mountaineering

watch full-screen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bos_FCt4sxg

yuck

I just watched Free Solo on the plane. It was soooo good but then I couldn't sleep after. I did not like the gf arc and could've done without it but she seems like a nice person and they obviously made it work. Both seem to have vast amounts of patience.

Let's climb the Matterhorn...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ2BSHNgTlo

Finally saw Free Solo today. I wasn't prepared for the emotional wallop of it. Christ.

never know if it's a good or a bad sign when i start rereading jon krakauer's INTO THIN AIR

ppl whose day is almost certainly going worse than yrs: the climbers on everest 10-11 may 1996 :(

That's one of the few books I genuinely read 'in one sitting'. Fantastic (and grim as all hell).

anyone interested in the mystery of mallory and irvine shd probably be checking out michael tracy’s blog and youtube accounts: tracy sets up a detailed and dryly meticulous counter to the standard readings, of the route M&I took and whether they reached to summit (he thinks yes) and finally how some of the mystery actually (needlessly) arose

(tldr on the last point: it arose via edward norton’s unexplained news-release obfuscation of noel odell’s famous final sighting of the pair as they climbed “with alacrity” etc etc — tho why norton did this and why odell went along with it are not so far explored as far as i've spotted)

ps pleased to say it’s NOT *that* michael tracy (who spells his name w/an extra e)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGRCaGjZf0

just to expand on this (as I spent a long evening yesterday reading all tracy’s replies to all his youtube, some patient and some not so much)

it looks like tracy’s evolving a kind of triple theory why the myth of the modern or ridge route is now so embedded on the internet (by contrast he believes mallory and irvine traversed below the ridge towards the grand aka the norton couloir and then probably took what’s called the “zig zag route” up to the third step, that odell saw them at the third step, and that from there they very likely summited — and basically came adrift much later, on the way back, boned tired and dehydrated, when one of them slipped from the ice axe location and pulled them both off to their deaths. much of his work is suggesting where perhaps irvine’s body might be — he has some photos which I personally find it hard to decode)

anyway “zig zag route” is not currently the dominant narrative, for three reasons as he tells it

i: the expedition’s own history of itself: tracy believes that, shortly after noel odell’s original version of his sighting (at the third step at 12.50) was published in various places, expedition leader edward norton first promulgated a wildly different version of this sighting (first step some hours earlier) and then persuaded odell to fudge a comprise version and claim forever after to have possibly been confused, possibly between the first first and second steps. both of these, even given odell’s original timing, make summiting highly unlikely. there is evidence that odell did not in private accept that he had been confused or mistaken — which suggests he was (in public) taking one for the team, for reasons that (to me) seem opaque. there is documentation of the changing story, except for a key message which has conveniently gone missing. tracy says that norton’s deception is more interesting to him than his motives: though he also gestures gently towards reasons of high imperial state, given that colonialist hyper-weirdo frances younghusband was both president of the royal geographical society and chairman of the everest committee at the relevant time, and some of the reason there was an expedition at all (tibet was very reluctant) was of course the brits spying on russia lol

ii: china’s gatekeeping: china (bcz tibet) is how you access the northern route, which is the route at issue. assuming M&I did not summit, then hillary and tensing were the first up, via the southern route out of nepal, in 1953, and a chinese expedition in 1960 were the first up via the northern route, and specifically via the ridge or modern route. the chinese summit is controversial! reinhold messner for example thinks they did not summit and just faked their achievement beyond the second step (messner is tbc also a bit of weirdo). acc.tracy the the chinese are very discouraging of the notion that the mallory zig zag route is possible and permit no one to attempt it or explore it (tbf there are also safer concerns, like climbers on the ridge kick lethal rocks down on yr head): messner’s legendary solo sprint-summit w/o oxygen went up the grand or norton couloir but not up the zig zag, which remains unclimbed unless mallory and irvine used it in 1924.

iii: the mess after the discovery of mallory’s body in 1999: tracy claims that this important discovery was absolutely botched in forensic terms, and that ever since the big corporations and publications backing expeditions linked to it have been covering up their incompetence, rubbishing anything but the ridge route theory, amplifying both the “mystery” (bcz mystery sells copies of national geographic, the main disney-owned publication in question) and the fact that mallory could never have claimed the second step (an obstacle he explicitly said more than once he had no intention of attempting), plus just uncritically sucking up to the chinese version. tracy has absolutely uncovered a lot of inconsistencies in stories and is good at minor mallory myth-busting and sternly pointing out that ppl do fib a lot when various things are at stake, including pride and of course money (in real life he’s an attorney, tho he’s also an accomplished climber who’s been up everest north route and unsuccessfully searched for irvine’s body (too much snow that year).

all three of these element are obviously conspiracy theories in the classic sense — tho this fact doesn’t by itself invalidate them (sometimes ppl do conspire!) — and beyond the material sometimes gets deep into the detailed weeds. tracy talks a bit too sweepingly about the “post-truth society” as if this is a term we all use in a similar way, but it’s evidently a shorthand for his own exasperation at how hard it is to get the foax who claim to care abt the facts in this story to actually take the actions they would if they did care

claimed s/b climbed, my posh roots showing thar

one plausible if entirely petty reason for norton's deception is that he himself (norton) had failed to summit just days before via the grand couloir, at that time climbing higher than anyone else in recorded history. if mallory and irvine didn't summit, then this record stood from 1924-1953. so was he defending his altitude record against something that was at best uncertain?

tracy seems unpersuaded by this motivation however, since, unlike mallory and irvine, norton was climbing without oxygen: his altitude record without oxygen stood (i think) until messner's various ascents, solo and otherwise, in the 1970s? norton had also suggested the zig zag route to mallory as potentially climbable.

(actually a swiss team got higher than norton but not to the top in 1952: they had oxygen but the equipment was fucked so it's debateable which column they shd go in)

The 1960 Chinese expedition ran out of oxygen on the way up, so they're another in the question mark column. I believe they summited - given their descriptions of the third step and onward. I think Messner is sore simply because they did it without oxygen. Synott's book The Third Pole reviews much of the unearthed documentation of the 1960 expedition (and indirectly interviews the last surviving summiter) and the political back-and-forth.

I wish that Tracy wasn't so dismissive of the 2019 expedition to look for Irvine and his camera but I think he's hung up a narrative of brave adventureous men carrying their banners with strange devices. Synott's tales of looting abandoned tents, resting up against frozen dead, and the constant spectre of having to climb up the second step ladder next to a dead climber that's hanging upside down. All of this is set against the current political economy of Everest itself. I'm still kinda shocked at the entertainment complex that's formed around Indian families sending their kids up to the summit in exchange for a big cash payout.

Also discussed in Synott's book - sometime between 1975 (when Wang Hongbao reports "old English dead") and 2008, the CTMA found and removed Irvine's body. Mallory's body seems to have been removed too, but that's more unclear.

tracy's recent youtubes are well worth catching up on; the story is very rich now and i like the way he painstakingly explores each separate element (the watch, the rocks, the ice axes, the oxygen bottles, mallory's planning): he talks a lot abt synott's book, which he likes (with reservations). he doesn't believe the chinese have removed irvine's body -- as he puts in one of the most recent (my paraphrase), "they don't care about mallory and irvine, they care about their own 1960 summit being respected and acknowledged"

is he driven by a romantic and idealised vision of M&I's climb? i mean, he's pretty unromantic about both of them -- i think tbh he's more driven (as a lawyer when he isn't an everest-hobbyist) by irritation and frustration when ppl lie or obscure the truth or mess with evidence, or invent unevidenced explanations of anomalies in a story, whether it's norton back in 1924 or the chinese or the 1999 expedition (which synott is very critical of)* or the 2019 expedition's evasiveness about its drone footage and so on

i find his "post-truth" riddles fairly exasperating but his point that ppl in this context very often fib abt themselves -- and that a lot of the journalism that cover this field is bad at pushing back against that -- seems p well taken

*i haven't read the synott book, which looks genuinely very interesting in a wider sense than this one micro-topic

We interrupt this thread's programming of "Historical Himalayas" with a special new bulletin... Eberhard Jurgalski at 8000ers.com finally issued his report after a decade of research on who has actually been to the true summit of all 8000m peaks and who only got near to it.

Rumors had swirled in the climbing community for months. Eberhard Jurgalski and his team at 8,000’ers.com were about to release research that would change the history of alpinism. Well, the bomb has arrived.

History may or may not change but, at least, it has provided material for both heated debate and quiet reflection. Basically, Jurgalski states that only three people have really summited all 14 of the world’s 8,000m peaks.

In the new list, the first person to summit all of them was not Reinhold Messner, but American Ed Viesturs. Both he and the second on the list, Veikka Gustafsson of Finland, completed the challenge without supplementary oxygen. In fact, Gustafsson and Viesturs climbed together on a number of expeditions.

The bronze medal goes to Nirmal Purja who, on the same list, loses his Project Possible speed record. According to Jurgalski, Purja did not summit Manaslu and Dhaulagiri during his Project Possible race in 2019. Instead, he only reached sub-summits. He only properly topped out during follow-up climbs last fall.

Moreover, Jurgalski claims that Purja knew from the outset exactly where the actual summits of those two mountains were, "because we spoke about it months earlier," Jurgalski said. "Nearly secretly, he 'corrected' it in autumn 2021, when he went to the true summits of both mountains."

The NYT has the background on everything as of a year back.

I dunno... I look at something like the summit of Manaslu and can't really go hard on this issue but if you wanna claim that you went to the top you gotta go. Otherwise, drones, gps, other climbers, and the internet massive can and will rat you out.

https://www.journeyera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CLIMB-MANASLU-MOUNTAIN-NEPAL-0082.jpg

I remember reading Edward Whymper's book when I was a kid. And now...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_nFlIAWFM

(terrible background music ahead - keep it muted & play yr own)

i also read whymper's book as a kid: it had victorian woodcuts which were mostly scenic (and therefore of no interest to me) and then a section depicted what happened to whymper's team as they descended the matterhorn having successfully been the first to get to the top (basically on of the least experienced climbers slipped, cannoned into the most experienced, knockign them both off -- then the rope meant to hold them broke and several of them fell to their deaths; whymper and two aline guides survived)

anyway i found these woodcuts super-spooky and returhed to gaze in horror at them many times

i don't have the book to hand but checking GiS suggests that the engravings were actually by whymper himself -- though there's also some of the incident by gustav doré

https://www.futilitycloset.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-06-22-an-apparition.jpg

The engraving of the apparition is what has always stuck in my head. I hadn't realized that folks were working on the geometry of fogbow/ice crystals and may have discovered the answer

to pick thru the puritan brainwork of myself as a very serious 10-yr-old nerd:
i: i was huffy that whymper's big official engraving (above) misrepresented the scene as depicted in his better sketch (sketch can be see at the link) where the lines of the crosses are plainly more curved -- and therefore more likely perhaps to have a "scientific" than a "supernatural" cause
ii: i concluded it could not be "supernatural" bcz 4 ppl had died and there plainly are not 4 crosses. QED! facts and logic!

reading up on it now i discovered what i didn't grasp then: which is that this was a team very hurriedly cobbled together bcz whymper discovered that a colleague-rival was making a serious attempt on the same day. from nearby hotels he put together a group of fellow brit scramblers and local guides, who didn't all know one another at all -- and one of whom (the guy who caused the fall) was very inexperienced and really shouldn't have been there. whymper got to the top first; the rival saw this from below and despondently broke off his own attempt (who cares who's second); then on the way down the inexperienced guy slipped and pulled three others off the mountainside :(

in the aftermath whymper was slammed (and almost cancelled) for various assumed failings -- from making up the apparition to cutting the rope that saved the other three from being pulled off as well -- and it became an intense media talking-point for a while. queen victoria apparently considered banning brits from all rock climbing! (not sure how this would have been enforced in e.g. switzerland… )

Bummed to hear about what happened to Dmitry Golovchenko on Gasherbrum IV.
https://explorersweb.com/gasherbrum-iv-ends-sadly/