The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest

by Mark Synnott

They climbed unroped,

Why

he and Politz did not flip the body over,

Why not

as noble and courageous as any of the other exploratory exploits that had long fascinated me.

Or as obnoxios

In the hearts and minds of the Chinese people, the first ascent of Everest’s North Face occupied the same sacred psychic space as the moon landing would for America.

Wade Davis in Into the Silence.

the true extent of the bloodbath was not yet clear. All told, 20,000 Allied troops would lose their lives that day—one in six who crawled out of the trenches. At the height of the massacre, a dozen men were killed every minute.

the Battle of the Somme

(All told, the five-month-long battle would inflict more than a million casualties, during which time the Allies would push their front line forward by a mere six miles.)

1919, Mallory was back at Charterhouse. He found the environment suffocating; those who had not fought in the war could never understand the trauma of soldiers who had, a fact that tore British society apart.

“Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.”

Speak for yourself

A sixty-year-old is roughly twenty times more likely to die than a thirty-year-old. The authors put it like this: “Youth and vigor trump age and experience”—an inversion of the quote by playwright David Mamet: “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.”

He says now that he had fallen into a vicious pattern of using alcohol to drown the shame of his infidelity and the affection of other women to sooth the shame of his alcoholism.

narcissist is not what you think,” says Olivia. “It’s someone who has a huge ego, but actually hates themself.

about PTSD and learned that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of people who suffer a near-death experience are haunted by it afterward, and also that people who have previously suffered psychological trauma are more likely to experience PTSD.

Some have speculated that this traverse, which avoids the Second Step, may have been a way that Mallory and Irvine could have summited in 1924.

Since Messner and Habeler first climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978, those who have endeavored to repeat the feat have died at a rate six to seven times higher than the average climber.

dozens of garishly painted Indian-built Tata trucks

Vibrantly painted? Garish is snotty

The Tibetan Plateau encompasses an area the size of the entire western US, and in some ways it resembles the American Great Plains. Yet, with an average elevation of 14,800 feet—higher than the tallest peak in the Rocky Mountains—there is something otherworldly about Tibet that you just don’t feel in Nebraska or Montana.

like George Everest once said, these places were “a little nearer the stars than that of any other.”

According to Human Rights Watch, at least two-thirds of Tibetan nomads, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of people, have been forcibly moved into housing projects along main thoroughfares like the “Friendship Highway” we were now following. Families that move into these projects often find themselves forced to work in shops or on road construction crews, cast adrift from everything they have ever known.

the price these people pay is the loss of an ancient way of life. Among former nomads, high rates of depression, alcoholism, and suicide have been reported.

During China’s Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, more than six thousand monasteries across Tibet were destroyed by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards. Monastic life, the pillar of Tibetan culture for centuries, was eradicated or driven underground.

This year, we rode on smooth pavement almost directly into Base Camp. The Everest Road serves as one of many poignant examples of the difference between the two faces of the mountain today. On the Nepal side, climbers must still take a sketchy flight to the “world’s most dangerous airport” in Lukla, and then hike for ten days through the foothills of the Himalaya to reach Everest Base Camp on the Khumbu Glacier.

reminded me of how the US National Park Service funnels visitors into a cookie-cutter, curated experience designed to pump the masses through in a way that is easy, safe, and profitable.

Dunno abt profitable

a monumental new mountaineering center the size of five Walmart Supercenters.

The different-colored flags, I had learned, are always arranged in the same order: blue represents the sky or space, white is air, red is fire, green is water, and yellow is earth. Together, the colors signify balance.

Most of the weather in this region comes out of the southwest, so the south sides of the Himalayan range get the bulk of the precipitation, while the north sides lie largely within the mountains’ rain shadow. The glaciers on the Chinese side of Everest are consequently much smaller and easier to negotiate than those in the Khumbu Valley on the Nepal side.

north side of Everest is considered a bit safer than the south, even though it presents greater technical difficulty high up on the route.

The glacier in the steepest part of this section flows downhill at the rate of three or four feet per day,

Khumbu

Altitude sickness and its associated maladies claim more lives higher on the route, but you’re far more likely to be randomly killed by the mountain itself in the icefall.

Joisher shared that he held the distinction of being the first vegan to climb Everest, which he had done in 2016.

He also had unfinished vegan business with Everest because he had used a down suit in 2016.

an enterprising member of the 1922 Everest expedition named George Finch who invented the down coat.

Mallory and Irvine ventured forth on their fateful climb wearing the traditional tweed and gabardine outfits that had been de rigueur for gentlemen mountaineers in the Alps since the Victorian era.

Chinese climbers die at a low rate on Everest, whereas Indians perish at the highest rate of any nationality—a trend that only seems to be increasing.

the government requires its citizens to have summited an 8,000-meter peak before attempting to climb Everest, at least from the north.

China

The collectivist culture in China bestows no great honor upon Everest conquerors, but in India, on the other hand, successful Everest climbers are celebrated as champion athletes.

a geologic oddity known as the Miracle Highway.

The “miracle” is not the ice towers themselves but the fact that there’s a ridge of dirt and rock, known as a medial moraine, running right down the middle of the glacier, offering a straightforward walking path through a phantasmagorical wilderness of ice that would otherwise be all but impassable.

Descended from the wild yak, which evolved to live on the Tibetan Plateau, they don’t fare well at lower elevations, where they fall prey to bovine diseases like foot-and-mouth.

two tons of food and equipment that needed to be moved up to ABC. Broken down, this translated into about forty yak loads.

Multiply this by a dozen expeditions and you start to get a picture of how much yak traffic there is on the East Rongbuk Glacier.

My hope that we could conduct a meaningful search while also making a proper summit bid

Thought you didnt care about everest? Stick to the job ppl funded you for

“It’s extraordinary to see these sedentary slob attorneys from Chicago go up Everest with a fair amount of oxygen and do fine,” says Hackett, “while marathon runners and triathletes fall by the wayside. This is why we call altitude the great equalizer.”

But these genetic changes, it turns out, are different from those found in other populations that also live at high altitude, in other parts of the world. In the Andean highlands of Peru, the indigenous people who live at elevations up to 17,000 feet have adapted to the thin air by increasing red-blood-cell production.

High red-blood-cell count thickens the blood and can lead to a host of maladies like high blood pressure, clots, strokes, and heart disease, all of which the Andean highlanders suffer from disproportionately.

Sherpas, on the other hand, have evolved to have less hemoglobin—the protein that carries...

a variant of a gene called EPAS1 that is common in Tibetan genomes. EPAS1, the so-called “super-athlete” gene, provides instructions for making a protein called hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha (HIF-2α). This protein, like HIF-1 (which I mentioned in chapter five), is a part of a larger complex that plays a critical role in the body’s ability to adapt to changing oxygen levels.

that this unique fragment of DNA didn’t match with a single other human genome. So

the genome of an archaic human called the Denisovan.