George Mallory was the first person who said "Because it's there" to explain why he wanted to climb Everest. He died up there in 1924, and it's unclear whether he ever reached the summit. Ever since, that phrase has been the explanation people give for wanting to do something that doesn't have much point (in the eyes of other people), particularly climb a given mountain.



I think of my interest in hearing about the fate of expeditions up Mount Everest as a form of collecting because I feel the same passion for a story about it as that person who finds a different shaped thimble or unusual coin. I watch all the documentaries and read the news stories about it that I can.

It's not a consuming passion, though: I don't have a shelf full of books, and don't feel the need to purchase the DVDs. But I am pleased that in my jaded every day life, coming across a news item about Mount Everest tweaks my imagination.

What got me thinking about this the other day was the news item that four more people died coming down Mount Everest. Nearly 4,000 people have climbed Mount Everest since 1953 when Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first scaled it, and more than 200 people have died. This is prime season, and it gets very crowded up there, so the ascent and descent are slowed down, making it riskier, especially when storms come up.

I was first drawn to Everest by stories of the 1996 climbing season when 15 people died trying to reach the top of the mountain, eight of them on May 10 - 11, 1996.

It came out that if a person paid enough money they can get a sherpa to carry them up the mountain on his back, and we heard about all the trash, including discarded oxygen bottles, and dead bodies accumulating along the trail to the summit. Conditions up there are so extreme, corpses are just left in place, and people are lucky to get down alive, much less pick up after themselves. But this is when we first started hearing about how commercialized it had become.

Picturing all that litter brought to me a human element that I'd never thought of before, and I started paying more attention to the stories about climbing Everest.



No, I'll never climb Mount Everest myself, but my imagination soars to the heights.