(wind howling)
I think a lot of people go on Mount Everest to feel like,
"This is something I'm gonna accomplish."
It's like the metaphor for all the goals,
you know, that people have.
It's a quantifiable marker.
It's just like, it just is the biggest, tallest thing.
There is this badge of honor that comes with it,
and yeah, a selfie for Insta.
The summit of Everest is just over 29,000 feet
above sea level, and it so happens that there is
no other mountain which does top 29,000 feet.
(whoop)
That one simple number has attracted
thousands of people, willing to risk everything
to get to the top of Mount Everest.
For every 33 people who make it to the top of Everest,
one person dies trying. Not good odds.
There must be 50 ways to die on Mount Everest,
Hypoxia, hypothermia, ice falls,
avalanches, and bad decision-making.
I would die climbing Mount Everest.
I would immediately die. I have no cardio.
People who did climb Everest definitely did not tell
their mom they were climbing Everest,
because no mother would ever allow their child
to do anything like that.
For a hundred years,
Everest has been a beacon to scientists, geographers,
and adventurers, drawn to the tiny point
where our planet brushes against the stratosphere.
There's something rather special about being totally alone
on top of the Earth.
Dream fulfilled.
It's thrilling, and exciting, mentally rewarding.
Truly a blessing.
On the other hand,
you're in the most dangerous place on Earth.
(rock music with intense sound effects)
Mount Everest cast a spell across the globe.
Thanks to a few numbers, Everest is more than a mountain.
It's a challenge to the world, asking,
"Have you got what it takes to conquer the big one?"
Well, it's the highest mountain in the world.
It's the third pole. Mountaineers seek the height.
There's something about getting to the highest point
that brings you closer to God.
(percussive clank)
Mount Everest is 29,032 feet tall.
Its summit is almost five and a half miles above sea level.
That's as high as 95 Statues of Liberty,
stacked on top of each other.
It sits in the Himalayan mountain range in Central Asia,
on the border between China and Nepal,
about 115 miles east of the Nepalese capital, Katmandu.
I can't help but think that some of the fascination
with tall mountains has to do with a bit
of phallic obsession, but I think a lot of people climb
Mount Everest for the bragging rights.
Each year, more than 500 climbers,
hailing from all over the world,
pay an average of $45,000 to try and make it to the top.
Cost me like three grand to go backpacking in Japan
for like two weeks, so like, that seems reasonable.
That's some rich people (bleep) right there.
Even though you have a lot of free time,
and a lot of money, there's a chance to die,
and you sort of want to.
Until really the 1990s, to have a go at Mount Everest,
it was assumed that you were a very experienced mountaineer.
When I went to the mountain in 1988,
(wind howling)
I was actually the 203rd person to reach the summit.
33 years later, the mountain's been climbed
by well over 10,000 people.
In 2019 alone, 523 paying climbers tried
to scale Mount Everest.
398 of them succeeded, along with 507 guides.
10 people died in the attempt.
Certain humans are attracted to sports
and competitions that are considered particularly dangerous,
and the corpses strewn up and down Everest kind of add
to the cache for some individuals.
(intense whooshes)
For 100 years,
human beings have been trying to climb Everest,
and 288 of them have lost their lives.
So why would anyone brave this peak,
and how did our obsession with Everest begin?
These guys are the Everest OGs,
especially this guy, George Mallory,
who tries to climb it three times in the 1920s.
When he was asked why, he simply answers,
"because it's there."
"Because it's there" is not a good enough reason
to climb Mount Everest.
"Because it's there" is kind of like the same reason
my cats have for eating all the things
that they're not supposed to eat.
Heroin's just there.
A lot of things are there.
(intense whooshes)
So how exactly did Mount Everest get there?
(intense whooshes)
50 million BC,
the tectonic plate that forms the Indian sub-continent
collides with the Eurasian plate, driving the rocky peaks
of the Himalayas up, and into existence,
including Mount Everest.
For the next 50 million years or so,
that tectonic collision continues.
So every year, Everest grows about an eighth of an inch.
That's called being an overachiever.
At some point, Everest slowly became the highest point
on the planet, but no one noticed for a really long time.
(lively trumpet fanfare)
Fast forward to 1802.
British colonial influence in India is in full swing,
and Mount Everest is still living in blissful anonymity,
but that will soon change,
because the British East India Company wants to reinforce
their control of the Indian sub-continent,
so they decide to map every inch of it,
beginning at the country's southern tip.
(metal creaking)
This is an extraordinary feat of science and engineering
called the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India,
and basically it was a way of measuring
through a series of triangles.
Hundreds of people labored to create
an accurate map of India, working their way,
1600 miles up the entire country, one triangle at a time.
It was a literal measurement of a line of longitude,
the length of the subcontinent of India.
This implied carrying the most fine instrument of the era,
these theodolites that weighed 1500 pounds,
and they literally marched these incredible devices,
the lengths of the subcontinent.
42 years after they begin,
the British surveyors reach the Himalayan mountain range,
and notice, "Wow, these mountains are big."
In 1846, Andrew Waugh is the director
of the survey of India,
when the Bengali mathematician Radhanath Sikdar says,
"I've discovered the highest mountain on Earth, Peak 15,"
and it's Andrew Waugh who suggests that instead of calling
it Peak 15, we should name it after my predecessor,
Sir George Everest.
So George Everest, as he apparently pronounced his name,
actually rather objected this idea.
He said, "Well, that's not really appropriate,
and there must be a proper, a local name for the mountain,
which indeed there is, it's Chomolungma.
And it was his misfortune to have a mountain,
highest on Earth, named after him for all time,
but also mispronounced for all time as Everest.
(intense whooshes)
The mountain's stature is discovered
at a key moment, just as Europeans are developing
a severe case of Alpine fever.
(lively Alpine music)
In the mid 19th century, there was a gradual change
of attitude in Europe from thinking of mountains
as places of horror,
to thinking of them as places of fascinating beauty.
By the late 19th century, climbing had been
one of the things that gentlemen did.
There was a fusion of literature and culture
that went with climbing.
And that really reaches its climax
with the first ascent of Matterhorn in 1865.
(intense whooshes)
The 14,692 foot Matterhorn quickly attains
legendary status among the European mountaineers.
It is a very, very striking, visual object,
and it has a kind of aura and fame.
When word
of Everest's impressive altitude makes it back to Europe,
the tweed-clad mountaineers inevitably set
their sights on conquering it.
In the mid 19th century, when Westerners first realized
that there were mountains reaching
to nearly 30,000 feet in height, they couldn't believe
that mountains could actually be this high.
The fact that Everest is 29,000 feet high,
that is the equivalent of looking down from an airplane.
Everest is twice the height
of the mighty Matterhorn, and presents challenges
that European mountaineers can't even imagine.
It's the early 1900s, and Europeans are conquering
the final frontiers of planet Earth one by one,
the North Pole, the South Pole,
and inevitably, Mount Everest.
In 1921, George Mallory, of "because it's there" fame goes
to Everest for the first time to scout it.
George Mallory was a fantastic climber.
He was also stunningly good-looking, and in a way,
he became a symbol of the great effort on Everest.
In 1922, he returns as part
of the first serious attempt to reach the summit,
approaching Everest from the north through China.
The white men arrive with all our extraordinary equipment,
including these steel cylinders full of oxygen,
and the local Tibetan people, they are amazed,
and they call it English air.
(whimsical musical sounds)
At Everest base camp, the air contains less than 50%
of the oxygen present at sea level.
At 25,000 feet, this drops to 39%.
At Everest's summit, the air contains only 32%
of the oxygen we're used to at sea level,
but Sherpas and many European mountaineers at the time are
dubious about using English air.
At this stage, there's still considerable doubt,
A, about whether a human being can actually get
to 29,000 feet, B, whether
supplementary oxygen is actually going to help.
These European mountaineers had never tested
their abilities against a mountain like this one.
Mount Everest challenges the very limits
of human physiology.
At nearly 9,000 meters, there's so little air pressure,
that you've just got to extract what you can out of the air.
Every step, it'd be three very conscious, deep breaths.
Onward, gentlemen.
(suspenseful music)
The first expedition quickly finds out
how unforgiving Everest can be.
They were really climbing into the unknown.
On June 7th, 1922,
George Mallory, two teammates,
and 14 sherpa are attempting to conquer Everest.
They weren't really prepared for what they saw.
They got onto the Northeast Ridge,
and then there was a huge avalanche.
(wind howling)
The avalanche tosses the expedition
145 feet down the mountainside.
Seven sherpa are killed in the first major climbing disaster
on Mount Everest.
(wind howling)
It will be two years before George Mallory makes
another attempt at Everest.
In 1924, many of the same team come back
for a second full-scale attempt on the mountain.
George Mallory sets out once more to reach
the top of planet Earth, this time,
with a young climbing partner named Andrew Irvine.
They sort of knew what to expect.
They've had all the pieces in place to actually make
an attempt to climb the summit.
Mallory and Irvine leave the rest of their team
at the camp, striking out along Everest's Northeast Ridge.
June the 8th, a member of the climbing team looks up,
and he thinks he sees two figures somewhere,
possibly up on that crest of the Northeast Ridge,
and then the clouds moved back in,
and he doesn't see them again.
It's the last time anyone sees
Mallory or Irvine alive.
And it was never determined whether or not
they reached the summit before they met their end.
Mallory's disappearance was international news,
and remains a subject of public fascination to this day,
but his disappearance into the mist
of Everest does not discourage further attempts
to conquer the mountain.
During the 1930s, there are four more attempts
to try and get to that summit, and then after the war,
there are more attempts,
because people desperately want to complete this journey.
In 1953, the British make another attempt
under the leadership of an Army Colonel named John Hunt.
Right, here we go.
The large expedition includes Edmund Hillary,
a beekeeper from New Zealand.
There won't be any bees at the top of Everest.
And Tenzing Norgay, who was a member
of the climbing team in addition to leading the sherpas.
I can help you, Edmund.
Ed Hillary was very, very driven.
He was intensely ambitious.
It was wonderful that he was paired with Tenzing Norgay,
a man who'd almost got to the summit
with the Swiss the year before.
Tenzing Norgay has been a porter and guide
on Everest for nearly 20 years
by the time Edmund Hillary arrives.
Tenzing Norgay, technically a citizen of India,
but born in Tibet, and also a citizen of Nepal,
and was in a way a representative of the sherpas he headed.
The 1953 expedition establishes a path,
approached through Nepal, that is now known
as the South Col Route.
A col is a low point in a ridge between mountains.
This route winds its way up the southwest face
of the mountain, and is now dotted by four rest stops
along the way, starting with Camp 1 at 19,500 feet,
up to Camp 4, which sits in the South Col at 26,300 feet.
The start of the climb is up the infamous Khumbu Icefall,
a great cataract of ice on the south side of the mountain.
It's changing from week to week.
Sections are collapsing constantly.
You've got to climb through over 2000 feet
of chaotically-fractured, tumbling blocks of ice
the size of skyscrapers.
It's just a very, very dangerous place,
and it always will be.
The Khumbu Icefall is part
of the 10-mile-long Khumbu Glacier,
the highest glacier in the world,
with its source at an altitude of 25,000 feet,
moving down the mountain at an average rate
of three feet per day.
If you could stand it on end, it would be 53,000 feet tall,
almost twice as high as Mount Everest itself.
The two-and-a-half-mile long icefall is filled
with towering seracs up to 30 feet high,
and crevasses up to 145 feet deep.
It's the first major challenge on the ascent.
Climbers must cross a 2000-foot stretch
of the Icefall to get to Camp 1.
Part of what's impressive is all the logistics
to get them there.
The plans for having regular drop-off points for food,
for oxygen, how they're gonna get all their equipment
up and down that mountain.
In preparation for their summit attempt,
Hillary and Norgay must pass
through the icefall several times.
During one attempt, the dangers of the icefall strike.
Descending the glacier, Hilary lands on an icy outcropping
above a crevasse, which collapses beneath him,
and he plunges towards the darkness below.
Help me!
Luckily, he is tethered
to his climbing partner, Norgay.
And I set off down the crevasse.
Well, Tenzing, he was following, had the rope tied to him
a very short time, and pulled me out,
so I didn't go very far.
Tenzing Norgay's expert skills save
Edmund Hillary's life,
and they form a friendship that will last for decades.
Hillary and Norgay are the B team on this expedition.
After another pair of climbers fails to reach the peak,
they are chosen to make the second try.
So we get to the morning of May the 29th.
Hillary and Tenzing in this tiny little tent,
perched on a ledge.
What a view!
Higher than any human has slept before.
They break trail up the steep snow,
leading to the south summit, and then they come
to what is now known as the Hillary Step,
and it's a sort of steep rise in the ridge.
It's about 40 feet high, and finally,
Hillary gets to the top of this awkward step,
brings up Tenzing or the rope.
Finally, there's this wonderful moment
where it's a beautiful morning, hardly of breath of wind,
and it's just perfect.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become
the first human beings to stand
on the summit of Mount Everest.
In the 1950s, we have not left the atmosphere yet.
We've not been to the moon,
so Mount Everest at that time was the farthest
or highest anyone has ever gone.
It wasn't summited, as the British had imagined,
by Oxbridge boys.
No, it was a humble beekeeper from the far reaches
of empire, and a sherpa of a humble origin in Kharta Valley.
Ed Hillary was offered a knighthood.
Tenzing Norgay was not offered a knighthood.
It would have been nice if they'd given the knighthood
to Tenzing Norgay as well.
Those two dudes worked as a team.
It's not fair that only one person gets recognition.
You know the the saying,
behind every great white man is an Asian?
That should be a saying, guys. I should be a saying.
(whoosh)
Since Hillary and Norgay blazed
the trail up Everest,
10,271 climbers have successfully summited,
and 6,554 of them have done it on the South Col Route.
(intense whoosh)
The South Col Route has also paid witness to some
of the mountain's other famous firsts.
In 1970, Yūichirō Miura of Japan becomes the first person
to ski down Everest, but Miura doesn't stop there.
43 years later in 2013, he becomes the oldest person ever
to summit the mountain at age 80.
In 1975, Junco Tabei of Japan becomes the first woman
to summit Everest, barely surviving an avalanche on route.
And then in 1980, Reinhold Messner of Italy,
and Peter Habeler of Austria become the first people
to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.
(upbeat music)
By 1980, Reinhold Messner is already
a legendary mountaineer.
He's one of the best, fastest climbers in Europe.
He does some extraordinary Himalayan climbs,
and he is a phenomenon.
I'm the king of the world!
Messner invents
the ultimate mountaineering challenge,
climbing the highest peaks on all seven continents.
It becomes known as the Seven Summits.
(wind howling)
The Seven Summits are Mount Kosciuszko, Vinson Massif,
Mount Elbrus, Mount Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua,
and finally, the gargantuan Mount Everest in Asia.
(intense whooshes)
Hillary and Norgay proved it was possible
to reach Everest's summit,
but only elite mountaineers dared to attempt it.
Only four more people made it to the summit in the 1950s,
and 17 more in the 1960s.
In the 50s, and the 60s, and into the 70s,
they were really experienced climbers,
and so Everest was the pinnacle of their career.
Until one man decided to use numbers
to tackle Everest, the numbers in his bank account,
with lots of zeros at the end.
Round about 1980, a wealthy American businessman,
Richard Bass, he liked dreaming up great plans,
and he thought, "Well, how about climbing
the world's seven highest continental summits?"
(adventurous music)
Bass has only four years
of climbing experience, but he realizes he can pay
more experienced mountaineers to help him climb
the world's highest peaks.
Bass conquers six of the seven summits in 1983,
spending a whopping 125,000 U.S. dollars
just to reach the top of Vinson Massif in Antarctica.
(whimsical boing)
It takes him two more years, and three attempts
before his odyssey concludes on the summit
of Mount Everest on April 30th, 1985.
(people cheering)
It's a bit of a game-changer
when this wealthy businessman says,
"Well, I've got the money. I'll pay someone.
I can get to the summit of Everest."
Help me up there, buddy.
He pulls it off.
(whimsical boing)
It obviously makes people think,
"Well, if him, why not others?"
(wind howling)
And so it doesn't take long
for commercial pressures to change who climbs Everest.
It's quite lucrative.
You can charge 70, $80,000 to climb Everest.
It starts as a trickle,
but soon becomes a flood.
Between 1990 and 2005, more than 2200 climbers attempt
to summit Everest for the first time.
(festive organ music)
The climbers who make it to the very tippy top,
also known as the summit, will discover that it measures
approximately 10 feet long by three feet wide,
the size of a large dining room table.
Hidey-ho!
Most climbers remained on the summit
for just a few minutes.
On May 23rd, 2019, a total of 354 climbers reached
the summit, the most ever in a single day.
(intense whooshes)
The Nepalese government wants to keep those visitors coming.
They collect a fee for every climber.
So they just start dishing out these permits
for more and more climbers, and that starts
hundreds of people arriving every April
to throng the mountain for the spring season.
These newer climbers are not
necessarily accomplished mountaineers,
and many of them aren't prepared
for the most hostile environment on the planet.
(wind howling)
The last camp on the South Col Route
before reaching Everest's summit is Camp 4,
perched on a rocky flat devoid of life.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have now entered the death zone.
I bet the death zone is where most people die
when they're climbing the mountain.
A tourist attraction to the death zone sounds like a ride.
Not a great way to appeal to a person like me,
but like anyone who drinks Mountain Dew probably loves it.
I think you need to rebrand a little bit.
Maybe if you call it the pleasant zone.
(intense whoosh)
The altitude above 26,000 feet is known as the death zone.
The air contains less than a third
of the oxygen present at sea level.
The human body is using oxygen faster
than it can be replaced by breathing,
and simply can't acclimatize to the deficit.
The chance of brain swelling increases,
digestion efficiency declines.
Climbers are advised to spend no longer
than 48 hours in the death zone.
It's about trying to live.
Been here too long.
Human beings were not designed to operate at 29,000 feet.
The trick on Everest is to try and get up and down
so quickly that your body doesn't quite know what's hit it.
(wind howling)
The most important number on Everest could be
the length of time your body can operate in the death zone,
because once there, you've still got more than 3000 feet
to climb to get to the summit.
(wind howling)
Your body is just wasting away, and that's because
there's just not enough oxygen,
even for you to keep blood flowing.
Individuals start to experience hypoxia.
They're not getting enough oxygen.
They experience such high blood pressure in the brain,
that they are disoriented, and it really have impacts
on their decision-making skills.
This is part of the danger of the death zone.
There's so little air pressure,
and you really have to feel your diaphragm pulling down,
and desperately trying to fill the lung cavities
with as much air as you possibly can,
and you just become weaker and weaker.
You are dying.
That's what you're doing up there, you're dying.
And you're battling these symptoms
in an environment that gets more hostile weather
than anywhere else on the surface of the planet.
The six-and-a-half mile layer of the atmosphere
that supports all life on earth is known
as the troposphere, and above that is the stratosphere.
When you fly in a plane,
you're usually flying in the stratosphere.
There's almost no place on the surface of the Earth
that actually reaches into the stratosphere,
except for really high mountains.
The summit of Mount Everest is on the border
of these atmospheric layers, which is also occupied
by the jet stream, with prevailing winds that move
upwards of 100 miles per hour.
Everest is in this region where actually it can be slammed
by these very, very high winds.
(wind howling)
Temperatures can drop as low
as minus 40 degrees, with the wind chill making it feel
more like minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
While the overall speed of the jet stream can easily reach
100 miles per hour, bands of intensity
called jet streaks can achieve speeds of 183 miles per hour.
If you're not careful, it could blow you off the mountain.
There are records of people being blown
off of Mount Everest. That can happen.
(wind howling)
In 1996, the death zone unleashes its fury,
during the climbing season that results in one
of Everest's most notable tragedies.
In the early hours of May 10th, 1996,
three expeditions leave Camp 4.
New Zealander Rob Hall and American Scott Fisher lead
a combined total of 33 climbers.
The goal is to get to the summit as early as possible.
If you haven't made it to the summit by 2:00 PM,
you're not going to make it before the sun goes down.
I think it's kind of hard for people to understand
how difficult it is to climb at those elevations,
and so typically when you climb Everest,
it takes you about an hour to go a hundred meters.
At that pace, the final push
to Everest's summit is a race against the clock.
In the death zone, any delay can be the difference
between life and death.
When Hall and Fisher arrive at the Hillary Step,
the fixed rope hasn't been set up,
and they wait for an hour.
Three climbers return to Camp 4, fearing they will run out
of oxygen on the summit.
What happens is that people who don't have a lot of skill,
they come to the Hillary Step, and they slow down,
and only one person can go up to the Hillary Step
at any point in time,
and so what happens is the kind of backup occurs.
The 2:00 PM deadline comes and goes.
Rob Hall, and a handful of others reach the summit,
but there is still a traffic jam of climbers below,
determined to get to the top.
If this is your goal to climb Everest,
you've just spent $70,000 of your money to do it,
and so you're gonna try to make it to the summit.
By 3:00 PM, the sky darkens,
and snow begins to fall.
A second jet streak brings a terrifying storm.
Rob Hall remains at the summit,
trying to protect a trapped client.
Scott Fisher is struck with altitude sickness,
and sends his team down without him.
By 5:00 PM, a blizzard hits,
and everyone on the mountain is in deep trouble.
Fearsome winds, whiteout conditions,
driving snow in your face, and that storm blew
all afternoon, and continues through the night.
A lot of the people who got trapped high
in the mountain were not very skilled,
and they climbed essentially into a blizzard.
The death zone claims both Rob Hall
and Scott Fischer, as well as several other climbers.
Well, eight people died in that storm
during those days May the 10th and May the 11th.
At the time, it was the most fatalities
in a single day on Everest.
When news of the 1996 disaster reaches
the rest of the world, well,
you know what they say about bad publicity.
After the great disaster of 1996, apparently,
instead of bookings dropping off,
bookings double, maybe quadruple
for the companies organizing Everest expeditions.
In 2019, a total
of 398 paying climbers summited Everest,
along with 478 support climbers,
making it the busiest season in the mountain's history.
It isn't 500 people going up over the course of 12 months.
It's 500 people going up in a six-week window.
The mountain's future holds the same problems
as the rest of the world, but higher,
too many people, too much garbage, and warmer temperatures,
and they're no easier to solve at 29,000 feet.
In the past, people weren't so concerned
about leaving waste, because they assumed
that they are one of such a small handful of people
who are going to be up there.
That's really changed now.
You have so many people going up every spring.
On average, climbers and guides generate
about 26,000 pounds of waste on the mountain each year,
approximately the same weight
as eight full-grown hippopotami.
(intense whooshes)
Once you're up there, you're very like,
"Well, there's no garbage bins, so, I guess I'm gonna,
I guess this snow will cover it up."
Like, littering, I'm not down with, to be clear,
but like, I get it, like, you know,
like, you've surmounted a mountain,
you've done a thing which everyone said is impossible.
At that point, you're just, you don't care about anything.
(intense whooshing)
(upbeat music)
On Everest, there's these ubiquitous blue barrels
that are used for everything.
So all the food goes up the mountain in the blue barrels,
and all the poo comes out in the mountain
in the blue barrels.
These barrels weigh up to 150 pounds each
when they're full, and sherpa porters carry them
on their backs for over five miles back down the slope.
In 2019, the Nepalese government staged
a 45-day cleanup operation that removed
more than 24,000 pounds of waste from the mountain,
and there is likely much more frozen beneath the surface.
The skills and generational knowledge
of the Sherpa people make expeditions
to Mount Everest possible.
How many people would make it up the mountain
without the help of a sherpa guide?
My guess is that 0% of the people could make it
to the top without the Sherpas.
It started with Tenzing, and it goes on today.
These incredibly talented people who live in the region,
the contributions that they make hasn't been recognized.
The Sherpa where an ethnic group that had found their way
to the Solukhumbu Valley in Nepal.
They became deeply associated with the mountain.
And of course, once Tenzing Norgay summited Everest,
the position of the Sherpa
in mountaineering lore is absolutely secure.
We suspect that people have been living
in the Tibetan Plateau for 40,000 or more years.
The Sherpa aren't just skilled mountaineers.
They've physically adapted to life at high altitudes.
They're going to breathe more rapidly, and more deeply.
Some of them are developmental, like ending up
with a larger chest circumference
from living at high altitude all their lives,
and needing larger volume in their lungs,
and some of them are
through multi-generational, natural selection.
They have a gene that allow them more efficient use
of hemoglobin when they're in low oxygen scenarios.
So it's no surprise that Sherpas hold
some of Everest's greatest climbing records.
(high-energy rock music)
Kami Rita has summited Everest 24 times,
including two successful climbs within the space
of a single week in 2019.
The fastest ascent from the south took just under 11 hours,
and was accomplished by Lakpa Gelu.
Babu Chiri, who was at the summit for 21 and a half hours,
holds record for the most time spent on top of Everest.
(high-energy rock music)
They're carrying all of the stuff up the mountain.
I think being a sherpa guide isn't
the worst job in the world.
It's like, "Yeah, no problem.
Just gonna go up and down, I do this on the daily."
That is a tough job.
Everest is an important economic asset
for Nepal, the 43rd poorest country in the world.
In 2019, expeditions earned the nation
more than $300 million, a huge incentive
for the sherpa guides to return to Everest
each climbing season, despite the dangers.
(intense whooshing)
Just how risky is it to be a guide on Mount Everest?
The most dangerous industry in America is hunting
and fishing, with an annual fatality rate of 144 workers
for every hundred thousand.
Sherpa guide on Everest?
Between 2000 and 2010, their annual death rate was
1,332 per a hundred thousand, 10 times greater
than the most dangerous job in America.
The riskiest part of Everest guide work is creating
the infrastructure through the Khumbu Icefall.
The 1953, keeping that icefall open was the job
of an English climber.
He had the expertise, and it was the sherpa employees
who helped him.
Nowadays, the expeditions on Everest are largely run
by the local Sherpa people.
The sherpas secure climbing ropes,
carry oxygen tanks, and a special team known
as the Icefall Doctors creates a path each day
through the Khumbu Icefall using simple aluminum ladders.
Every day, they've got to go up and readjust
the ladders, 'cause the glaciers will have moved
a meter or two, and that can cause
these ladders to become less stable.
People have to walk across these ladders in their,
with their crampons, and literally,
they are just ladders, and they're pretty rickety.
I wouldn't trust them, but people do it.
An average climber may have to cross
the icefall six to eight times during their time on Everest,
but a sherpa guide must do it 30 to 40 times
each climbing season.
The more often you go up and down through the icefall,
the greater the statistical odds on you being unlucky.
Of the 176 deaths that occurred
on the southwest face between 1953 and 2016,
44, about 25%, happened in the icefall,
making it the deadliest part of the South Col Route.
Of those 44 deaths, six fell into a crevasse,
nine were killed by a section of the icefall collapsing,
and 29 died by avalanche.
(avalanche rumbling)
The climbers always tend to die high on the mountain,
whereas the sherpas tend to die low on the mountain.
In 2014, the big disaster
whichever everyone has always been dreading, happens.
It's April 18th, first thing in the morning,
and the sherpa are working in the Khumbu Icefall.
Unseen above them, the glacier gives a tiny shrug,
and unleashes a massive tragedy below.
A huge chunk of ice breaks off
the western shoulder of Everest,
and develops into an immense, great, airborne avalanche.
Probably about 15 million tons of ice,
and the avalanche occurred exactly in that region
of the icefall where they were working.
(helicopter blades whirring)
16 People are killed in the avalanche,
13 of them Sherpas.
In the aftermath, the Sherpa community ceases work,
and the mountain is closed to visitors for the year.
The disaster in 2014 was probably
the worst single disaster to the Sherpa people.
It did sort of highlight that they're paid very good money
by the standards of Nepal,
but they're doing very dangerous work to earn that money.
(foreboding music)
So the whole world is warming, and we think
that's what caused the avalanche in 2014 was
these hanging glaciers are becoming more unstable,
and there'll be more avalanches occurring in the future.
Global warming's strongest effects occur
at the extremes, and Mount Everest is no exception.
Regions like Mount Everest,
which are high regions, are actually warming
at a faster rate than the rest of the Earth.
Average global temperatures increased
by 1.3 degrees between 1914 and 2014.
In Nepal, the average temperature increase was
more than twice that.
Each year, the glacier coverage in Nepal shrinks
14 square miles, and when glaciers shrink,
they turn into water, a lot of water.
There's a very large glacial outflow lake near Everest,
which is constantly growing in size as the glaciers melt,
and there's a real concern that this will eventually burst
through the moraine and cause a flood.
There's a couple of towns downstream,
so it's a really big problem.
Global warming is destabilizing
the entire glacier system on Everest.
It's coming over the hill now.
And the way they recede is they avalanche.
(avalanche rumbling)
That makes some of the icefalls more dangerous.
(climber grunting and exclaiming indistinctly)
It's also revealing more of the corpses that have been left
up on the mountain.
More than 200 of Everest victims never made it
back down the mountain.
They remain in the world's highest graveyard.
As the snow and ice recede,
Everest is beginning to reveal its secrets.
When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally reached
the top in 1953, they do actually say,
"We looked around just in case there were any signs
of Mallory and Irving having been there."
(dramatic music)
For decades after his disappearance,
climbers hoped to solve the George Mallory mystery.
75 Years later, an American research expedition
on the sloping screes of the north face,
at a point a few hundred feet below the crest
of the Northeast Ridge.
Here, wait, this George Mallory.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Finds George Mallory's body, and it's obvious
the broken rope tied around his waist,
and the bruising of his body, and a broken leg,
that he's been badly injured and a fall, and at some stage
has died alone on the mountain from those injuries.
The 1999 discovery of Mallory's body solved
the riddle of his disappearance, but the question remains,
if he was one of the most skilled mountaineers in the world,
why didn't he survive his climb?
Scientist Kent Moore believes he found the answer.
I was really intrigued by the Mallory and Irvin story.
They disappeared into a cloud, essentially,
and then they were never seen ever again,
and so what I decided to do was go to London one day,
and go to the Royal Geographical Society,
and access the original expedition reports.
(whoosh)
I came across these pressure measurements
that they had made.
What the data showed is that on the day they were climbing,
there was a huge drop in pressure,
and the pressure drop that Mallory recorded
at base camp was about the same magnitude
as the pressure drops that we saw in the really bad storm
in 1996, where eight people died.
So from this data, we were able to quantitatively show
that Mallory and Irvin probably climbed
into a really bad storm.
Numbers may solve more mysteries
from Mount Everest's past,
but the mountain's shrinking glaciers raise questions
about its future.
The future of Everest, I think, as the planet warms,
I think it's becoming a more dangerous place to go,
but still I think the magnet of Everest is
a pretty profound one.
(wind howling)
You could say that Everest is just
one more sight-seers' tick.
It's like seeing the pyramids, or the Taj Mahal.
It's one of those things you do.
You can't deny there's this sort of cheap thrill in saying,
"Oh, well, here I am, I've done it.
This is the summit of Everest."
So what do you guys have to say for yourselves?
I can't believe it.
Thanks for the opportunity.
On the other hand, there's something rather special
about being completely alone,
higher than anyone else on Earth.
It's a strange, mesmerizing feeling.
(wind howling)
What's the next thing after Mount Everest,
when people get tired of that?
It's been done. It's kind of passe.
People are gonna start trying to conquer
the moon to up the ante.
Like, we're going into space, right?
We're gonna try to go to Mars.
Gonna go like, bottom of the sea, like,
James Cameron did it, but only briefly,
and he still hasn't seen even half
of the weird-looking fish that are down there.
I think it'll just keep being a thing,
because it's been a thing for so long,
and people continue to do it.
(whimsical music)