Sir Edmund Hillary, the lanky New Zealand mountaineer and explorer who with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday in Wellington.

He was 88. [link]

I had the honour of meeting him once and, awed as I was, his smile alone was enough to win me over. He was an inspiration, a great man and a gentle soul. He will truly live forever with some of us.

“All the other climbers thought the jacket was stylish and wanted to know where they could buy their own versions of the clothes!”

For those interested in climbing, you may (or may not) be surprised to know that the clothes held up extremely well to the test. Hoyland says:

“We both got too hot working on the glacier so we felt that Mallory’s clothing would have been more than adequate to climb to the top in”

You might think that all those layers must be heavy. In fact, they were lighter than today’s synthetic wear! Says, Professor Parsons (one of the project leaders):

“The results stand out as a challenge for future outdoor innovators because Mallory’s clothing and footwear was 20% and 40% lighter respectively.”

Not only were they lighter, but it seems they were also more comfortable to wear than the regular synthetic clothes. Hoyland says:

“I immediately found the underclothes warm to put on, whereas the modern polypropylene underwear feels cold and clammy”

So, the clothes were warm, comfortable to wear, made to fit and to top it all off, the clothes were not as stinky as the polypropylene stuff tends to get. Says, Hoyland:

“[The polypropylene underclothes and outer fleeces are pre-sized and] are unforgiving in stretch, and begin to smell unpleasant if worn for more than a couple of days. There is a harsh synthetic sensation next to your skin. By contrast, the Mallory clothing was made to fit me.

All is not well however, there were some problems (nothing’s perfect!):

“The immediate problem was fastening buttons with cold fingers.”

Despite this drawback, this finding is pretty cool. I’ve never been a big fan of the synthetic stuff for the usual reasons: it doesn’t fit well, it smells and it can get pretty uncomfortable at times. This is nice.

For the full article click here.

Also, apparently yet another climber, an Australian named Lincoln Hall, who had summitted on Thursday, and who had lost a German team-mate, started to hallucinate and weaken on his descent. The Sherpas who were with him radioed the team leader at base camp (or a lower camp at any rate, I assume) who told them to leave him since they were out of oxygen. He was basically given up for dead. But surprise, surprise, he was found to have survived the night and was discovered alive the next day by an American climber, Dan Mazur. Rescue operations are under way.

Wow, it really looks like they're having good weather up there, with people summitting left, right and center!

Things have taken an interesting turn recently, though. It seems that of the other 40-odd people who summitted that day, all were in a group, and (this is key) they all passed by a dying David Sharp on their ascent. Sharp, who had already ascended, summitted and was descending alpine style (that means solo), was lying there frozen to the point where he could only move his eyes (I couldn’t find any information about the details of his death online).

The main defence put by Mark Inglis [that's the double-amputee] is not that the rescuers would have put themselves at risk but that David Sharp was “effectively dead”. Frozen, he could only move his eyes. If this diagnosis is correct, it is extremely unlikely that he would have survived the descent. No amount of help would have saved his life.

At first, I was a little outraged. However, having done a wee bit of climbing myself (four trips to various parts of the Indian Himalayas, climbing up to ~16,000 feet) I think we should desist to climb on the high horse and begin moralizing. Bear with me for just a minute. The BBC’s resident medical ethicist Daniel Sokol has written about this incident. He distinguished between what is justifiable and what is excusable. He says

An act is morally justified if you can show that it was the right thing to do. An act is excusable if, even though what you did was wrong, the circumstances were such that you cannot really be blamed.

So, I guess for all of us who watch Law and Order, an excusable act is one where the defendant pleads “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” Although what the defendant did was wrong, its excusable because (s)he’s clinically insance (assuming (s)he really is insane, and all that). Given that the forty-odd climbers were in extremes of weather, at a high altitude with low oxygen, and most likely at their limits of endurance, this act is morally excusable, but not morally justified – so says Sokol.

I think that, to some extent, I agree with him. Assigning blame right now is pointless. Its not going to bring the dead climber back to life. And also, it can be brutal up there and to even begin to contemplate some kind of rescue procedure (ie, taking him down to base camp) might be outside the realm of one’s physical abilities at that point. This is, of course, speculation based on my own experience – its very hard to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the decision to leave him behind was made. What do you think?

Here’s the BBC article by Daniel Sokol.

However, all is not well, since this poor 34-year old Brit didn’t quite make it back down after reaching the summit. The article also says that:

On Thursday, 42 people made it to the summit as the Everest season entered its busiest spell.

Damn, the weather must be good.

For all of you out there who know a little about mountaineering, and who’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air [which, incidentally, I highly recommend] know the level to which (in terms of commercialism) ascending Everest has descended. They also know that Everest is not the most technically difficult mountain to climb. That dubious honor goes to K2.

K2 is considered to be one of the most dangerous mountains to climb and it has taken many climbers lives. During 1998 and 1999 noone managed to summit the mountain. During 2000 however, over 20 people have made it the top already. The total number or successful ascents of K2 is still less than 200, which can be compared to Mount Everests 241 ascents during 1998 and 1999 alone.

This is, of course, not to diminish the achievement of the Everest summit-reachers in any way. Everest not being as technically challenging as K2 does not imply that it is not technically challenging in itself. My point is that Everest has a certain glamour surrounding it which makes reaching the summit something which is not only in great demand, but also highly demanding. Climbing is a serious business and I just hope that those who climb (and particularly those who lead) fully understand the serious aspects of it before they get into the business aspects.

In the mood for word-play this afternoon, I guess…

Read more at BBC News here.