Extreme Endurance/Ghoulishly Extreme

They're driven to succeed.  Having committed themselves to the venture, they must summit the mountain.  The window of opportunity is rare and it is slim.  They must take advantage of any and all opportunities to ascend the last, most dangerous portion of their clamber to success.  There is money, ambition, reputation and a dash of narcissistic appeal in the heady brew.

Climbers reach the Hillary Step portion of the climb to the summit of Mt Everest. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

 

And the adventurous mountaineers, with the considerable assistance of their more capable, agile, experienced and physically enduring Sherpas, plod on through vicious weather conditions and extreme geological environments to succeed at their goal.   Countless people have determined that they will conquer that mountain.  Many have.

And  then there are those who remain on the mountain, in perpetuity.  Perhaps not for an eternity, but until they may no longer remain there. They have become exhausted, incapable of thinking rationally, of defending themselves from the elements, of brain instructing body to act.  And there they sit, or remain prostate, unmoving, silent reminders to those who pass, averting their eyes.

Except for the very new deaths that have occurred in places where they cannot be ignored.  Say, for example, still clipped to those ropes that climbers must use to haul themselves into position, one after the other.  Climbers who have to clip and then unclip themselves to pass over a body hanging there on the mountain.  Carrying on, forcing their minds to concentrate on their survival, not someone else's death.

"There was another man who was almost dead.  He was sitting attached to an anchor and he was rocking and I just thought it was a dead body rocking in the wind, but as we passed he raised his arm and looked at us.  He didn't know anyone was there.  He was almost dead.  He was dead when we came back down".  These are those people so dedicated to their goal that they will pass by another human in mortal distress.

To stop and attempt to help, to form a brigade to assist, to bring that dying man down to a lower level where oxygen could be restored, where medical aid could be applied, would mean surrendering one's own goal to succeed to the summit.  Unthinkable.  Although it has been done, in the past, by those whose standards and values encompassed compassion leading to offering help in the knowledge that time will offer other opportunities to summit...

"There was a single rope attached to the mountain and you have to pass people on ridges that are only wide enough for one set of feet, and you are literally climbing over other people to get back down again", reported one adventurous young woman, a medical student at Southampton University, who found the experience more terrifying than rewarding.

This is a mountain-climbing expedition that does not benefit from countless people attempting to realize their dreams of success, creating a back-up of others behind them awaiting their ascent so that they may begin their own, over treacherous terrain, where a very narrow trail exists, and occasionally the only means of moving forward and upward is with the aid of a dangling rope that can only be accessed carefully, one-by-one.

Moreover, those crowded conditions mean that the long waits before the trails could be clear to proceed, would bring the climbers to a late-afternoon, and dangerous time lag.  When the optimum time to reach the summit is ten in the morning, so the descent can begin and conclude at an equally early time of day.  The later one waits to achieve the peak, the more dangerous the descent becomes.  And it is in the descent at the eight-thousand-metre death-zone level where death waits.

Four victims of their own ambitions died above the South Col camp, the last camp before the summit.  In the area famously recognized as the death zone.  Where extreme cold can freeze a person to death who lingers too long; where oxygen deprivation can cause the kind of irreparable mental and physical distress that will make a person linger too long, because he becomes unaware...

Shriya Shah-Klorfine, a Nepali-Canadian woman whose life's ambition was to ascend Mount Everest was so passionate about her ambition that she refused to listen to the three Sherpas whom she had hired to guide her to the mountain peak.  Too late in the day to proceed, and she was far too exhausted.  But she insisted that they struggle on, and she was rewarded by standing on the peak of Mount Everest.

Those three Sherpas, who were forced to leave the dying woman on the descent in abysmal weather conditions to save their own lives, have made an effort to return, to retrieve her body and return it to her family.  They partially succeeded, then had to surrender to inclement, dangerous conditions, determined to try again.  Her last words evidently were "Save me".

And the Sherpas will attempt to save her body from remaining forever on the slopes of the mountain in the death zone.  If they can, before the season abruptly shuts down, as it is destined to.