Posts tagged #long read · All posts
Thirty years after the 1996 Everest disaster, Jon Krakauer's account of it remains one of the most argued-about books in adventure writing. In a National Geographic interview for the anniversary, he talks about what the disaster cost him, where he stands on the questions the book raised, and what he makes of Everest's commercialisation.
Every spring, before any climbing team sets foot on Everest, a small crew of Sherpa climbers has already been up and down the Khumbu Icefall dozens of times. They are the Icefall Doctors, and the route through the most dangerous kilometre on the mountain exists because of them. They carry aluminium ladders across crevasses that can swallow a person whole, fix ropes through a glacier that moves about a metre downhill every day, and return every few days to rebuild what the ice has shifted or collapsed. The name is not official and it is not ancient: it was coined relatively recently, and the story of how it stuck says something about how Everest operates. This post traces that history: who the Icefall Doctors are, how the role is organised, what they are paid, what gear they carry, and why the work is as respected as it is dangerous. If you have ever looked at a photograph of ladders strung across a blue-white void and wondered who put them there, this is the answer.
7summits.com spent twenty years as an expedition operator and now organises no trips at all. What it does instead is keep the record: who climbed what, and when. This is the site's own story. One expedition up Kilimanjaro on Christmas Day 1998, a company name that was too long, and two decades of guiding the same eight mountains, which is where the route guides here come from, including three that started life as printed Rucksack Readers guidebooks and have since been expanded and brought up to date, free to read. It is also what the site is today, after being rebuilt from nothing. It holds 798 7 summits finishers, several hundred guide pages in four languages, route tracks built from real GPS recordings, and a directory of who actually runs each trip on each peak. Everything free today stays free, and what comes next is doing more with what is already here.
"Green Boots", the landmark that was a person For roughly three decades, climbers on the northeast ridge of Everest passed a man in a bright-green mountaineering boot and used him as a waypoint. He had a name, almost certainly Tsewang Paljor. He was an Indian Border Security Force constable who died on the mountain during the May 1996 storm, but on the route he was known by the colour of his footwear. The body is now expected to be removed. A retrieval expedition is planned, and the circumstances that kept him there for so long are, for the first time, being addressed in public.
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