; it also theoretically fixes responsibility for pollution) rampant on a few routes that has earned Everest the tag of being an easy peak. Climbing continues on its difficult routes but those expeditions are fewer in number and tracked only by climbers. The situation resembles the media predicament - a handful of pages in every newspaper and magazine, influenced by the marketing department, has a whole publication stinking or an entire profession disgraced.
It also fetched the mountain several accidents traced to crowding and people overlooking conditions on the mountain to get the summit they paid for. The paying clients highlight `achievement’ discounting the core lesson of adventure • honesty. The media and sponsors, dancing to a previously agreed tune, accentuate this travesty by ranking the achievement on par with true blue climbing. Together, they subvert a precious ethic. In Everest’s case, the peak’s centrality to the local Sherpa community, the community’s frantic pursuit of records to establish ownership over the peak and the competing tourism industries of
Much like a headline, Everest is a peculiar case of one superlative overshadowing every other facet of the mountain. Even trekking to Everest Base Camp with thousands of others, gives you the luster of quasi-summiteers. Once on the summit nothing else matters at the press conference, to the chagrin of discerning mountaineers who recognize real challenge but are helpless before a media lost to jingoistic headline and an environment shaped by that jingoism. Not long ago I spoke to a veteran expedition leader, struggling to be objective, after a youngster from the same community topped the peak on a commercial ascent. It was if, but, yet, still, nevertheless, all the same….so on. What can the veteran say when the tenor of news reporting is already cast by money and spin? Nobody wants an unpopular comment in the media.
So who can rescue Everest from Peak Easy?
Of the trio in question • sponsor, media and climber • the first two won’t change. They are deep down the money well. Even an Everest clean-up expedition becomes saleable, soulless media platform projecting Corporate Social Responsibility. The best person to restore respect is the climber much as professional respect for journalism eventually rests on the integrity of the journalist. The climber can do it without hurting the business surrounding Everest. If the climber chooses honesty over fame and tells the whole story, then Everest would revert to being Everest. It wouldn’t come across as a mountain flattened by towering human achievement because all that you did was to be guided up its easiest route • which incidentally, is sufficiently punishing for body and mind.
However, if the South East Ridge was cakewalk for the prodigy, then try the Kangshung Face, about which George Mallory had noted, `` Other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us.’’ Such shift depends on what the climber is plotting and whether failure is acceptable when sponsors and media are aboard. Problem is - if the climber desperate for the Everest tag does not seek sponsors and media, from where would resources for the big mountain-climb come? If the climber relents and succumbs to branded glory, then a predictable story of `conquest’ unfolds. It’s Catch-22. The mountain has no say in this construct of human ambition fuelled by affordability. If it became Peak Easy, that’s because we made it so in our hunger for limelight.
Given to panting at much lower altitude, I felt hopeless and worthless before an Everest deemed Peak Easy. Everest is Everest, let’s keep it that way. Imagine the calamity if for a handful of rotten pages ghost written by marketing, you were to say the whole newspaper was a waste? Or because of a few pushy, pesky ambitious journalists all of journalism was to be dubbed pointless? Think about it for what happened on Everest is a metaphor for our times, media included.
(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)