Climbers clogging Everest

I guess I won’t be climbing Mount Everest anytime soon. Not that I really had any great desire to trek to the roof of the world, thrilling as that might be. But if I had, and could come up with the $65,000 or so it would cost to get myself up there, a recent article in The New York Times certainly would have me rethinking my travel plans.

The story about the vast number of climbers crawling all over the fabled mountain seemed so incredible that at first I thought it might have been concocted by Jayson Blair from a coffee shop somewhere in the Bronx. But not even a talented fabricator like Blair could make this up: Everest has become so crowded these days that Sir Edmund Hillary himself has suggested that it might be time to “give the mountain a rest.”

No fewer than 500 climbers are scurrying to reach the summit sometime today, the 50th anniversary of the day Hillary and Tenzig Norgay, his Sherpa guide, became the first people to accomplish the historic feat in 1953. In just the last week, the Times reported, climbers have broken several Everest records. A 70-year-old man became the oldest person to scale the summit, and a 15-year-old Sherpa girl became the youngest. A climber broke the speed record by nearly two hours when he made it from base camp to the top in 10 hours and 56 minutes, while another climber got into the books for having reached the peak 13 times.

On Tuesday alone, three people stood on the summit, including a man from Swaziland who became the first black person to occupy that hallowed spot. A record 65 expeditions are expected to give the mountain a shot this year, and the Outdoor Life Network is planning to broadcast the 50th anniversary celebrations from its windswept TV studio at the 29,035-foot summit.

So what’s next for the highest mountain the world? A Denny’s restaurant to feed the clambering hordes? Discount tours for senior citizens clad in orthopedic hiking boots? Everest as the setting for the new “Survivor” TV series, in which teams gag down freeze-dried yak brains and compete for bottled oxygen?

Would the majestic mountain that once loomed so large in the public imagination, in other words, be steadily scaled down to a molehill attainable by any able-bodied tourist with lots of money and time off from work?

For a down-to-earth perspective, I called Tom Armstrong to see what he thought of the masses on the mountain. Armstrong, who is from Yarmouth and a vice president at L.L. Bean, knows Everest firsthand. He climbed it in 1990, as a member of the Mount Everest Earth Day International Peace Climb, which was sponsored by the Freeport outfitter. As a support climber, whose job was to carry food, fuel and equipment to the base camps along the route, Armstrong went as high as the North Col, a 24,000-foot-high saddle on a glacier leading to the summit. On a Maine scale, that’s a mere Mount Katahdin away from the highest point in he world.

Recalling his nearness to the summit, its killing cold and the freight-train roar of its 180-mile-an-hour winds, Armstrong said that while more and more people are able to buy tickets to the mountain these days, there’s no guarantee that any of them will live to brag about their adventures one day.

“It’s been said that one person dies for every two who reach the summit, so that’s something to keep in mind,” said Armstrong. “The biggest change in the 13 years since I was there is the great number of people attempting it these days. There was only one other party on our route back then, and we never even saw them. Now there are hundreds of people attempting the summit during the short weather window of the first three weeks of May, and the ones who don’t know what they’re doing are creating bottlenecks along the more technical parts of the routes.”

If anything, Armstrong said, the sheer volume of climbers on Everest is making the ascent more dangerous than it has ever been.

“With so many climbers on the routes, people get the feeling that there is safety in numbers,” he said. “When you’re on your own or with a small team, you make decisions based on your judgment and the capabilities of your team. When there are hundreds on the mountain, there’s a false sense of security that someone will be there for you if you get into trouble. Actually, it’s very difficult for anyone to help another person at that altitude. Sure, anyone with the money and time can sign up to try it, but how successful they’ll be is still be determined by their abilities.”

Even the unseasoned climbers who can afford private guides must put one foot in front of the other until they reach the summit, he said, and then they’re only halfway there. They still have to get down alive.

“No matter how much money you have, I don’t think you can pay someone to carry you up,” he said with a laugh. “In the old days, your apprenticeship was long and difficult in preparing for the biggest mountaineering opportunities. Now, people are buying that apprenticeship. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s fatal.”

Armstrong still regards Mount Everest as one of the most symbolically powerful and alluring places on earth. But he has no burning desire to tackle its magnitude again and perhaps attain the summit he once gazed at in wonder from just a few thousand feet away. There are plenty of other challenging mountains in the world, he said, where a climber doesn’t have to wait out traffic jams in order to find nirvana.

“It’s less of a unique experience than it used to be,” he said. “For me, going to a mountain is getting away from all the hubbub we live with each day and being with a small group. It’s certainly not that way on Everest anymore. I think some of the awe of the place has been lost.”