A picture of a conga line of climbers queuing to conquer Everest shocked the world, with mountaineers blaming cashed-up amateurs seeking bragging rights. It's made this season one of the peak's deadliest – yet it seems even bad news is good for business.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size For Seamus Lawless, the moment has arrived. It is 8.30am on May 16, and he is standing on the summit of Mt Everest. To reach the highest point in the world has been his lifelong ambition. It is windy and extraordinarily cold – about minus 30 degrees – but he and three fellow climbers pose for photographs, beaming through oxygen masks. If they look across the jagged snow-covered peaks of the Himalaya to the horizon, they can see the curvature of the earth. It is unwise to linger at this altitude, almost nine kilometres above sea level, so after about 20 minutes they begin the long descent. Lawless is an open and engaging Irishman, the kind of person who seems to seize life with both hands. An assistant professor in the school of computer science and statistics at Trinity College Dublin, he has worked hard to develop his mountaineering skills. About four hours below the summit, on a natural platform known as the Balcony, he and his companions switch to new oxygen bottles. Then Lawless continues his descent with an experienced Nepali guide, bound for the highest camp on the mountain. It is the last his friends will see of him. Climbers on Everest on May 22 this year. Long delays increase the risk that climbers will run out of oxygen: “If you’ve got to wait in a bloody queue, you’re knocking on heaven’s door,” says Australian climber Greg Mortimer. Credit:AAP Camp 4, as it is called, is at 7900 metres on the South Col, a plateau that links Everest to Lhotse, the world’s fourth-tallest mountain. On one side of this windswept saddle is a drop of more than a kilometre into Tibet. On the other side, is a similarly long drop into Nepal. Lawless’s longtime climbing partner, Jenny Copeland, arrives at the camp with the rest of the group at about 4pm. They are greeted with scarcely believable news. Lawless is gone. According to his stricken guide, Temba Bhote, he went over the edge. The next day, Lawless’s rucksack with his climbing harness inside is discovered at the foot of the Lhotse Face, a towering wall of blue glacial ice. There is no sign of his body. In Ireland, his family sets up a GoFundMe page, asking for donations to help cover the cost of a search and recovery operation. Money floods in – about $445,000 by the time the appeal ends – but treacherous weather prevents helicopters from taking off for close to a week. When the search finally begins, it yields only Lawless’s goggles and his crampons, the spiked metal frames from the bottom of his boots, which are spotted on rocks about 100 metres below the South Col. Lawless is one of 11 people to die on Everest during this year’s northern-spring climbing season. Canberra public servant Gilian Lee almost bumps the number up to 12: he collapses while climbing and has to be dragged unconscious down the mountain, then transported by yak and helicopter to hospital in Kathmandu, the Nepali capital. In late May, the world is shocked by a photograph of climbers caught in a human traffic jam at the southern approach to the summit. “Just jaw-dropping,” says Greg Mortimer, who with Tim Macartney-Snape made the first Australian ascent of Everest in 1984. “It may be the most tragic photo in mountaineering history.” Experienced climber Seamus Lawless – mystery surrounds his death.


When I call Jenny Copeland in July, she is struggling to come to terms with Lawless’s death. “It makes absolutely no sense to me,” she says, pointing out that her climbing partner was proficient and safety-conscious. How could he have vanished like that? “I have so many questions,” Copeland says. “But no answers.” Also puzzled is Russell Brice, one of the longest established operators of guided climbing expeditions in Nepal. We meet in the southern NSW town of Queanbeyan, near Canberra, where New Zealand-born Brice lives when he isn’t in the Himalaya. The disappearance of Lawless was the subject of immediate conjecture in the sprawling tent city that is Everest base camp, he says, especially among the leaders of expedition companies: “We went, ‘There’s something funny here.’” But Brice and his colleagues had a lot else on their minds. Trouble had been brewing at Everest for some time, he says. “But this year was a dramatic change. It felt so much worse.” Though the number of climbing permits issued was only slightly higher than in the previous northern spring, there were few days when the weather allowed people to head for the top. Consequently the surge to the summit sometimes looked like a stampede. Brice says he has long believed that Everest’s biggest problem is the composition of the crowd it attracts. This year, more than ever, the mountain seemed to him to swarm with inexperienced climbers, unqualified guides and unscrupulous expedition operators. It was as if Everest Inc had reached a tipping point, and the result was a death count more than double that of 2018. US climber and blogger Alan Arnette, in his account of the 2019 season, summed it up as “the year Everest finally broke”. Some people are drawn irresistibly to mountains. While the rest of us are content to putter about on the plains, they hanker to be far above the snowline in that region of transcendent beauty and terrifying inhospitality that the 19th-century English poet Francis Ridley Havergal called “the weird white realm”. Sydney woman Ruth McCance gave away mountaineering when she was 30, deciding the risks were too great. Three years ago, aged 47, she took it up again, and in late May she was killed by a Himalayan avalanche. Her grieving husband, Trent Goldsack, says he accepts that climbing “wasn’t just what she loved, it was what she needed to do”. For McCance, an executive coach who was also a jazz singer and champion sailor, thin air and wild terrain were restorative. “When she’d been to the mountains, she was so energised and full of life,” Goldsack says. “Communing with nature in its rawest form fed her soul.” Loading Australian mountaineer Mike Groom lost the front of both feet to frostbite after his 1987 climb of the world’s third-highest mountain, Kangchenjunga. He remembers being advised to get a walking frame and a desk job. Instead, he went on to summit Everest. Twice. At 60, Groom says he has hung up his ice-axe. Well, probably. Even now, he has only to gaze at a decent-sized mountain to feel himself succumbing to its spell: “It’s almost speaking to me, as if to say, ‘Come a little closer.’” Seamus Lawless heard the siren song. The Irish Mirror reported that at his memorial service, where mourners included his pregnant wife, Pam, and their four-year-old daughter, one of his friends reminded the congregation that “since he was a teenager, he spoke about the mountains”. Jenny Copeland tells me that for years a double-page picture of Everest from National Geographic magazine was pinned to her climbing partner’s wall: “He called it ‘the centrefold’.” Such enthralment has a long and honourable tradition. “Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen,” English climber George Mallory wrote to his wife, Ruth, from his lamplit tent on the mountain in 1921. “My darling … I can’t tell you how it possesses me.” In Mountains of the Mind, an exploration of humankind’s helpless fascination with high places, author Robert Macfarlane says reading the letters and journals from Mallory’s three Everest expeditions “is to eavesdrop on a burgeoning love affair – a love affair with a mountain”.


Everest is a three-sided pyramid of rock and ice straddling the border of Nepal and Tibet. “What is it that causes somebody to risk their life for something that can’t love them back?” asks Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom, whose own preoccupation with peaks has resulted in the internationally acclaimed documentaries Mountain and Sherpa. Everest isn’t the hardest mountain to climb – Annapurna, also in the Himalaya, has a much higher death rate – but, as Peedom knows, Everest exerts a particular hold over our imagination. “There is such mystique and history around Everest,” she says. Its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, means “mother goddess of the world”, and its Nepali name, Sagarmatha, translates to “goddess of the sky”. Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen ... My darling … I can’t tell you how it possesses me. George Mallory The British, who identified it as the world’s highest mountain during their Great Trigonometrical Survey of the Indian subcontinent in the mid-19th century, named it after Sir George Everest, a former surveyor-general of India. On Mallory’s third expedition, in 1924, he struck out for the summit with Andrew Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford University student. They were last seen high on the north-east ridge. Whether or not they reached the top is Everest’s best-kept secret. Mallory’s frozen corpse was found in 1999. Irvine’s remains have never been recovered. Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary, who climbed it in 1953, are remembered as the mountain’s conquerors, but Mallory is Everest’s cult figure. He made scaling icy escarpments seem glamorous, a pastime both devil-may-care and high-minded (in the evenings, he and his fellow expeditioners read to one another from Hamlet and King Lear). Asked by a journalist why he wanted to climb Everest, he responded with the most famous throwaway line in the annals of mountaineering: “Because it’s there.” As Peedom says: “The Mallory story is probably responsible for a whole lot of people attempting to climb Everest.” Many, like Mallory and Irvine, haven’t lived to tell the tale. More than 300 people have perished on the mountain since the 1920s, and close to half those deaths have occurred in the past 20 years, says Billi Bierling, managing director of The Himalayan Database, an archive of information about climbing expeditions. Everest’s capacity to kill is part of its allure, it seems to Bierling, who dates modern Everest-mania to the publication of Into Thin Air, US journalist Jon Krakauer’s gripping first-hand account of the blizzard in which eight climbers died in 1996. Several other survivors of that storm subsequently wrote memoirs, and a Hollywood movie, Everest, was released four years ago. Bierling says expedition operators worried initially that all this would be bad for business, but bookings went through the roof. It was the same after the 2014 avalanche in which 16 Nepalis died on Everest, and the 2015 earthquake that killed 8900 people in Nepal, including 19 at Everest base camp. “The more disasters we have and the more books that are written, the more people come,” Bierling says. “Over the last 10 years, the numbers have gone up and up and up.” In 2018, 547 people paid tens of thousands of dollars each for the chance to get to the top of Everest, and 396 succeeded. Greg Mortimer, after the first Australian ascent in 1984. Climber Greg Mortimer contrasts this with 1984, when he and Tim Macartney-Snape made their way to the summit in splendid isolation. “We had the entire northern valley system of Everest to ourselves,” he says. “The entire north face to play on! We did a new route – we were just making it up as we went along.” In principle, Mortimer welcomes the Everest boom. Mountaineering can be transformative, he says. “There is an enormous amount to be learnt about yourself and the world and the big natural forces that control it.” For him, the experience verges on the spiritual: “There’s a heightened sense of awareness that it demands. A presence of mind. It’s almost an exalted state.” But the picture of the conga line of climbers on the southern summit ridge depressed Mortimer. “This guided climbing thing has flipped into madness,” he says. At 8848 metres, the top of Everest is well into the so-called “death zone”, where the atmosphere holds at best only one-third as much oxygen as at sea level. Bottled oxygen partially compensates, but climbers who encounter long delays are at risk of emptying their canisters. “Above 8000 metres, anyone is hovering on a knife-edge between life and death,” Mortimer says. “If you’ve got to wait in a bloody queue, you’re knocking on heaven’s door.”


Marisa Strydom, a finance lecturer at Melbourne’s Monash University, went to Everest in 2016 as part of a larger plan. She and her husband, Robert Gropel, a veterinarian, wanted to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents to show what vegans could do. Already they had ticked off North America’s Denali (6190 metres) and South America’s Aconcagua (6962 metres), but Strydom knew Everest was in a different league. In an email to her family, she said she was “a little nervous but that is good as it keeps you on your toes”. She and Gropel had booked places on a climb jointly run by Dutch mountaineer Arnold Coster and the biggest Nepali expedition operator, Seven Summit Treks. They paid $US45,000 each. Loading Everest expeditions take two months or more, partly because of the need to wait for a “weather window”, when jet-stream winds that can whip the summit at hurricane strength temporarily abate, but mainly because acclimatising to high altitude is a slow process. Most climbers ascend from the Nepal side, where base camp, at 5400 metres, is full of people with headaches, nausea, dizziness and fatigue. Other common symptoms of altitude sickness are breathlessness, coughing, irritability, loss of appetite, insomnia and a sense of disconnection from reality. Higher on the mountain, oxygen deprivation can affect brain function, leaving climbers seriously disoriented. High-altitude cerebral oedema (swelling of the brain) and high-altitude pulmonary oedema (a build-up of fluid in the lungs) are potentially fatal. Strydom made clear to her family that getting home in good health was more important to her and Gropel than climbing Everest: “We will give it our best shot, hopefully that is enough, but if not, then so be it,” she wrote. Not far below the summit, Strydom became ill and confused. Arnold Coster says she at first agreed to descend – the best treatment for altitude sickness – but then wanted to follow Gropel to the top. Eventually she was incapable of progressing in either direction. She and Gropel had paid extra to have four Nepali guides between them, but Gropel says none seemed to have much idea of what to do in a medical emergency. “Everyone was kind of staring blankly,” he says. Strydom ended up spending 31 hours in the death zone, but back at Camp 4, she appeared to recover. Gropel says she was upset to hear that another member of their expedition, Eric Arnold, from the Netherlands, had returned from the summit and died in his tent. After a few hours, she and Gropel began the descent to Camp 3, but Strydom, 34, collapsed and died on the way. Her mother, Catharina Strydom, learnt of her death from the online version of a Nepali newspaper, The Himalayan Times. Gropel says senior people at Seven Summit Treks showed surprisingly little compassion: “They were more worried about the negative media, how it would affect their business.” Coster, on the other hand, was pretty sure that news of the two deaths would do no harm at all. “As a matter of fact, I got more inquiries,” he tells me. Everest climbers pass a dead body (circled) in May.


Perhaps all those people crawling towards the summit in the photo were there because, like Seamus Lawless, they dreamed about climbing Everest as kids. But Coster would be surprised. “A lot of the clients aren’t mountaineers,” he says. “They’re more like trophy-hunters.” Tim Macartney-Snape agrees: “They’re more interested in talking about it at a cocktail party than actually being in the mountains. It’s a status-enhancing thing.” What disturbs him is the how-hard-can-it-be attitude that some bring to base camp. “A lot of people are very unrealistic about the dangers and difficulties.” For The Himalayan Database, Billi Bierling interviews climbers in Kathmandu before they leave for Everest, and again when they return. “Some of them I don’t recognise because they’ve aged by 20 years,” she says. Some are exhilarated by the whole thing, but “some just look shocked. Not only have they lost 20 kilograms, they have a weird look in their eyes.” The worst affected tend to be the climbers who started with the least experience. “And more and more inexperienced people are coming,” Bierling says. Himalayan climbing chronicler Billi Bierling. It is easy to see how you could get the impression that all you really need do is pay a large sum of money and turn up. Seven Summit Treks offers a $US130,000 ($192,000) Mt Everest climb described on the company’s website as being just the thing if “you want to experience what it feels like to be on the highest point of the planet and have strong economic background to compensate for your old age, weak physical condition or your fear of risks”. Bierling doesn’t believe rumours that clients of some expedition companies have been carried up Everest. “But I seriously think some are pushed up,” she says. Most guides on the mountain are Sherpas, members of one of Nepal’s many ethnic groups. People tend to assume that because Sherpas are renowned for their strength at high altitude, they are inherently skilled mountaineers, says Andrew Lock, the only Australian to have climbed the world’s 14 peaks higher than 8000 metres (10 in the Himalaya, four in the nearby Karakoram range). “But Sherpas aren’t born with ice-axes in their hands,” Lock says. “They’re not gifted climbers. They have to learn the ropes like everybody else, and very few of them do.” In place of formal training, many acquire great expertise through experience, but the rapid growth of the Everest industry and associated increase in demand for guides means some of those shepherding clients to the summit are novices: “It’s the blind leading the blind, which can only end badly.” Guides should know when and how to convince a client to give up on a summit attempt, says David Hamilton, leader of British company Jagged Globe’s Everest expeditions. One of the reasons that foreign-owned climbing companies include Western guides on their teams, he says, is that Sherpas, culturally averse to confrontation and lowly paid by Western standards, can find it difficult to resist a determined climber’s bullying or blandishments: “The classic example is the Nepali guide who says to the Korean or Japanese customer an hour or two below the top, ‘I think you are too slow. You should go back.’ And the customer says, ‘If we keep going, I’ll give you an extra $1000 tip.’ In that case, the Sherpa will keep going, whereas a Western guide will say, ‘No, this is unsafe. I don’t care if you’re mad with me, I don’t care if you try to sue me in court. I’m going to get you down alive.’” After Canberra man Gilian Lee’s rescue from Everest, he was interviewed in his Kathmandu hospital for the Seven Network’s Sunday Night program. Lee – who declined to speak to Good Weekend – had insisted on trying to reach the summit without supplementary oxygen, a feat so challenging that it has defeated many of the world’s most accomplished mountaineers. Andrew Lock, for instance, managed to climb the other 13 peaks over 8000 metres with no bottled oxygen, but not Everest (he gave up when he started having hallucinations involving giant bats).

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