Oct
04
2007
Poor old Peak 15. It’s like a brilliant woman whom men see only for her perfect body. Into the Thin Air of Everest: Mountain of Dreams, Mountain of Doom portrays Everest as remarkable mostly because of its recreational opportunities, which afford humans infinite potential to chalk up “firsts”:
- First attempt
- First successful summit
- First via the south
- First by English [Chinese] [American] team
- First without oxygen
- First without porters
- First solo
- First American woman to summit without dying (surname: Allison!)
- First climb in the name of international peace…
It reminds me of those toys I used to see when M was little: Baby’s First Purse, Baby’s First Tackle Box, Baby’s First Golf Clubs, Baby’s First Laptop Computer Playset, Baby’s First Cell Phone, Baby’s First Baby…
So, back to the movie: the production style is offensive, produced in Fear Factor style with driven techno music and dizzying sequences of oddly angled images. The script bugged me, too: it kept referring to the mountain as though it’s a scheming enemy to be subdued: climbers attack it, assault it, conquer it.
On another level, though, the film is worthwhile. It’s the only one I’ve seen in which a present-day Sir Edmund Hillary appears, and there are interviews with a bunch of other climbers important in Everest’s mountaineering history. The ones active before the 70s are pretty cool people: true adventurers and athletes. But the newer crowd appears vacuous. Some are there as entrepreneurs, leading the inexperienced up the mountain for $60,000 a head. Others seem more dazzled by the fancy, high-tech climbing gear than by climbing.
Anyway, for the Fear Factor generation there’s footage of people with faces black with frostbite, and the last minutes of various people shortly before they toppled to their deaths, and some of the frozen corpses that speckle the mountainside. One in five people dies in trying to reach the summit.
Sep
29
2007
Netflix description:
“Celebrate 50 years of mountaineering magic with this awe-inspiring documentary replete with sensational footage of Mount Everest. The award-winning National Geographic crew tracks the three children of mountain-climbing icons Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first two people ever to conquer the fabled peak.”
My thoughts…
This was one step below so-so. The story was shallow, the adult children of the early Everest adventurers were uninteresting, and even the scenery was bland. Much better was Everest: The Death Zone.
Aug
15
2007
Since Cheryl got back from Nepal in June we’ve had a couple chances to get together for yacking and planning. She told me what I might encounter with respect to food, lodging, sanitation, culture, religion, topography, climate. She looked over my heap of camping and river rafting supplies and made the welcome pronouncement that I’ve got what I need, except for my Holy Grail: painless boots.
We made preliminary plans for a route through the Khumbu region, the most strenuous of the three popular trekking areas. I always knew that trekking would be a stretch; now I know that it’s a stretch past the point of snapping: by far the biggest physical challenge I’ve ever faced. Okay, so that’s not saying much. But there was that whitewater expedition in eastern Canada, and the ill-fated backcountry ski-camping trip, and a lot of Irish leaping. Beyond those, a walk around the block is at the limit of what I do without griping.
Our thought is to fly into the Lukla airport (such as it is; see above) from Kathmandu and head toward Gokyo (el. 4750 m.) by way of Phakding > Namche Bazaar > Phortse Thanga > Dole > Machhermo. Once there, Cheryl suggested, we may want to … oh … pop over to the Everest Base Camp (5545 m.) only a ridge away. Did you know that 5545 m = 18,192 feet? The whole trip should take 2.5 to 3 weeks.
Two weeks ago Cheryl and I took a little hike up Marin Avenue which climbs 800 feet in less than a mile. Cheryl hinted that she might surreptitiously evaluate my performance. As we started up the hill I took heart in her assurance that she is a very slow hiker. Slow, my butt. She left me in the dust half a block later as I gasped like a large-mouth bass. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and less pretty a feeling, but I finally dragged my carcass up to where a perky Cheryl stood absorbing the panorama of the SF Bay. “If you can get so you can make it up this hill without any effort,” she encouraged, “you’ll have no trouble in Nepal.”
To my amazement, the poor performance of my teeny lungs and wobbly muscles didn’t provoke her to rescind her invitation to Nepal. “Why not?” I asked. “Because you didn’t whine.”
I’ve tried that same hike twice since then: two near-death experiences that made me decide I had to bite the bullet and … argh … join a gym. Today I did my first workout. The iPod Nano I won two years ago has finally come into its own. I get to listen to my old hippie stoner music as large machines fling my unwilling limbs in all directions.
