Every year, I obsessively follow Everest summit attempt converge. This is Everest Season. There is a tiny sliver of time each year where the weather is marginally cooperative. A time when it’s slightly less likely that you will be buried in an avalanche, crushed by a serac or swallowed by a shifting glacier. That window is early to mid-May.
The weeks ahead are spent acclimatizing to an environment that is completely inhospitable to human life. Climbers frequently use the “climb high, sleep low” technique. This involves repeated day climbs to successively higher altitudes, sometimes laying in supplies at higher camps before returning to lower elevations to recuperate.
This year’s teams include veteran climber Conrad Anker, with National Geographic this year and a group from the Mayo Clinic who will be studying the effects of altitude on the human body.
I may write about this quite a bit here because it seems that IRL, the sentence, “An experienced Sherpa died today on the Khumbu icefall when he fell into a crevasse while crossing a ladder without clipping into the fixed ropes” is a conversation stopper.
In case you are interested, check out #oneverest on twitter or the National Geographic blog:
National Geographic Everest Blog
