Three books capture the stories of mountaineering’s tragic past and lucrative present | Canada Voices

For centuries, humans have been hauling themselves up into the barely-there air of the Earth’s tallest protrusions as if their lives depended on it, even though, for the most part, they didn’t. Indeed, over time, mountain climbing’s lack of utility became part of its ethos.

So it comes as something of a surprise that the history of a pursuit that seems to uniquely combine risk and vanity, one that evolved from a male- and European-dominated colonial-era pursuit to a thriving international business, should be so fascinating.

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People used to climb mountains for ostensibly less existential reasons than Britain’s George Mallory, who famously (and rather glibly) told a journalist in 1923 that he wanted to climb Everest “because it’s there.”

It was in the spirit of conquest (over the Aztecs), for example, that the army of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés ascended Popocatépetl, an active 17,694-foot stratovolcano, whose summit was higher than any in Europe, in Mexico’s Yucatan in 1519.

And in the 18th century, it was under the auspices of scientific inquiry that German naturalists Baron Alexander von Humboldt and, later, brothers Adolph, Hermann and Robert Schlagintweit, would tackle mountains in South America and India, respectively. (Though Humboldt’s statement that “That which seems unobtainable has a mysterious attractive power” has distinctively Mallorian overtones.)

Mallory bookends, but doesn’t star in, Daniel Light’s wonderfully readable The White Ladder (WW Norton), which gives us stories of early mountaineering pioneers between the early 19th and 20th centuries. Many, like Brits Martin Conway and Albert Mummery, were famous in their day. Others, like the thousands of Gurkha riflemen and Balti porters often exploited by the European “gentleman” explorers, never even had their names recorded.

The book’s most memorable characters are naturally its most controversial. One is the caustic, non-conformist Jewish mathematician Oscar Eckenstein, who found himself ostracized by an antisemitic British alpine establishment despite several pioneering climbs and game-changing innovations (knots, ice-axes, crampons).

Another is Aleister Crowley (yes, that one), who, before he became infamous for his dabblings in Satanism and sex magic, was infamous for pulling a gun on a member of his team during a disastrous 1902 attempted ascent of K2. (On the same expedition, Crowley infuriated Eckenstein by carting several large volumes of vellum-bound poetry along with him: “I would rather bear physical starvation than intellectual starvation,” he preened.)

Then there’s the odious Fanny Bullock Workman, an American heiress whose several altitude records (one of them for both genders) and first ascents in the Karakoram region of present-day Pakistan remain sullied by her outrageously entitled, racist behaviour. Per Light, Workman and her husband heavily relied on the efforts of hundreds of underfed, underequipped local porters (whom they endlessly complained about) for their achievements. Among other duties, the porters were expected to prepare gourmet meals and carve terraces out of hillsides so the Workmans could sleep on flat ground.

Fanny and her husband never climbed Everest. Had they been born a century later, however, they would no doubt have been thrilled to learn they could do so in the luxury they clearly felt was their birthright: sipping on cappuccinos and surfing the internet in beanbag chairs in one of several well-heated and well-supplied base-camp tents (alongside the approximately 1,500 climbers who go to Everest annually). The hundreds of thousands of dollars today’s higher-end expeditions cost would surely have been no object.

Back in the 1980s, the notion, as dreamed by Texan businessman Dick Bass, that a business could be made of guiding people up Everest seemed completely absurd. And yet, part adventure tale, part business story, Will Cockrell’s engrossing Everest Inc. (Gallery Books), explains how today’s “Everest-industrial complex” came to be. Part of that story is the industry’s dramatic 20-year turnaround, from control by the so-called “Big Five” Western-based companies, to its effective nationalization by the 2,000 Nepali companies who now guide hundreds of novices up Everest every year.

Cockrell, a magazine writer and former guide, is keen on dispelling certain pervasive myths about Everest, the main one being that commercialization has turned it into a high-altitude garbage dump overrun by freeways of Gore-Tex-clad strivers who are only too happy to step over a frozen body in pursuit of a bucket-list tick.

The reality, he maintains, is far less dramatic than the drama and disasters that usurp the headlines (he never quite dispels the garbage rumours). One involved the death of eight experienced climbers during a 1996 storm that threatened to destroy Everest guiding before it got properly started. Present on that expedition was journalist Jon Krakauer, whose subsequent book, Into Thin Air, served as both a record of the tragedy and a scathing indictment of a fledgling industry. Into Thin Air remains, according to Cockrell, the source of the “stickiest Everest myths.”

But human nature being the strange beast it is, the incident only served to supercharge public interest in Everest climbs. In the years since, the number of those summiting has dramatically risen as deaths have plummeted. In Cockrell’s telling, the Big Five were led by passionate idealists, some of whom preferred helping others realize their dreams than summiting themselves.

Nowadays, social media is always on hand to amplify any bad behaviour or mishaps. A notorious 2003 incident in which three European climbers got pelted with rocks by an angry group of Sherpas, following an altercation in which the Sherpas felt they’d been disrespected while fixing rope, can, like any number of summits, be viewed on YouTube.

As much as technology, training and equipment have improved outcomes, the mountain, like the house of any Vegas casino, still calls the shots. To wit: The most successful guiding year on Everest, 2022, in which 670 people summited in spring alone, and three people died during the whole year, was followed by its worst. In 2023, a record 17 lives were cumulatively lost in disparate incidents.

Once elusive even to the world’s most elite mountaineers, Everest has effectively been democratized, assuming you have the cash to participate. It’s been summited by an 80-year-old man and a 13-year-old boy; by amputees and by four blind people. Indeed, some climbers now avoid it owing to a perceived lack of risk. For that gang, as B.B. King once crooned, the thrill is gone.

The extraordinary, near-total takeover of the Everest guiding industry by Sherpas (a “Sherpa” being not, as many believe, a profession, but a member of an ethnic group) is a major subject of Canadian Bernadette McDonald’s Alpine Rising (Mountaineers Books), which highlights the essential, often tragic role played by the many ethnic groups – Sherpas and Pakistani Baltis being just two – who work and dwell in the mountains of India, Pakistan, Tibet and Nepal.

McDonald has written her book as a series of profiles of Himalayan climbers, sung and unsung. Prominent in the former category is, naturally, Tenzing Norgay, New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s summitting companion on Everest in 1953, whose subsequent fame (which at times threatened to eclipse Hillary’s) brought global awareness to the role, and plight, of Sherpas.

Today, the mantle of Sherpa “rock star” is firmly on the shoulders of Nirmal Purja – Nimsdai to his more than two million Instagram followers – who’s as much a legend for having climbed, in 2019, all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks in six months and six days (shattering the previous record of nearly eight years) as for his cocky swagger and legendary partying. A 2021 viral video showing 10 Sherpas, including Nimsdai, singing the Nepali national anthem as they achieved the first winter summit of K2, struck many as symbolic confirmation of the continuing decolonialization of a once monolithically Western pursuit.

The unsung heroes are, no surprise, far more legion. McDonald notes that while Sherpas like Nimsdai have leveraged their success to advance their own climbing goals, most Himalayan guides and porters enter the profession in the hopes of lifting their families out of poverty. Many sacrificed limbs and digits to save foreign climbers, only to fall back into poverty, and alcoholism, when their means of employment vanished overnight. The widows of those who die at work often receive only modest compensation to care for their children.

Even when they do get famous, local climbers don’t always get rich. Like Lhakpa Sherpa, who despite receiving Guinness’ imprimatur as the most successful woman on Everest (with 10 summits), never received lucrative sponsorships, and today struggles to survive in the United States as a single mother working on minimum wage.

Were anyone to put the same question to these talented but obscure alpinists – Why climb? – that was put to Mallory all those years ago, the answer would almost certainly be: To pay the bills.