Chapter 4 Chapter 2 Dera Heights, India

△Elevation 681 meters, AD1852 * On a winter day, far from the mountains, I saw blurry photographs of Everest in Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels.It was a poor reproduction, with jagged peaks rising in white against a background sky that was eerily black and scratched.Standing so far behind the peaks ahead, Everest doesn't even look like the tallest, but that's okay.Mount Everest is the tallest, so the rumors say.The dream is the key to the picture, allowing a teenager to enter, stand on the windward ridge, climb the peak that is now no longer unattainable It's one of those uninhibited dreams that comes with growing up.I firmly believe that my Everest dream is not just my own.The unreachable, unexperienced highest point on Earth is there, waiting for many boys and men to pursue.

Hornbein's Everest: The West Rim Thomas F. Hornbein, Everest: The West Ridge □□□ The actual details of events are obscured by the addition of legend.The year is 1852 and the background is the North Hill Station Office of the Grand Triangulation of India in Dehradun, India.There are many rumors, and the most reasonable version is that a staff member rushed into the bedroom of Sir Waffle, the Chief Surveyor of India, and exclaimed that the Bangladeshi calculator Shikda of the Calcutta Branch of the Survey Bureau had discovered the tallest mountain in the world.Three years before that, surveyors used an eight-meter theodolite to measure the angle of the peak's rise for the first time, and named it Peak 15.Located in the locked kingdom of Nepal, the peak rises majestically from the Himalayan ridges.

Before Sikda compiled the measurements and calculated them, no one thought that there was anything strange about the fifteenth peak.The six triangulation points of this mountain are all in North India, and the nearest one is 160 kilometers from the mountain.In the eyes of surveyors, except for a small peak, the entire peak of No. 15 Peak is covered by some hanging rocks and cliffs in front, and some of them give people the illusion that the mountain is higher.However, according to Sikda's careful triangulation calculation (taking into account the curvature of the earth, atmospheric refraction, and the deviation of the plumb bob measurement), Peak 15 is 8,840 meters above sea level, making it the highest point on the earth.

Note 1: Modern measurements using laser light and perfect Doppler satellite transmissions have corrected this figure upwards by eight meters to the currently accepted 8848 meters.author note In 1865, nine years after Sikda's calculations were confirmed, Waffle named Peak 15 Mount Everest in honor of his predecessor, Surveyor General, Sir George Everest. .In fact, the Tibetans living in the north of the mountain have already given the mountain a more beautiful name, Mount Everest, which means the mother of the earth.The Nepalese who live in the south of the mountain call it Sagarmata Peak, the goddess of the sky.But Waffle honestly ignored the local name (and disregarded the official policy of encouraging the retention of local and ancient names), and Westerners have called it Mount Everest ever since.

Once Mount Everest is determined to be the highest mountain on earth, it is only a matter of time before people decide to climb it.In 1909, American explorer Robert Peary announced that he had reached the North Pole. In 1911, Rolad Amundsen led a Norwegian team to reach the South Pole. Since then, the so-called Third Pole Everest has become a field of land exploration. The most coveted target in the world.Gunter O. Dyhrenfurth, an influential mountaineer and author of an early history of Himalayan mountaineering, declared that reaching the summit is a global human endeavor that should not be flinched, no matter the cost.

As a result, the price is not light.Since Sikda discovered the height of Mount Everest in 1852, a total of 24 people and 15 expedition teams were sent to try to climb it, and it took 101 years before someone finally reached the summit of Mount Everest. In the eyes of mountaineers and topography experts, Mount Everest is not a particularly beautiful mountain. The proportion is too thick and short, the lower part is too wide, and the shape is too rough.However, although Mount Everest lacks the beauty of the architectural structure, its huge volume is more than enough to make up for everything.

As the boundary mountain on the Tibet-Nepal border, Mount Everest is more than 3,660 meters higher than the valley below. It is a three-sided pyramid composed of shiny ice and snow and dark layered rocks.The first eight Everest expeditions were all British, all attempting to climb from the Tibetan side of the north.It is not so much because the defense of Mount Everest is like an iron wall, and only the north side has obvious weaknesses to attack, it is better to say that the Tibetan government opened the long-closed border to foreigners in 1921, while Nepal has always kept the door strictly.

The first Everest climbers had to hike 650 kilometers from Darjeeling, across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the foot of the mountain.Their knowledge of the deadly effects of extreme altitudes was limited, and their equipment was scant by modern standards.But Edward Felix Norton, a member of the third British expedition in 1924, reached an altitude of 8573 meters, only 175 meters lower than the peak, and later failed due to fatigue and snow blindness. Can climb to the top.It's an astonishing achievement, unsurpassed for perhaps twenty-nine years. I say possible because a story was circulated four days after Norton's summit.At dawn on June 8 of that year, Mallory and Andred Irvine, two other members of the British Expeditionary Force, left the highest camp and headed for the summit.

Mallory's name is inseparable from Mount Everest, and he was the force that pushed the first three expeditions to the summit.On a slideshow tour across America, when an annoying newspaper asked him why he wanted to climb Everest, he uttered the world-famous quip because Everest was there.In 1924 Mallory was thirty-eight years old, a married public school teacher with three children.Born in the upper class of England, he is an esthetician and idealist with strong romantic sensibility.His elegant demeanor, social charm and striking good looks made him a favorite of Strachey and London's Bloomsbury Circle2.While trapped in a tent on Mount Everest, Mallory and a few of his companions would take turns reciting Hamlet and King Lear.

Note 2: The Bloomsbury Crowd is a group of elite intellectuals, writers and artists in England in the early 20th century, members include writers Woolf and Foster, biographers Strachey, Economist Keynes et al.Most of these people lived in Bloomsbury Street, London, hence the name.Editor's note On June 8, 1924, Mallory and Irfan struggled to slowly make their way to the summit of Mount Everest. Fog filled the upper half of the spire, and their partners on the lower part of the mountain could not see the progress of the two summit climbers.At 12:05 in the afternoon, the clouds and fog cleared for a while, and teammate Noel Odell saw Mallory and Irfan on the top of the mountain. It was a short glimpse but quite clear. It was nearly five hours later than the scheduled time, but it was obviously on the way. Proceed calmly and swiftly to the summit.

However, the two summit attackers did not return to the tent that night, and no one has seen Mallory and Irvan since.Whether either or both of them reached the summit only to be swallowed up by the mountain and become legendary is still being debated to this day.The results of the Evidence Synthesis Control showed no.In any case, due to the lack of solid evidence, the two were not listed as the first successful people to reach the summit. In 1949, after centuries of isolation, Nepal opened its borders to the outside world. A year later, China's new communist regime closed Tibet to foreigners, and would-be climbers turned their attention to the south of the mountain.In the spring of 1953, a huge British team with high morale and powerful resources at the combat level attacked Mount Everest from Nepal, becoming the third Everest Expeditionary Force in history.After two and a half months of fighting, a high-altitude camp was shallowly dug on the southeast ridge at an altitude of 8,504 meters on May 28.Early the next morning, Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander with slender limbs, and Tenzing Norgay, a highly skilled Sherpa Nugay, set out to attack the summit, inhaling cylinders of oxygen. At nine o'clock in the morning, the two came to the South Peak, overlooking the dizzying narrow ridge leading to the main peak.After another hour, the two came to the bottom of the rock steps on the ridge. Hillary described it as the most daunting problem on the ridge. The rock steps were about 12 meters high. It might have been an interesting Sunday afternoon challenge for climbing experts in the English Lake District, but here it was an obstacle our meager strength could not overcome. Nogay nervously let out the rope from below, and Hillary squeezed her body into the crack between the rocky buttress and a vertical snow column at the edge of the buttress, inch by inch toward what would come to be known as Hillary's Step.According to his later notes, the climb was very difficult, but Hillary persisted and barely finished. At last I dragged myself out of the chasm, up the wide ledge, and up to the summit.I lay there panting for a few minutes, and for the first time, I really felt that nothing could stop our strong determination to reach the summit.I stood firmly on the rock shed and motioned for Nogai to climb up.I pulled the rope hard, and Nogai squirmed and climbed up the crack, and finally collapsed on the top of the rock like a giant fish just pulled up from the sea after a violent struggle, exhausted. ☆☆ Fighting against fatigue, the two mountaineers continued to climb the undulating ridge above.Hillary thought to herself: I don't know if we have enough spare energy to get through it.I went around the back of another round hill, and found that the ridge in front of me went down all the way, and we could see Tibet in the distance.I looked up and saw a round snow cone above.A few more slashes with the ice ax, and a few more steps to climb carefully, and Nogai and I reached the top. ☆☆ And so, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, Hilary and Norgay became the first people to climb Mount Everest. News of the ascent reached Queen Elizabeth three days later, on the eve of her coronation, and the Times of London published it in its early edition on the morning of 2 June.The telegram was sent from Mount Everest in radio code by a young commissioner, James Morris (in case a competitor got ahead of him), who would become a respected writer twenty years later and transgender a woman, Change the name to Jan.Forty years after that feat, Morris wrote "Crowned Everest: The Scoop of the Queen's First Ascent," which read: □□□ It is hard now to imagine with what almost mystical joy the British Empire greeted the coincidence of double happiness (the coronation of the Queen and the summit of Everest).Britain finally got rid of the haze of misery since World War II, but at the same time it had to face the reality of the fall of the British Empire and the inevitable decline of its power in the world.They held out a glimmer of hope that the young Queen's rise to power would mark a new beginning, as the newspapers liked to call the New Elizabethan Age.Coronation Day, June 2, 1953, will be a symbol of hope and joy, in which all patriots in Great Britain will find a perfect moment of devotion, for, what a miracle of miracles, news came from far away on that day ( from the frontiers of the old empire, in fact), that a British mountaineering party had reached the only remaining supreme goal in the field of earth exploration and adventure, the apex of the world It was a moment that stirred up all sorts of strong emotions in England, pride, patriotism, nostalgia for a bygone age of war and adventure, hope for future glory, and people of a certain age still remember that incredible moment when they walked in a drizzly London Waiting for the coronation procession to pass by on a June morning, hearing the moment when the summit of the world has arguably fallen into British hands. ☆☆ Nogai also became a hero throughout India, Nepal, and Tibet, all three places claiming him as their own.Hillary was knighted by the Queen and saw her appearance appear on postage stamps, comics, books, movies and magazine covers. Suddenly, the thin and angular Auckland beekeeper became one of the world's most famous celebrities. I only appeared in my mother’s womb one month after Hillary and Nogay reached the summit, and I was unable to share the collective glory and joy that the whole world felt landing on the moon.But ten years later, the ensuing summit drive helped me establish a trajectory for my life. On May 22, 1963, Hornbein, a 32-year-old doctor in Missouri, and Willi Unsoeld, a 36-year-old theology professor in Oregon, had never climbed a terrifying Mount Everest was climbed on the west edge. At that time, Mount Everest had been captured four times, and eleven people reached the summit. However, the difficulty of West Edge was higher than the two routes taken by the predecessors: the South Col plus the Southeast Ridge, and the North Col. Add the northeast edge.The ascents of Hornbein and Ensold were celebrated then and later as great deeds in the mountaineering annals, and rightly so. Later on summit day, the two Americans climbed a steep, brittle formation known as the infamous Yellow Band.Climbing this cliff requires extraordinary physical fitness and mountaineering skills. No one has ever challenged such difficult terrain at such an extreme altitude.After climbing to the top of the yellow belt, Hornbein and Ensold doubted that they would be able to get out unscathed.They concluded that the most hopeful way to descend the mountain alive was to climb over the peak and take the southeast ridge with a clear route.Given that it was getting late at that time, the two were not familiar with the terrain, and the oxygen in the tank was rapidly depleted, this was a very bold plan. Hornbein and Ensold reached the summit at sunset at 6:15 p.m. and were forced to spend the night in the open at an altitude of 8,530 metres, at the time the highest camp ever built.It was freezing cold that night, but fortunately there was no wind.Although Ensold's toe was frostbitten and had to be amputated, both men made it down alive to tell their stories. I was nine years old and living in Corvaris, Oregon, Ensold's hometown.He was a close friend of my father, and I occasionally played with the Ensolds, Regan, a year older than me, and Davy, a year younger.A few months before Ensold set off for Nepal, my father, Ensold, and Regan and I climbed to the summit of the first mountain in my life, the Waterfall Mountains, a mountain with an altitude of more than 2,700 meters. , an unspectacular volcano, and now there is an aerial cable chair to the top of the mountain.The Everest epic of 1963 unsurprisingly haunted my pre-adolescent imagination for a long time.My friends idolize Astros Glenn, baseball pitcher Koufax, and American football star Unitas. My heroes are Hornbein and Ensold. I secretly dreamed that one day I would be able to climb Mount Everest, and this ambition has been burning for more than ten years.By the time I was in my early twenties, mountaineering had become the center of my life, and I hardly cared about anything else.Getting to the top is real, timeless, and specific.Mountaineering is all about desperate determination, which gives the activity a seriousness that the rest of my life lacks.I was thrilled by the fresh perspectives brought about by overturning the routine of day-to-day existence. Climbing also provides a sense of belonging.To be a climber is to join a separate, highly idealized society that is largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world.Mountaineering culture is characterized by fierce competition and strong masculinity, but for the most part, the constituents only care about winning each other's admiration.Climbing to the top of any mountain is far less important than the method of attacking the summit. Prestige can only be gained by tackling the most demanding routes with the least equipment and the most daring style.And the most admired are free solo climbers, who are dreamers who climb alone without ropes or tools. In those years I lived for climbing, lived on five or six thousand dollars a year, worked as a carpenter, and also caught salmon. As long as I saved enough travel expenses, I could go to Bugaboo, Teton or Alaska in Canada. quit.However, when I was twenty-five or six years old, I once gave up my boyhood fantasy of climbing Mount Everest.All mountaineering experts at the time dismissed Everest as a slag heap, a mountain that wasn't technically challenging or aesthetically appealing enough to be worthy of serious mountaineering, and I wanted to be serious mountaineering very much.I began to ignore the highest peak in the world. The reason why the mountaineering community has this self-righteous point of view is that in the early 1980s, the best route to Mount Everest (via the South Col and the Southeast Ridge) had been climbed no less than a hundred times.My colleagues and I called the southeast ridge the yak route.In 1985, Bess, a fifty-five-year-old rich man from Texas with limited mountaineering experience, was taken up Mount Everest by the extraordinary young mountaineer David Breashears. Contempt for Everest. Until then, Everest was largely the domain of elite mountaineers. Kennedy, editor of "Climbing" magazine, said that it is an honor to be invited to participate in the Everest expedition. You can only enjoy this courtesy if you have been an apprentice for a long time on a shorter mountain. To the highest days of mountaineering stardom.Bass' ascent changed all that.After hunting Mount Everest, he became the first person to complete the seven summits of the world. This feat made him famous all over the world, and other weekend climbers flocked to follow his footsteps, hired guides, and rudely removed the Virgin. Feng pulls into the postmodern era. For daydream adventure kings like me, the bass is a good motivator, Withers explained in his thick East Texas accent on a hike to Everest base camp last April.Withers, 49, a pathologist in Dallas, was one of eight clients on Hall's expedition in 1996.Bass proved that it is possible for ordinary people to step into Everest territory.If you're physically fit and have some disposable income, I think the biggest hurdle might just be taking a break from work and leaving your family behind for two months. Records show that it is not difficult for many climbers to take a break from their daily labor, and a cash expenditure is not a problem.Over the past five years, traffic to the seven summits of the world has grown at an astonishing rate, especially Mount Everest.In order to cater to the demand, there has been a relative increase in commercial organizations that sell guides to lead teams to climb the Seven Peaks (especially Mount Everest).In the spring of 1996, there were thirty expedition teams on the Everest flank, at least ten of which were for-profit commercial teams. The Nepalese government sees that the crowds flocking to the Marist summit are causing serious problems and damaging local security, beauty and the environment.To deal with this problem, various ministries and associations in Nepal have come up with a solution that can limit the number of people and increase strong currency income for the tight treasury, which is to increase the mountaineering permit fee.In 1991, the Ministry of Tourism charged US$2,300 for a Mount Everest climbing permit, for the entire expedition team, with no limit on the number of members.In 1992, the fee was increased to $10,000 for a nine-person team, with an additional $1,200 for each additional person. Despite the higher fees, climbers continue to flock to Everest.In 1993, which was the 40th anniversary of the first ascent, 294 climbers from 15 expeditions attempted to climb Mount Everest from the Nepalese side, setting a record.In the autumn of that year, the Ministry of Tourism raised the permit fee again. The mountaineering team charged a sky-high price of 50,000 US dollars for less than 5 people, and 10,000 US dollars for each additional person, up to a maximum of 7 people.The government has also ordered Nepal's Everest flanks to be climbed by only four expeditions per season. There is one thing that the various departments of the Nepalese government did not expect: China allows an unlimited number of teams to climb from the Tibetan side, and each team only charges 15,000 US dollars, and there is no limit to the number of expedition teams per season.As a result, the Mount Everest climbing wave shifted from Nepal to Tibet, and hundreds of thousands of Sherpas lost their jobs. The ensuing rebound forced Nepal to abruptly lift the four-team limit per season in 1996.On the one hand, the government loosened the ties, and on the other hand, it raised the fee. This time, the fee was raised to US$70,000 for a climbing team with less than seven people, and an additional US$10,000 for each additional member.In the spring of 1995, 17 of the 30 Everest expedition teams climbed from the Nepal side. It can be seen that the high cost of the permit does not seem to be a major obstacle. The proliferation of commercial expeditions has been a sensitive issue of the past decade, before the Indian Ocean monsoon hit in 1996 and the catastrophe of the mountaineering season struck.Traditional people are dissatisfied that the world's highest mountain is being sold to wealthy upstarts. If they do not rely on guides, some of them may not even be able to climb a low-level mountain like Seattle's Mount Rainier.Mountaineering purists despise Everest as derogatory and profane. Such critics also point out that, because of the commercialization of Everest, the once-sacred mountain is now being dragged into the quagmire of American law.Some climbers pay exorbitant rewards to have someone escort them to Mount Everest, and if they fail to reach the summit, they will sue the guide.Renowned guide Peter Athans, who has been to Everest 11 times and summited four times, laments that every now and then you run into clients who think they've bought a guaranteed ticket to the summit.Some people don't understand that Everest expeditions can't be run like Swiss trains. Sadly, not every Everest lawsuit is innocent.On more than one occasion, incompetent or unqualified companies failed to provide critical logistical support, such as oxygen tanks, as agreed.Guides on some expeditions summited without any paying clients with them, and disgruntled clients concluded that they were traveling just to pay their bills.In 1995, the leader of a commercial expedition absconded with tens of thousands of dollars from his clients before setting off. In March 1995, I got a call from an editor at Outside magazine, suggesting that I join the guided Everest expedition, which departed five days later, and then write an article on the burgeoning commercialization of Everest. and the ensuing controversy.The magazine didn't ask me to climb Everest, I just had to stay at base camp on the Tibetan side and report from the Rongbuk Glacier at the foot of the mountain.I seriously considered their proposal, even booked a plane ticket, and took the necessary epidemic prevention measures, but withdrew at the last minute. Given my years of contempt for Mount Everest, the outside world must have thought I was rejecting it out of principle.In fact, the phone call from "Outdoors" unexpectedly aroused a strong longing in my heart.I turned down the assignment only because I thought it would be too boring to spend two months in the shadow of Everest while staying at base camp and not climbing up.If I were to travel to the other side of the world, away from my wife and home for eight weeks, I'd love to have the chance to climb mountains. I asked Brian, the editor of Outdoor Magazine, if he would consider postponing the mission for twelve months so I could get in shape for the expedition.I also asked the magazine if it would sign me up for a group with a reputable guide and pay $65,000 for the chance to climb the summit myself.I dare not expect him to agree to the plan.I've written more than sixty articles for Outside over the past fifteen years, and the travel budget for my assignments has rarely exceeded two or three thousand dollars. Brian called back the next day after discussing it with the publisher of Outside.He said the magazine didn't have the budget to pay the $65,000, but he and other editors thought Everest's commercialization was an important story to cover.He emphasized that if I was serious, The Outdoors would try to make it happen. I have called myself a climber for thirty-three years, and have undertaken several difficult projects.I climbed a thrilling new route on Moose Tooth in Alaska and soloed Devils Thumb, spending three weeks alone on an isolated ice rock.I have done many extreme ice climbs in Canada and Colorado, USA.Near the southern tip of South America, where winds swept across the land like God's broom, I climbed Cerro Torre, a breathtaking 1,200-meter upright and overhanging granite wall. Terrified.There are often winds of 100 knots per hour, covered with crisp rime, and it was once considered the most difficult mountain in the world to climb (now it is not). But these foolhardy adventures all happened years ago, maybe even a decade or two ago, in my twenties and thirties.Now I am forty-one years old, well past my mountaineering peak, with a gray beard, weak gums, and an extra seven kilograms of fat around my waist.I married a woman I love deeply, and she loves me very much.I happened to have a so-so career and was living above the poverty line for the first time in my life.In short, my desire to climb has been blunted by a collection of small gratifications that add up to bliss.Plus I've never been to really high altitudes before.To be honest, the highest I have ever reached is more than 5,200 meters, and the altitude is even lower than the base camp of Mount Everest. I have been enthusiastically studying the history of mountaineering, and I know that since the British first visited Mount Everest in 1921, more than 130 people have died in mountain disasters. About every four people who succeeded in attacking the summit, one person died, and many died. Far stronger and more experienced in high mountains than I am.But I found that the dream of boyhood was hard to eradicate, no matter what wise judgment he had.At the end of February 1996, Brian called to say that there was a place waiting for me on Hall's upcoming Everest expedition.He asked me if I really wanted to go through all the hardships?I couldn't even wait to stop and take a breath before saying yes.