Everest and Conquest in the Himalaya: Science and Courage on the World's Highest Mountain
240
Everest and Conquest in the Himalaya: Science and Courage on the World's Highest Mountain
240Hardcover
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Overview
In this fascinating study of the dramatic history of Everest climbs, Richard Sale and George Rodway describe in vivid detail the struggle to conquer the mountain and the advances in scientific knowledge that made the conquest possible. Their account gives a compelling insight into the science of mountaineering as well as the physical and psychological challenges faced by individuals who choose to test themselves in some of the harshest conditions on earth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848841390 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen and Sword |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2011 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Dr Richard Sale is a theoretical physicist, a mountaineer and an expert on the history and ecology of the Artic. He has travelled extensively in the Arctic, Antarctica and the Himalayas, and is a prolific author. His many books include On Top of the World, To the Ends of the Earth and The Arctic: The Complete Story.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Early Quest for Extreme Altitude
Introduction
In 1995 Johan Reinhard, an American archaeologist heading a Peruvian-American expedition, discovered the almost perfectly preserved mummy of a teenage girl near the summit of Ampato, a 6288m stratovolcano in southern Peru. The mummy, quickly named la Doncella, 'the maiden', in Peru and 'the ice maiden' in the English-speaking world, caused a sensation, not least because of the altitude of the discovery. But four years later, working on Llullaillaco, another stratovolcano close to the Argentine-Chilean border and the Atacama Desert, Reinhard made another discovery. At 6723m, Llullaillaco is the sixth highest mountain in South America and the second highest active volcano on Earth. Reinhard's team discovered the mummies of three children close to the summit. It is believed that they were child sacrifices, killed perhaps 500 years ago to appease the Incan gods, or to thank them for a successful harvest. Llullaillaco was probably the highest point reached by humans in South America in the pre-Conquistador era, and also the highest point reached by humans until the late nineteenth century. In Tibet the summer snowline can rise to 6500m, though vegetation is very sparse beyond 6000m. Yaks and snow leopards have been reported to roam up to 6100m, and Tibetan gazelle and kiang (wild asses) are occasionally seen at similar altitudes, though they prefer to stay below 5500m. It is likely that early Tibetan hunters reached heights similar to those of their prey, and that traders crossing the high passes between India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet also reached comparable heights. There is, however, no evidence for permanent or semi-permanent habitation above about 5,200m on either side of the Himalaya, and that is also likely to have been the limit in South America. Higher terrestrial elevations were truly terra incognita 150 years ago. Although a few very brave (and/or ignorant) men had ascended to altitudes over 8000m as early as 1862 in hot air balloons, these 'exposures' to the extreme altitude environment were short term, usually lasting little more than an hour or two. Nonetheless, their flights were full of near-misses as well as outright tragedy, as knowledge of the human body's ability to deal with low atmospheric pressure and thus low tissue levels of oxygen, known as hypoxia, was extremely rudimentary.
Although some tentative steps had been taken towards an understanding of high-altitude physiology in the early years of the nineteenth century, it was not until the work of Paul Bert that the first giant leap forward was made. Bert, a Frenchman, was the first person to make an extensive study of the effects of barometric pressure. In the early 1870s he had a fortuitous meeting with Paris physician Denis Jourdanet, which was to have far-reaching consequences for the new science. Jourdanet was fairly wealthy and had travelled among the mountains of Mexico, where he developed an interest in high-altitude medicine. He and Bert shared enough medical interests to become friends and fellow-workers, with Jourdanet providing Bert with funds to establish a laboratory with a decompression chamber for the investigation of hypoxic phenomena. During the course of his high-altitude field experiences, Jourdanet had formulated the hypothesis that blood contained less oxygen on high mountains because the atmospheric pressure was lower, calling this theory 'barometric anoxemia'. With Jourdanet's financial backing, Bert aimed to put this theory to the test with a series of laboratory studies that would ultimately go an enormous distance in helping to sort out the puzzle of maladaptation to altitude that expresses itself, for instance, in the form of mountain sickness.
Although it seems so obvious today as to be easily taken for granted, Bert was able personally to confirm his deduction that mountain sickness is caused by exposure to an environment with low oxygen pressure. In a series of experiments, he allowed himself to be rapidly 'taken up' to a simulated altitude of approximately 5500m in a pressure chamber, and then breathed supplementary oxygen in order to successfully relieve his symptoms of acute hypoxia. Finally, he breathed supplementary oxygen during the course of being 'taken up' to the same altitude, finding himself untroubled by any noxious symptoms during the process, providing clear evidence that the use of supplementary oxygen in a low barometric pressure environment was based on a firm physiological footing.
Bert made other pioneering efforts of great interest to medical science, but his study of high-altitude (hypobaric) and high-pressure (hyperbaric) environments (such as deep-sea diving) is the work for which he is primarily remembered. This is no doubt due to the fact that, in 1878, he published his 1178 page magnum opus La Pression Barométrique, Recherches de Physiologie Expérimentale. This work contained not only Bert's experimental results, but also an encyclopedic history of all that was then known or believed about high and low barometric pressures and mountain sickness. A very notable tribute to the lasting value of La Pression Barométrique is that it was of fundamental importance to aviation medicine during the Second World War. The need for an English edition at that time prompted its translation by the academicians Fred and Mary Hitchcock at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. This first English edition of the book – Barometric Pressure: Researches in Experimental Physiology – was finally published in 1943, 65 years after its original publication in France! Bert's studies were without doubt a most important milestone in the ever-expanding canon of knowledge concerning the physiological effects of oxygen and its lack on the human body. As such, Paul Bert is widely recognised today as the father of 'modern' high-altitude physiology and medicine.
While the hard-earned knowledge of Bert and other scientists was useful as mountaineers started to push the altitude 'envelope' to near the 7000m barrier by the end of the 1800s, mountain climbing exposed people to the hypoxia of high altitude over much longer periods (days, weeks or even months), and thus adaptation to altitude and deterioration from altitude were still unknown quantities. It should thus come as no surprise that early attempts to climb the world's highest peaks, particularly K2 and Kangchenjunga, very early in the twentieth century were unsuccessful.
Laying the Foundation
In 1786 Mont Blanc (the highest peak in the European Alps, at 4810m) was climbed by two Chamonix residents, Dr Michel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, after the aristocratic Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had offered a sizeable reward to the first ascentionists. Though their achievement is often regarded as the start of alpine climbing as a sport, another 70 years would pass before the 'Golden Age' of climbing in the European Alps began. Those early climbers, who were chiefly British, though invariably employing local guides, wore little more than old street clothes and concentrated on finding the most straightforward route to any summit they attempted.
In the Himalaya climbers were preceded by the map-makers of British India's Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS). Work began in 1802, and just seven years later, while exploring the upper reaches of the Ganges, Lieutenant William Spencer Webb, a Survey employee, surveyed a peak known as Dhawala Gira (now known as Dhaulagiri) and found it to be 26,826ft (8190m). Astonished, he returned the following year to check his result: it was correct. But, rather than being excited by the finding of the world's highest peak, the geographers of Europe scoffed at the absurd height calculated by this amateur surveyor: everyone knew that the world's highest mountain was Chimborazo in the Ecuadorean Andes. In the years that followed GTS surveyors worked their way towards the border of forbidden Nepal. From close to the border they set up survey stations from which they were able to fix the height of the great peaks of the Himalaya. One, Peak X V, they discovered to be the highest mountain in the world. It was named after George Everest.
Occasionally, the survey stations set up by the GTS were at high altitude: some on the high Karakoram peaks were at over 6000m. As a consequence, exactly when climbers, rather than explorers or map-makers, came to the Himalaya is a matter of opinion – when does an explorer become a climber? Why does a map-maker choose one peak rather than another, or decide to press on to the summit when a lower shoulder would be adequate for his purposes? One of the most striking examples in this grey area was William Johnson, who was a member of the GTS but seems to have climbed as much for the thrill of it as to set up triangulation stations. In 1865, on an unsanctioned journey into China's Kunlun Shan (a journey that eventually led to his resignation from the GTS), he claimed to have climbed a 7284m peak. More recent surveys give the peak's height as 6710m and some, both at the time and today, question Johnson's claim, though it is beyond doubt that he did achieve such altitudes elsewhere.
It is now generally agreed that the first 'pure' climber to visit the Himalaya was W.W. Graham in the spring of 1883. At that time Bhutan and Nepal were off-limits, Sikkim vaguely hostile and the Karakoram both remote and politically sensitive, the borders of Russia, Afghanistan and British India having still to be defined. Of the Himalaya only Himachal Pradesh and northern Uttar Pradesh (Garhwal and Kumaun) were easily and safely accessible. It is therefore surprising that Graham, accompanied by his Swiss guide Joseph Imboden, chose to go to Sikkim. The pair explored the southern approaches to Kangchenjunga, but then Imboden fell ill and had to return to Switzerland. Graham next employed two Swiss guides, Emil Boss and Ulrich Kauffmann, and headed for Garhwal. The trio arrived in July and apparently completed two climbs which, if true, were astonishing. Graham claims to have reached 6900m on Dunagiri (7070m, and not climbed until 1939), and then climbed Changabang (6864m), the peak whose fierce granite spire dominates the Ramani Glacier. This ascent of Changabang (which was not officially climbed until 1974) is now given no credence; indeed, it was being questioned within 15 years of Graham's trip. The claimed height on Dunagiri is also disputed: many believe it likely he got no higher than 6100m on a subsidiary ridge.
After his Garhwal climb Graham returned to Sikkim with Boss and claimed to have climbed Kabru (7349m) to the south of Kangchenjunga. If true, Graham and Boss would have been the first men known to have gone above 24,000ft (7,315m), but that ascent is also discounted by most authorities, who believe that Graham actually climbed a peak about 1220m lower. It is not thought that Graham was a liar, his explorations being well documented. More likely his obvious inability to tell north from south and east from west, and his habit of making assumptions about what he was looking at (which owed more to wishful thinking than geography), meant he was genuinely mistaken about which mountain he was actually on.
Such early claims must be treated with caution, but important and validated explorations were being made. Francis Younghusband is considered by many to be the most important early Himalayan explorer. His three landmark journeys between 1887 and 1890 began with the crossing of the Karakoram via the Mustagh Pass (~5500m) to the Baltoro Glacier and to Baltistan and Kashmir. In 1889, when Younghusband investigated Hunza raids on the Karakoram Pass, he was escorted by men of the 5th Gurkha Rifles. This detachment included Charles G. Bruce, then a young subaltern, who was later to lead both the 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions. At this time Bruce had already begun training his Gurkha soldiers to be mountaineers. Even though Younghusband's third high mountain journey, in 1890, was to the Pamirs, it is not considered exceedingly significant from a mountaineering standpoint.
As the border areas of the Karakoram had been pacified by the early 1890s, a major expedition from England was organised to explore this region by a mountain traveller destined to become famous, Martin Conway. This was the first Himalayan expedition to be funded by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Conway, later a prime mover in the RGS and President of the Alpine Club, had already accumulated extensive mountaineering experience from his years of climbing and exploring in the Alps. The 1892 Karakoram expedition was important for many reasons, not least of which was that it helped to build understanding of how best to organise and equip remote Himalayan expeditions.
While Conway's 1892 Karakoram expedition was not exactly a mountaineering tour de force, it was unarguably the precursor of large-scale Himalayan expeditions. The logistical principles of this trip served as a model for the Duke of the Abruzzi's K2 expedition in 1909, even though the duke had gained exploration and mountaineering experience in Alaska and Greenland in the 1890s. Charles Bruce also participated in Conway's 1892 Karakoram expedition, and what he learned there laid an important foundation for his later contributions to Himalayan mountaineering. Perhaps most importantly, he was instrumental in bringing recognition of the natural mountaineering abilities of local Himalayan mountain people. Bruce continued to add to his stock of knowledge, remaining in intimate contact with the Himalaya for 15 years following Conway's expedition. The appreciation he continued to develop for the mountains and its people during this time laid invaluable foundations for later high mountain endeavours in the greater ranges, such as the numerous attempts to climb Kamet (7756m), in India's Garhwal district, in the first and second decades of the twentieth century.
Kamet, known to Tibetans as Kangmen, a name meaning 'huge grandmother of the sacred snow-chain', was not discovered until 1848, but its surrounding slopes witnessed some of the very earliest high-altitude Himalayan mountaineering endeavours. During the course of measuring the peaks visible from a viewpoint near the hill station of Naini-Tal, the surveyor Richard Strachey found that one peak, approximately 160km distant, appeared to be more than 7700m, exceeding all its neighbours by at least 300m, and only 100m lower than Nanda Devi, the highest mountain in British India. Although an attempt to climb Kamet was not undertaken until 1907, the brothers Adolphe and Robert Schlagintweit from Munich made what they thought was an early probe of the mountain's slopes. The brothers had travelled to India in 1854 at the invitation of the East India Company to continue the scientific survey begun in 1846 by Captain Elliot. In the spring and summer of 1855 they began a series of Himalayan journeys, eventually crossing into Tibet. Pioneers far in advance of their time, the brothers Schlagintweit approached the Garhwal region from Tibet in August 1855 and reached a height of over 6700m on a lower neighbouring peak of Kamet, Abi Gamin. The brothers had actually intended to attempt Kamet, and it was not realised for several decades that they in fact climbed Abi Gamin, which lay between their approach route and Kamet. Many years passed before the area again witnessed serious mountaineering endeavours.
By the end of the nineteenth century an attempt to climb Everest was being seriously considered as Tibet became more accessible and the summit seemed more attainable, as mountaineers pushed their 'ceiling' to ever greater heights: the Duke of the Abruzzi's team had reached a record height of 7500m on Chogolisa in 1909 (failing to reach the summit by just 165m), and Aleister Crowley, the English satanist and self-styled Great Beast 666, had organised an attempt on Kangchenjunga in 1905, proof that the psychological barrier of very high peaks was breaking down. Indeed, as early as 1892 the renowned British surgeon-mountaineer Clinton Dent had predicted that the summit of Everest would be reached:
Selected men will have to work for a year or more with one definite object before them ... We may agree with Mr. (Edward) Whymper that the effects on respiration will impose limitations on the range of man, but it does not seem conceivable that this limitation is below the level of the highest point on the earth's crust ... It is a tremendous undertaking but a magnificent possibility.
Prior to the first successful penetration of the inner sanctum of Everest in 1921, British explorers and mountaineers had for more than two decades shown a serious interest in planning a reconnaissance expedition to the mountain. Several months before the start of the First World War Colonel C.G. Rawling, the surveyor who had identified Everest for the first time from the north during the 1903–4 Younghusband mission to Lhasa, proposed a reconnaissance of the mountain from the north to commence in 1915. This was to be followed by an attempt on the summit in 1916. Although this scheme necessarily had to be shelved because of the outbreak of war, it had gained the approval of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, and Dr Alexander M. Kellas drafted a detailed proposal of expedition activities and personnel. Kellas was a pioneering Himalayan explorer and mountaineer who spent nearly the last 20 years of his working life as a member of the chemistry faculty at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London. He remains to this day a surprisingly unknown figure, despite his noteworthy contributions to high-altitude physiology and exploration. He was almost certainly the first person to apply state-of-the-art knowledge of high-altitude physiology to field investigations at altitudes over 6000m. Additionally, it is extremely likely that he had spent more time above 6000m than anyone else on Earth by the time of his death in 1921 (during the British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Everest and Conquest in the Himalaya"
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Copyright © 2011 Richard Sale and George Rodway.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Prologue,
Introduction,
Chapter 1: The Early Quest for Extreme Altitude,
Introduction,
Laying the Foundation,
Box: Discovering and Naming the World's Highest Mountain,
Box: Sir George Everest,
Box: Oxygen and Altitude,
Box: Alexander Mitchell Kellas,
Mountaineering Equipment and Clothing,
The Pre-Everest Years: Considerations of a Physiological Nature,
Breaching the 8000m Barrier,
The Lessons of the 1922 Everest Expedition,
Everest: 1924 to the Second World War,
Box: Did Mallory and Irvine Reach the Summit?,
Chapter 2: Reaching the Highest Summits,
Box: Frostbite,
Box: Tenzing Norgay,
Box: The Closed Circuit Oxygen System and the Ascent of Everest's South Summit,
Box: Ed Hillary,
The Remaining 8000m Peaks,
Chapter 3: The Next Generation,
The Silver Hut,
Everest in the 1960s and 1970s,
Box: Tom Hornbein,
Box: High-altitude Illnesses,
Box: Reinhold Messner,
Box: Peter Habeler,
Box: Spirits on the Wind: Hallucinations at High Altitude,
Box: Cosmic Rays and High-altitude Climbers,
Chapter 4: The Slippery Slope,
Commercialism,
Ambition and Competence,
Box: Dexamethasone,
Morality and Ambition,
Box: Sherpas,
Chapter 5: Redefining the Game,
Box: Finding Mallory,
Box: Fast Ascents,
Physiology in the New Century,
Everest Today,
Box: V[O.sub.2] Max and Other Measures of Interest,
Everest – The Risks,
Box: Hypothermia,
The Future,
Notes,
Index,