![]() ![]() “Instead, as a climber, I know I will be afraid, but the key bit is that I approach that fear and try to overcome it.” “It’s a misnomer that climbers are fearless,” Barlow says. Rather than avoid the things they fear, they feel compelled to face-off with those elements. Many of the climbers Barlow and his colleagues included in their study – especially professional ones – also exhibited what psychologists refer to as counterphobia. “Let the mother take care of the son that’s sick, or deal with little Johnny who got in trouble at school.” “In some cases, climbers just want to get away from home and responsibilities,” she says. In her decades interviewing mountaineers, Hawley, too, has noticed this tendency. “In the mountains, the emotion is fear, and the source is clear: if I fall, I die.” “The emotional anxiety of everyday life is confusing, ambiguous and diffuse, and you don’t know the source of it,” Barlow says. They may compensate for this by becoming experts at dealing with emotions in another, more straightforwardly terrifying realm. As Matthew Barlow, a postdoctoral researcher in sports psychology at Bangor University, Wales, puts it: “Climbing something like Everest is boring, toilsome and about as far from an adrenaline rush as you can get.”īarlow and colleagues also found that mountaineers believe that they struggle emotionally, especially when it came to loving partner relationships. High altitude climbing, in fact, is a slog. Yet think for a moment about what climbing a mountain like Everest entails – weeks spent at various camps, allowing the body to adapt to altitude inching up the mountain, step-by-step using sheer willpower to push through unrelenting discomfort and exhaustion – and this explanation makes less sense. Some concluded that high-risk athletes – mountaineers included – are sensation-seekers who thrive off thrill. “In fact you have to have a certain amount of ego to get up the damn thing.”Īs for professional climbers, whose love of mountaineering extends well beyond Everest, psychologists have tried to weed their motivations out for decades. ![]() “In some cases, it’s just ego,” Hawley adds. “Someone wants to spread the ashes of their dead husband, another does it for their mother, others want to kill a personal demon.” “Everyone has a different motivation,” Bierling says. Instead, Everest tends to assume a symbolic importance for those who set their sights on it, often articulated terms of transformation, triumph over personal obstacles or the crown jewel in a bucket list of lifelong goals. “Somebody once said that climbing Everest is a challenge, but the bigger challenge would be to climb it and not tell anybody,” says Billi Bierling, a Kathmandu-based journalist and climber and personal assistant for Elizabeth Hawley, a former journalist, now 91, who has been chronicling Himalayan expeditions since the 1960s.īut few would actually admit that they climb Everest only so they can boast about it later. Professional climbers often insist that their drive differs from that of the majority of clients who pay to climb Everest, a group that is frequently accused of the lowliest of motivations: bagging the world’s highest mountain for bragging rights. For everyone else, however, motivations are often difficult to explain, even to oneself. Will bodies like Paljor’s remain in their place forever, or can something be done? And will we ever decide that Mount Everest simply is not worth it? As I discovered in this two-part series, the answer is a story of control, danger, grief and surprises.įor Sherpas and others hired to work on Everest, the reason they keep coming back is that it’s a high-paying job. ![]() For the rest of us, however, the idea that a corpse could remain in plain sight for nearly 20 years can seem mind-boggling. Mountaineers largely view such matters as tragic but unavoidable. ( Read part one of this story, exploring who Paljor was and how he got there). When snow cover is light, climbers have had to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak. For nearly 20 years, Paljor’s body – popularly known as Green Boots, for the neon footwear he was wearing when he died – has rested near the summit of Everest’s north side. Perhaps most well-known of all are the remains of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who lost his life in the infamous 1996 blizzard. Most are concealed from view, but some are familiar fixtures on the route to Everest’s summit. ![]() Climbers and Sherpas lie tucked into crevasses, buried under avalanche snow and exposed on catchment basin slopes – their limbs sun-bleached and distorted. No one knows exactly how many bodies remain on Mount Everest today, but there are certainly more than 200. “But when I say our sport is a hazardous one, I do not mean that when we climb mountains there is a large chance that we shall be killed, but that we are surrounded by dangers which will kill us if we let them.” ![]()
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