Professional climbers often insist that their drive differs from that of the majority of clients who pay to climb Everest, a group that is frequently accused of the lowliest of motivations: bagging the world’s highest mountain for bragging rights. For everyone else, however, motivations are often difficult to explain, even to oneself.
Will bodies like Paljor’s remain in their place forever, or can something be done? And will we ever decide that Mount Everest simply is not worth it? As I discovered in this two-part series, the answer is a story of control, danger, grief and surprises.įor Sherpas and others hired to work on Everest, the reason they keep coming back is that it’s a high-paying job. For the rest of us, however, the idea that a corpse could remain in plain sight for nearly 20 years can seem mind-boggling. Mountaineers largely view such matters as tragic but unavoidable. ( Read part one of this story, exploring who Paljor was and how he got there). When snow cover is light, climbers have had to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak. For nearly 20 years, Paljor’s body – popularly known as Green Boots, for the neon footwear he was wearing when he died – has rested near the summit of Everest’s north side. Perhaps most well-known of all are the remains of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who lost his life in the infamous 1996 blizzard.
Most are concealed from view, but some are familiar fixtures on the route to Everest’s summit. Climbers and Sherpas lie tucked into crevasses, buried under avalanche snow and exposed on catchment basin slopes – their limbs sun-bleached and distorted. No one knows exactly how many bodies remain on Mount Everest today, but there are certainly more than 200. “But when I say our sport is a hazardous one, I do not mean that when we climb mountains there is a large chance that we shall be killed, but that we are surrounded by dangers which will kill us if we let them.”
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