Everest Base Camp under snow in Nepal. – Photo by Martin Jernberg
IN most faiths, mountains are revered as the home of deities and thus should be respected. Atheists also respect mountain summits for various reasons.
Whatever one’s belief, when reaching the summit of a mountain and catching one’s breath, there is often a time to reflect and view the world below and the heavens above.
The Italian poet Petrarch, climbed Mont Ventoux (1,912 metres high) for pleasure, in Provence, France, in 1336 and this achievement, revealed in his writings, more than encapsulated the freedom of spirit that most climbers embrace when reaching a peak.
In Biblical terms, Mount Sinai was the place where Moses received the 10 Commandments. Mountains are, indeed, spiritual places.
In 1953, my father took me for a treat to our local cinema in West Cornwall, England, to see the new film ‘The Ascent of Everest’.
As a seven-year-old, this ascent of Mount Everest kindled my passion to follow in the footsteps of Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Sadly, age has caught up with me but I still retain glorious memories of climbing mountains in the UK, the Austrian Alps and not least, in 2000 when I reached Low’s Peak at 4,104 metres on Mount Kinabalu, in Sabah, along with 26 of my Sixth Form English students. The view from that summit, as dawn breaks, is one of the wonders of the natural world.
In September, as a guest of a former Chinese student, I aim to visit northwest Yunnan Province in China, near to the Tibetan Plateau, to walk in the Himalayan foothills at over 2,500 metres above mean sea level. A boyhood dream will be almost realised.
It was that 1953 film which persuaded me that, with determination and hard study at school, I could take myself out of my parochial environment in West Cornwall to a larger world and thence to Oxford University to read Geography. There, I acquired further research lust, through inspirational tutorials in ethnology, geomorphology and meteorology.
Climbs in life
As a youngster, health and safety issues were yet to be taken seriously. Self-taught, I climbed high oak trees in the fields beyond my house, although not without an occasional fall into the shallow stream below.
From the branches of the trees, I was at one with nature. Later in life, I learned to climb up and abseil down sheer rock faces and to use an ice axe to secure a handhold on a slippery snow-ridden slope with a 200 metres drop below me whilst gaining a Mountain Leadership Certificate in the Lake District National Park, UK.
On that course, sharing a three-man tent, I stayed awake for three nights watching icicles develop from the tent-roof.
A few years later, and perhaps overconfidently, a colleague and I scaled, on a whim, a near vertical and difficult climb, without ropes, on the Millstone Grit rocks of Stannage Edge in the Peak District National Park.
It brought home to me the risks I was taking as John shouted up to me, “Remember, Alan, that you have a wife and two lovely daughters to support.”
Foolhardy perhaps? Ten years later, I harnessed my eight-year-old son, who was clad with my motorcycle crash helmet and his climbing boots, on an abseil down a steep granite escarpment tor in West Cornwall.
I had climbed this tor as a youngster many moons before. His achievement and enjoyment that afternoon led to his later spirit of adventure.
Our lives are all about considered risk-taking but, today, we are bombarded with insurance policies and health and safety matters.
Most children born today are wrapped up in swathes of cotton wool, at home and beyond, and they will never be allowed the chance of testing their mental and physical capabilities when faced with uphill climbs.
As an educationalist over now 49 years of my life, for many a year I have had to fill out and also approve somewhat meaningless risk assessment forms, for them to be then approved by an assessor up the line for field trips and expeditions.
Accidents do happen at home and in the wider world. We cannot forever keep our children away from risks and, with reasonable common sense, should allow them to explore life beyond the confines of our households and classrooms to get truly close to nature.
World’s highest mountains
Mount Everest, or in Nepali ‘Sagarmatha’, standing majestic at 8,848 metres, is the peak of our planet. With temperatures at its summit varying from minus 19 degrees Celsius in summer to minus 60 Celsius in winter and with unpredictable winds of up to 274km per hour in nigh oxygen-less air above 7,900 metres, life is imperilled.
Just 3,000 metres above the summit on a jet airliner, I once looked down onto its peak and marvelled at the other snow-clad summits and glaciers of our wonderful world.
There, I was travelling in the fastest jet stream in the world and thus reached my destination 45 minutes earlier than the allotted time of landing.
Below the summit of this mountain, on its inhospitable rock ledges, yaks, goats, red pandas and snow leopards exist. Today, there are only 7,000 snow leopards left in the whole of Asia.
At the Everest Base Camp, the foot of the Khumbu Glacier falls with its many deep crevasses and seracs (pinnacles of ice) – all to be crossed by prospective climbers.
Beyond that zone on an ever-melting glacier, which moves at an average rate of three metres per day, there are daily rock falls cascading downslope.
Everest is an ever-rising mountain, not unlike Mount Kinabalu (the 20th highest peak in our world), where tectonic plates still move, thrusting land plates even higher as plates collide.
In April 2015, the Nepal earthquake and its aftershocks saw a total disaster at the Everest Base with very many lives lost and many injured climbers through a surge in the Khumbu glacier and subsequent rock-falls.
Amongst those who lost their lives were the Sherpas, the porters and guides of climbing expeditions. Recalling this tragedy reminds me of the Kadazandusun folk who lost their lives in the tragic June earthquake at Ranau and Mount Kinabalu in the same year.
Both Sherpas and Kadazandusuns are renowned as equally humble, compassionate and generous people, accustomed to living at altitude, and, thus, are outstanding leaders to assist expeditions on their quests to reach mountain peaks.
Hillary and Tenzing are seen in a photograph from John Henderson’s collection. – Photo from Dirk Pons
Why climb mountains, hills and crags?
New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, late in life, was asked by a reporter, “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?”
In his modest and unassuming style, he simply stated, “Because it was there!”
Little did both Tenzing and Hillary realise that the summit they had climbed in 1953 was composed of tropical seas some 450 million years ago and contained crinoid-fossils. It was only 50 million years ago that the Himalayan mountain chain was ‘jacked up’, when the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate.
Throughout our lives, we will face obstacles such as mountains to climb and conquer, albeit in family situations, at work or coping with illness and the bereavement of loved ones.
Climbing to the summit of our nearest hill or mountain certainly requires energy but sitting on the peak, after catching our breath, allows us to view the wondrous world below to meditate and reflect on life and upon the risks we may have taken.