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Travel Blog
Mount Everest: Beauty and Tragedy Side-by-Side
May 10 2007
Today is the 11th anniversary of one of the worst tragedies to strike the mountaineering world. Mount Everest claimed the lives of 8 people and more subsequently died in the days that followed. The details of the tragedy can be read in Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air". The book is a harrowing read and brings you right into the high altitude scene of the tragedy where Jon himself was a mountaineer. Experienced and famous mountaineers such as Rob Hall from New Zealand and Scott Fischer from the USA perished alongside client climbers whom they were guiding up the world's highest mountain.
Six months earlier in November 1995 I had walked up to Kala Pattar overlooking Everest Base Camp where so much of the tragedy was felt first hand. During my time trekking in the Everest Region a less publicised tragedy had taken place when a storm whipped up from the Bay of Bengal leaving 2 metres of snow across the Everest Region at a time when normally it is bone dry. Dozens of trekkers similar to myself died in avalanches in the Gokyo Valley. I managed to reach lower altitudes and escape back to Kathmandu by the time this tragedy struck. I had sampled the harsh thin air environment myself and managed to avoid death by sheer chance. When it got to May 1996 and I had moved onto Peru, I became moved by the headlines and stories relating to the disaster which had ensued much higher up the mountain than I had experienced. Images were plastered across Newsweek and Time Magazines on the news stands around Cusco.
Within 18 months I read Krakauer's account with considerable gripping interest. The lessons learnt from the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy are numerous but fatal errors of judgement and bad luck still occur years later. It is human's desire to conquer the mountain that will always bring tragedy due to the forces of nature which can change in an instant. In 1997 I returned to Nepal and the scene of the tragedy and got a chilling reminder of what happened as I stood by the memorial stone of Rob Hall, near to Everest Base Camp. The Khumbu Valley and the surrounding mammoth peaks are amazing to gaze at, but to actually slog your way up to the rooftop of the world is an entirely different matter.