ABSTRACT
Mountaineering risks and deaths on Mt Everest The Nepalese Himalaya has been a mecca for high mountain adventure sports like trekking and mountaineering. However, more recently, the Nepalese Himalaya has also attracted the attention of the international media for all the wrong reasons – frequent fatal natural disasters like avalanches. This raises the question whether mountaineering in the Nepalese Himalaya is prone to repeat disasters and therefore vulnerable to market forces as more and more people try to avoid the region altogether. Evidence, however, suggests otherwise. While 2014 has been a highly volatile period for international mountaineering expeditions in Nepal, if the events unfolding after the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest is taken as a lesson (Krakauer 1999), mountaineering and high mountain trekking in Nepal will continue to attract international visitors in record numbers. However, one key question remains unanswered, that is, whether increases in high mountain adventure activities are contributing to the deaths and disasters in the Nepalese Himalaya. Adventure tourism, including mountaineering and high altitude trekking is sometimes described as ‘individualized protest’ against modernity, and an expression of their wishes to transcend the limits of self, as well as the limits of a controlled, normalized life (Bott 2009). Climbers seek for a set of meanings towards life and death in high altitude mountaineering and view risks and deaths as the payoff of this individualized self-discovery. High altitude mountaineering is widely recognized as an extremely risky outdoor activity, with a remarkably high incidence of injury and death. The most frequent kinds of death on Mt Everest, include: ‘a slip or a drop off a sheer face, or a fall into a crevice, the biggest killer in terms of numbers – burial in an avalanche or a slow death from altitude sickness’ (Ortner 1999: 6). According to the data compiled from government reports (MoTCA 2010, 2013) and other sources including American Alpine Journal, the Himalayan Database, 8000er.com (www.8000ers.com), everestsummiteersassociation.org and adventurestats.com, more than 4,350 people have successfully summited Mt Everest from the Nepalese side. Of the total, 2,112 were foreign climbers. Climbers from the United States accounted for nearly 11.4 per cent of all the summiteers, followed by the United Kingdom (5.4 per cent). Nepali climbers represented more than 50 per cent of all summiteers, the vast majority of whom were Sherpa guides and porters hired by expedition teams to provide vital support for foreign climbers. In 2013 alone, 272 (or 89.2 per cent) out of 305 Nepali summiteers were identified as Sherpa. Since 1922, Mt Everest has been the domain of professional climbers and expeditions with strong support in finance and supplies. Climbers took years to prepare for their expeditions and had trained extensively before attempting even the most straightforward routes. This domination of professional climbers started to change in the 1990s when increased commercialization of mountaineering
started to occur. For the first time in 1993, there were more than 100 successful summits during a single season (Figure 13.1). In 2013, a total of 538 people had successfully reached the summited in one season. According to Jenkins from National Geographic (2013), only 18 per cent of attempts to summit Mt Everest were successful in 1990. This figure jumped to 56 per cent in 2012. Our data shows a similar trend; in 2012, a record 169 climbers reached the top on a single day from the Nepalese side (Figure 13.2). By contrast, as recently as the year 2000, the most successful ascent on a single day was 18, and five years later the number stood at 75. Likewise, since the 1953 British expedition, 259 mountaineers (including their support staff ) have paid with their lives trying to reach to the top. In the
Figure 13.1 Successful summits of Mt Everest per year, 1953-2013.
