Horrors of Mount Everest

The 2019 Everest Traffic Jam and the Terrifying Death Zone Over 300 people have died on Mount Everest. Anywhere above 8000 meters is called the Death Zone. And maybe most disturbingly, over half of the people who have died on Mount Everest are still up there, never being taken back down or recovered. Mount Everest is terrifying, and let's learn about some of the horrors of Mount Everest. First of all, be sure to subscribe or follow on Spotify wherever you are if you want more videos like this. This is about part three of my series of horrors, the deep Ocean and then Horrors of Antarctica. So I hope you guys like this series. I have an Instagram which you should totally join, and I also have a Discord where we talk and hang out, so join that if you're interested. I talk in there a lot, but let's get into this. So we're going to talk about the 2019 Everest traffic Jam. People call it a traffic jam because that's the easiest shorthand, like name for it. But what it really was is a jam of climbers, like human beings, bunched up on a narrow section of fixed ropes near the top, moving so slowly that a lot of them were basically standing still. And that's where this very famous photo comes from. And here's what that photo was actually showing. So you're high on the route near the summit, clipped into a fixed line, and the path is narrow enough that you can't just step off to the side and pass people whenever you feel like it. So the pace becomes controlled by whoever is slowest up ahead. If the person in front of you stops to breathe, you have to stop. If a group ahead is struggling, then everyone behind them stacks up. And if someone needs to clip or unclip or is scared on a steep section, then the whole line has to wait. The reason it got that way in 2019 at this time is that there were a lot of people aiming for the same short summit window. Reuters reported in Nepal issued a record of 381 permits that year, and when you add guides and Sherpas, more than 800 people were trying to reach the summit. Once the weather gives a handful of viable summit days, teams push together and the route near the top simply doesn't have the capacity to move that many bodies quickly. And when you're delayed up there, the problem is time. You're burning through oxygen and energy while you're barely moving, you're getting colder, you're spending extra time, time at extreme altitude where your judgment and coordination get worse. And the schedule you planned, like with turn around times and oxygen usage, how late you'll be descending, that all starts to slip. And really that's why like crowding is a lot more than annoying when it comes to Mount Everest. It's dangerous. It can be like honestly. And you can see how this shows up in the reporting from the deaths themselves. On May 24th, 2019, Reuters reported 3 Indian climbers died on the crowd outed slopes and a logistics agency involved said that one of them died of dehydration, exhaustion and tiredness after being caught in the jam of climbers near the summit. By the end of the season, Reuters reported 11 deaths on Everest, 9 on the Nepali side and two on the Tibetan side, making 2019 the deadliest season since 2015. And later, when researchers tried to quantify just how extreme the bottleneck got, Reuters covered a study saying that on a single day in May 2019, 396 climbers gathered on the narrow route below the summit in the death zone. Oh, and I should probably explain what the death zone is. So on Everest, people use death zone to mean the altitude above 8000 meters, or 26,000 feet. That line gets used because once you're up there, the air pressure is so low that even breathing as hard as you can, you're still not getting enough oxygen into your body to keep functioning normal for long. You can push through it for a summit bid, but you can't live there and you can't truly recover there. The UIAA's mountain medicine write up on Everest puts it that like once you're past that 8000 meter line, the death zone begins and acclimatization doesn't really happen up there. And what that looks like in real life is just that everything gets harder and slower. You'll hear climbers describe doing simple tasks like clipping A carabiner or adjusting a mask or stepping over like a small obstacle and it taking them forever because your body is moving like it's underwater. You also get the mental side, like people get foggy, indecisive, and weirdly stubborn, which is a bad combo on a route where a small mistake can be fatal. National Geographic's Everest overview ties the death zone labeled directly to the low oxygen and the risk of serious altitude illness up there. Medically, the big monsters that people talk about are the high altitude cerebral edema, which is a brain swelling, and also high altitude pulmonary edema, which is fluid building up in the lungs. So yeah, the death zone is a real scary place to be. You got to be prepared to be up there and the bad things happening up there are extra bad. The Enduring Mystery of Mallory and Irvin's Lost Summit Next I want to talk about possibly the first people who were ever on Everest. So for the first half of the 20th century, Everest was the ultimate unconquered prize. No human being had ever stood on its summit. Multiple expeditions had tried and failed, some of them turning back just hundreds of feet from the top. The mountain had beaten everyone. And for Britain especially, reaching that summit had become a matter of national obsession. It was the post war era, The Empire fire was shrinking and standing on top of the world's highest peak felt like something that could restore a sense of national pride and greatness. Every year another expedition would head out and every year the mountain would win. But that finally changed on May 29th, 1953, when Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay and experienced Sherpa Mountaineer from Nepal, became the first people ever confirmed to reach the summit of Everest. They were a part of a British expedition, armed with the best gear, the best planning, and the benefit of every failed attempt that had come before them. The world erupted. It was a headline news globally. The mountain had finally been beaten. But here's the thing that immediately started gnawing at people. Before Hillary and Tenzing, before all of that, there were two men who might have beaten them there by nearly 30 whole years. And the reason? We're not sure is because they vanished without a trace. Their names were George Mallory and Andrew Irvin. It was 1924, and the two of them set off from their high camp on the morning of June 8th, pushing for the summit. A fellow expedition member named Noel Odell spotted them through a break in the clouds high up on the Ridge, moving toward the top just about 800 vertical feet from the summit. Then the clouds closed in and that was the last time anyone ever saw them alive. Now, George Mallory was not some reckless amateur. This guy was obsessed with Everest. It was actually Mallory who, when a journalist asked him why he wanted to climb it, gave the most famous answer in mountaineering history ever. He said quote because it's there. This was his third attempt at the mountain, and he really knew the risks better than anyone else. But Everest didn't care. The two of them disappeared somewhere in the death zone, above 8000 meters, wearing wool coats and leather boots, carrying primitive oxygen equipment. What they were attempting was, by modern standards, almost unthinkably dangerous. For 75 years, nobody knew what happened to them. Then, in 1999, a dedicated search expedition found something shocking. Mallory's body still up there on the mountain, perfectly preserved by the cold and the altitude. He was face down in the snow, his arm stretched out above him like he was trying to grab onto the mountain itself. His skin had turned a ghastly ghost, mostly white, almost like marble. He'd clearly taken a bad fall, a badly broken leg, a severed rope, injuries consistent with a serious tumbling accident. The mountain had kept him frozen in time for 3/4 of a century. But here's the thing that really makes this mystery so madding. When they found Mallory, they searched his body for something very specific, a photograph. Mallory had told people he planned to leave a photo of his wife at the summit if he made it. It was a tribute, a tradition of that photo was not on his body, which means he either left it at the top or it simply got lost somewhere in 75 years of wind and ice. There's also the camera. Mallory and Irvin were carrying a camera with them on the climb. If that camera was ever found, and if the film could somehow be developed, it could potentially show whether they reach the summit, it would really rewrite history. But that camera has never been found. Over the decade, there were tantalizing near misses about trying to find the remains of Irvin or anything that belonged to him. In 1933, climbers on another expedition found an ice axe high on the northeast Ridge, believed it to belong to Irvin, just sitting there on the slope like he'd set it down for a moment. In 1975, a Chinese climber reportedly spotted what he described as an Old English dead, which is a body near Camp 4 on The North Face. Since Mallory and Irvin were the only people known to have disappeared on that side of the mountain before 1960, it was almost certainly one of them. But no pictures were taken, no coordinates were recorded properly, and the climber died in an avalanche shortly after without being able to be interviewed in detail. And that clue died with him. Then there's the darker theory. Some Mountaineers and researchers believe that a Chinese expedition in the 1960s or 1970s actually found Irvin's body and and possibly the camera, and quietly removed them. Why? Because if that camera contained photos of Mallory and ervin at the summit, it would undermine China's claim that their 1960 expedition was the first to summit Everest from the north side. But there's no hard proof of this. Then 2024 happened 100 years to the year after ervin vanished. A National Geographic documentary team led by filmmaker and climber Jimmy Chin, the same guy behind the free winning film Free Solo, was on the central Wrong Book Glacier below Everest's north face. They weren't even specifically looking for ervin that day, they'd been forced to abandon their original plans due to weather and were exploring the glacier when one of them on the team, Eric Ropek, spotted something emerging from the ice, an old leather boot studded with the steel hobnails of 1920s climbing equipment. Inside the boot was a foot and inside the sock wrapped around that foot, it was a red name label, perfectly legible after a century on the mountain, it read AC Irvin. The team's reaction in Jimmy Chin's own words was that they were all, quote, literally running in circles dropping F bombs. Now, and this is important, the remains haven't been formally confirmed through DNA yet. The family has volunteered samples and the process is ongoing. Which I mean, you would think it's been like 2 years. It's 2026 now. You'd think that they would have gotten it done, but I couldn't find anything. I mean, I could be wrong, but I couldn't find anything. But given the name label, the style of the boot, the location, and the era, almost everyone in the mountaineering world considers it essentially certain that it is him. There are two things about this discovery that are especially important, I think. First, the remains were found at least 7000 feet lower in altitude than where Mallory's body was. That is a staggering distance. It suggests that ervin may have fallen or been carried by the glacier over a century an enormous way down the mountain. And 2nd, the rest of his body and the camera are still missing. The boot and the foot is all there is. And here's where climate change becomes important. A warming climate is thinning the snow and ice around the Himalayas, increasingly exposing the bodies of Mountaineers that have been frozen for decades. Irvin's boot almost certainly melted out of the glacier just days before the team found it. Jimmy Chin estimated it had emerged maybe a week earlier. A week later, they might have walked right past it, none the wiser. And the camera is still out there. So maybe one day we'll find it and we'll really know what happened. David Sharp, Green Boots, and the Ethics of Everest Rescue Next, I'm going to talk about David Sharp. On the Northeast Ridge route up Everest, there's a limestone alcove. Climbers call it a cave, sitting at just under 28,000 feet. Inside that cave is a body. It's been there since 1996. The climber is believed to be an Indian in Mountaineer named Sei Wang Paljoy, who died in a storm during that year's disastrous Everest season. He's wearing neon green mountaineering boots, which is how he got his nickname, Green Boots. For decades, passing his body has been a grim milestone for climbers on the Northeast route. A sign that you're getting close to the summit. He's basically a landmark, a frozen human landmark. In May 2006, A-Team reached that cave in the early hours of the morning, around 1:00 AM, and got a shock. There was a second person inside, a living one, or at least barely living. His name was David Sharp. He was 34 years old, a British Mountaineer on his third attempt to summit Everest. He was climbing solo with minimal oxygen, just two bottles for the whole climb and no radio. He wasn't wearing an oxygen mask, his eyelashes were covered in ice, and he wasn't moving. He was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees, right next to the body of green boots, as if the two of them were just resting together. The team checked on him, decided he was already in a hypothermic coma, and moved on. They didn't radio base camp. About 20 years later, another group came through. This time, Sharp actually reacted. He waved them off and according to one account, the last words he ever spoke to another human being. Where I just want to sleep. Over the course of that day, more than 40 climbers passed David Sharp on their way up or down the mountain. Some stopped briefly. A Turkish team reportedly spent considerable time trying to help him. They gave him oxygen, tried to give him water, tried to get him to stand. He could not stand upright, even with assistance, and it took several men just to drag him out of The Cave and into the sun. He couldn't be moved any further. He died there in that cave, next to green boots. When news of what had happened got out, the reaction was global outrage. The most prominent voice was the Edmund Hillary himself. If you remember him, he was the man who first summited Everest back in 1953, at least the first confirmed one. Hillary told the News Zealand Herald that he was horrified by what he called the callous attitude of today's climbers and that they quote, don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress. He said on his expedition there was no way they would have left a man under a rock to die. The climber who became the lightning rod for the controversy was Mark Inglis, a New Zealander who on the same day became the first double amputee to ever summit Everest, an extraordinary achievement that was completely overshadowed. Inglis and his team had passed Sharp on the way up, and his expedition leader at base camp had reportedly told the team that Sharp was beyond saving. Inglis later said he believed Sharp was effectively already dead by the time they reached him. When they found Sharp, he was virtually frozen solid and could not speak. Here's where it gets complicated, though, because this isn't a simple story of 40 heartless people walking past a man who could have been saved. It's well established that an immobile climber in the death Zone known above 26,000 feet cannot be rescued, no matter what resources are put up against the task. The cold, the altitude, the lack of oxygen. Getting an unresponsive person down from there isn't just difficult, it's essentially impossible without killing yourself in the process. And then there's a whole other uncomfortable detail. David Sharp's friend, who would have climbed with him before and knew him well, said in a documentary afterward that Sharp didn't expect to be rescued. He was clear that Sharp understood the risks and didn't, and not want to endanger anybody else. Sharp knew exactly what solo climbing with minimal oxygen on the world's highest mountain mint. And he apparently made that choice deliberately. Sharp's own mother, Linda, said she didn't blame the other climbers at all. Her view was just that quote, your responsibility is to save yourself, not to save anybody else. So who do you blame? The climbers who walked past the commercialization of Everest that put so many exhausted people on the mountain at once? The system that allowed a solo climber with minimal oxygen and no radio to be up there essentially with no safety net. The honest answer is that there probably isn't 1 clean villain here, it's just an unfortunate situation. But if I had to pick one villain, it would be the system that allowed a solo climber with minimal oxygen and no radio to be up there with essentially no safety net. Commercialization, Storms, and Survival: The 1996 Everest Disaster Next we're going to talk about the 1996 Everest disaster. OK, so to understand why this year in particular and what happened broke Mount Everest that it did, you first need to understand what Everest had become in the years leading up to it. So for most of the mountains history, climbing Everest was something that only elite government funded expeditions attempted. Small teams highly experienced, moving with careful precision. But by the late 1980s and early 1990's, the governments of Nepal and China started opening up more permits and entrepreneurial Mountaineers started to see an opportunity. If you could get clients to pay for a guided spot on an expedition, Everest could be a very lucrative business. In 1991, Adventure Consultants was formed, a company often credited with the pioneering commercial travel to Everest. It was founded by Rob Hall, a New Zealander who was by any measure one of the finest high altitude guides in the world. Hall was meticulous, safety obsessed, and extraordinarily experienced. By 1996 six he had guided 39 climbers to the top of Everest, more successful summits than almost any guide alive at the time. His reputation was honestly impeccable. A spot on his expedition cost $65,000. On the other side of the mountain, figuratively Speaking of course, was Scott Fischer. He was an American. He was charismatic, physically imposing, the kind of guy who seemed like he was born to climb mountains. Fischer ran a Seattle based company called To Mountain Madness. Where Hall was methodical and controlled, Fisher was a lot more freewheeling. He was known for his energy and his confidence. You know, a classic American. Fisher had first climbed Everest in 1994, doing it without any supplemental oxygen, an extraordinary feat that honestly made his reputation like what it is. By 1996, he was leading his own commercial expedition up the mountain. So on May 10th, 1996, you had to both of these respected, experienced companies attempting to summit on the same day. Along with them was a Taiwanese expedition and a team from the Indo Tibetan Border Police. In total, 34 people attempted to summit from Camp 4 via the South Coal that single day. The mountain was crowded in a way that would have been unthinkable A decade earlier. Shortly after midnight, the team set off from Camp 4 and began the long push toward the summit in the dark and almost immediately. Things started going wrong when the teams arrived at 2 critical points, the balcony and the Hillary Step. They found that the expected fixed ropes hadn't been installed. Nobody had taken responsibility for getting them set up in advance, so climbers arriving at these sections had to stop, wait, and fix the ropes themselves. Right there, above 27,000 feet, a queue formed on the Ridge. Dozens of people were standing around at the edge of the death zone while they were honestly slowly deteriorating, and they were just waiting for a bottleneck to clear. This burned a massive amount of time. Both Hall and Fisher had set a firm 2:00 PM turn around rule for their teams, which was a hard deadline. That meant basically, if you aren't at the summit by 2:00 PM, you turn around regardless because you need enough remaining oxygen in daylight to get back down safely. It's not a suggestion. It was like, you know, keep yourself alive rule, and that this altitude, attitude, missing that window is a death sentence. It'll not keep you alive. But leaders and climbers were suffering from what sometimes called summit fever. That need went so close to the top to get there at all costs. The 2:00 PM deadline came and went. Climbers kept pushing. Some didn't reach the summit until after 3:45 PM. And that is brutally, dangerously late. They now had to descend the entire mountain, exhausted in failing light, with oxygen running low, and the weather was already starting to turn. And the thing that makes this even worse is that weather reports were forecasting a major storm developing after May 8th, peaking in intensity on May 11th, and Hall and Fisher both knew this. The team summited during what turned out to be a brief break in the developing storm. But then, because they missed their 2:00 PM window, they began their descent directly in to the full force of it. By early evening, snow pellets driven by 130 kilometre per hour gusts were stinging the faces of climbers trying to descend. Visibility dropped to almost nothing. The fixed ropes that would have guided people down were buried under a new snow exhausted climbers who had already pushed far beyond their limits. We're now trying to navigate a treacherous descent in a full whiteout, which if you've seen my Antarctica video, you know what that means. In the dark with no oxygen left were almost no oxygen left. Some got lost just meters from their tents, and some like sat down and never got back up. So when the storm hit on the evening of May 10th, the mountain became complete chaos. Climbers were scattered across the upper slopes, the radio communications were a mess, and nobody had a clear picture of where anyone was. Rob A Hall was somewhere near the top of the Hillary Step, one of the most technical sections of the climb, trying to help his client, Doug Hanson, a postal worker from Washington State who had attempted the summit with Hall the year before and turned back just short of the top. Hanson had come back in 1996 determined to finish it. He made the summit that day, but barely. He had run out of supplemental oxygen, and on the descent he was deteriorating fast. Hall sent the Sherpas down to assist his other clients and stayed behind with Hanson. At around 4:30 PM, Base camp received radio calls from Hall saying that Hanson had run out of oxygen and could not descend the Hillary Step without fresh supplies. Hall's fellow guide, Guy Cotter, listening from base Camp, advised Hall to abandon the Hanson and save himself. Hall refused, though he stayed with his client through the night in the open at nearly 29,000 feet as the storm raged around them. By the next morning, Hanson was dead. Hall was still alive, but barely. His oxygen regulator had frozen solid. His frost bitten hands and feet made it nearly impossible to traverse the fixed ropes, even when he eventually managed to fix the mask. Sherpas attempted a rescue, clawing their way to within 650 feet of him before turning back. Fearing for their own lives, they left oxygen and a thermos on a Ridge below him. It wasn't enough though. Nobody could reach him. That afternoon, Hall made one last radio call. He asked Basecamp to patch him through by satellite phone to his wife, Jan Arnold, back home in Christchurch, New Zealand, seven months pregnant with their first child. Jan was a Mountaineer herself. She had summited Everest with Rob back in 1993. She knew exactly what it meant that he was calling from where he was and the condition he was in. He told her he was reasonably comfortable in the context of the altitude in the setting. He said he might have a bit of frostbite but hadn't taken his boots off to check. His last words to her were sleep well my sweetheart, please don't worry too much. He died shortly after his body was found on May 23rd by an IMAX expedition team. It remains just below the S summit this day. Two months later, Jan gave birth to their daughter, a girl that Rob never got to meet. Scott Fischer's story ended on the southeast Ridge. He had been showing signs of exhaustion and illness even before the summit push, but pushed on anyway. By the time the storm hit, he was spent unable to descend under his own power. Sherpas found him and a Taiwanese climber the following morning, both unconscious. Rescuers had to choose between the two, and they took the one that they thought might survive. The Taiwanese climber, Fisher, was given oxygen, wrapped up and clipped to a rope in the hope that someone would reach him later. Nobody did. He died there on the mountain. Now, among all of these stories of people who sadly didn't make it, there is one story of someone who absolutely should not have survived, but somehow did anyway. His name is Beck Weathers, A pathologist from Dallas, TX, and what happened to him is one of the most genuinely unbelievable things in pretty much all of mountaineering history. Earlier on this summit day, Weathers had discovered that his eyesight had almost completely failed, a complication from laser eye surgery he'd had previously that nobody had anticipated would be triggered by extreme altitude. Hall had advised him to wait on the balcony around 27,000 feet until Hall came back down to descend with him. But Hall never came back. He died further up the mountain, so Weathers weighted then eventually began descending with other climbers, and when the storm hit, he got caught with a group of people who became completely disoriented on the South Coal and couldn't find their tents. When the storm briefly cleared hours later, Weathers was so gone that the others themselves barely surviving, had to make the brutal decision to leave him and get help. A Russian guide named Anatoly Abukrev went out into the storm multiple times to rescue stricken climbers and managed to save several of them, but when he reached Weathers, he concluded that Weathers was already dead. The next morning, a doctor went up to check on Weathers and a Japanese climber named Yasu to Kanamba, who had also been left behind. His face was encrusted with ice and his jacket was open to the waist. The doctor described him as being at, quote, as close to death and still breathing as any patient he'd ever seen. The doctor assessed Weathers as beyond saving, too, and dead. His family in Dallas was called and told he had died on the mountain. Then Beck Weathers woke up. Nobody knows exactly what happened in his mind in that moment. He has said he saw a vivid image of his wife and children and understood with sudden clarity that if he didn't move, he would never see them again. Black frostbite covered his face and the body completely like scales, yet he found the strength to rise out of the snow bank and eventually make it down to camp. His fellow climbers, who had been told he was dead, looked up and saw what one of them, later described as a man with no face completely black like a crust, had formed over him. He was like something walking out of a nightmare. He could barely speak. He barely knew where he was. He survived, thanks only to the highest altitude helicopter evacuation ever performed. At the time, a Nepalese military pilot named Lieutenant Colonel Madden Casey flew a mission that most other pilots had refused as too dangerous. He got weathers off the mountain. Back in the US, the damage from the frostbite was devastating. His right arm was amputated halfway between the elbow and the wrist. All four fingers and his thumb on his left hand were also amputated, as were parts of both feet. His nose was amputated and reconstructed with tissue from his ear and forehead. Beckwithers survived Everest without a nose, without a right hand, without most of his left hand, and without parts of his feet. He later wrote a book about it, and he still practices medicine. He gives speeches. By any rational measure, he should have been one of the eight people who didn't come home. But I guess he was felt different. It's awesome. In the aftermath of all of this, one of Hall's clients, a journalist named John Krick Howard, who had been on assignment for outside magazines specifically to write about the commercialization of Everest, published a book called Into Thin Air. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of Time magazine's Non Fiction Books of the Year and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It brought the story of May 10th, 1996 to 10s of millions of people who had never thought about Everest before. And yeah, this day, May 10th, May 11th, one of the most disturbing days in the history, especially mountaineering history. The Haunting Landscape of Everest's Rainbow Valley Next I am going to talk about something called Rainbow Valley. Most people, if you ask them to think about bodies on Everest, they picture something hidden, buried under snow or tucked into crevices, fallen somewhere out of sight. The reality on the upper slopes of the mountain though, is quite different and can be more disturbing. On the north side of Everest, below the summit, there is an area that climbers have come to call a Rainbow Valley. It's not beneficial name. It doesn't appear on any map, and its exact boundaries are pretty loosely defined. It's more of a shared understanding among climbers than a geographic designation. But what it does refer to is a stretch of the mountain where the bodies of dead climbers have accumulated over decades, and where they remain preserved by the cold, exactly where they fell. The name comes from what the area looks like from a distance. Modern mountaineering gear comes in Vivid colours. Blues, Reds, oranges, yellows. And at altitude, the cold prevents the bodies from decomposing, which means the clothing stays intact. So from far away, against the whites of the snow and the ice, what you're actually looking at looks like a field of bright colour. It looks almost cheerful until you understand what you're seeing. It's really sad. Now you might be wondering why bodies accumulate their like at all. Now, recovering a body from the upper slopes of Everest is extraordinarily dangerous. Recovery teams face the same life threatening conditions as the original climbers, with the added burden of excavating and transporting frozen remains. Bodies up there don't just lie on top of the snow, they freeze directly onto the mountain, requiring teams to chip away ice with axes for hours. In 20241, body retrieval took 11 hours just to free the corpse from its icy tomb. And once you've done that, you still have to somehow get it down thousands of feet in technical terrain, in the death zone, with your own oxygen running low. The cost is staggering, too. A 2024 Nepal Army recovery mission deployed a team of 12 military personnel into 18 climbers for weeks on the mountain, retrieving just five bodies at a total cost exceeding 480,000 lbs. That works out to roughly 75 to 80,000 dollars per body. Most families simply just can't afford that, and so the mountain keeps them. According to the Himalayan Database, over 340 people have died on Everest in total and more than 200 bodies still remain on the mountain. Many of those are buried under snow or ice and invisible, but a significant number are not. They just are there on the slope, in the open and the gear they died in. Climbers passing through on their way to the summit step around them. Some bodies have been there for so long and are so well known, so they've become landmarks. We've already talked about Green Boots, the body in the limestone cave on the North East Ridge that served as a really, really scary milepost for climbers for nearly two decades. But there are others, too. There's a woman nicknamed Sleeping Beauty, an American climber named Francis Arsentev, who died in 1998 during a descent without supplemental oxygen and whose body lays visible on the slope for 9:00 years before her son funded an expedition to recover and bury her. There's the body of Scott Fischer, who we just talked about still somewhere on the southeast Ridge from the 1996 disaster. And there are dozens of others with no nicknames and no famous stories, just, you know, there. A Nepali army major told Outside magazine that seeing a dead body on Everest is gruesome and that clients are often distressed by passing the bodies of dead climbers on their climb, something that that he said could have long lasting psychological effects. Think about that for a second. You've paid 10s of thousands of dollars, trained for years, pushed your body to its absolute limit, and as you're making your final push toward the summit, you are literally walking past frozen human beings and colorful jackets. People who had the same dream that you have now, people who made it this far, it's just like you did and didn't make it back. Next, I want to talk about the 2014 Kumbu Icefall incident. The Deadly 2014 Khumbu Icefall and Sherpa Uprising So to understand the 2014 disaster, you first need to understand the Kumbu Icefall itself, because most people who know Everest don't even or haven't even heard of the Kumbu Icefall. The Kumbu Icefall is a stretch of glacial ice roughly 2000 feet tall that sits between a base camp and the upper mountain on the Nepal side of Everest. It's not a clean slope, it's a constantly shifting, groaning maze of ice towers called seracs, some of them the size of buildings sitting on top of a glacier that's always moving. Blocks of ice can fall without warning at any time. Crevices can open up overnight. The whole thing is deeply structurally unstable, and there's absolutely no way to make it safe. The hazard it presents is inherently essentially random, and the risk can't be controlled or mitigated. Every person who wants to climb Everest from the Nepal side has to go through it. The thing is, not everyone goes through it the same number of times. A paying client on a commercial expedition might pass through the Kumbu Icefall 6 to 8 times total, up and down for acclimation runs and then up and down for the summit bid. A Sherpa ferrying tents, food, ropes, and oxygen for the climbers can easily make the mortal trek 30 to 40 times in a single season. Every extra trip is just another roll of the dice in a place that kills people randomly. So on the morning of April 18th, 20, 14 at 6:45, AMA massive block of ice broke loose from a serac on Everest's western shoulder. John and Krakauer later described it as a block of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion. It came down directly onto the Kumbu Icefall, in an area that climbers call the Popcorn Field, named for the way huge blocks of ice spray across the snow when seracs collapse. A group of Nepali workers were there doing exactly what they do every season before the paying clients arrive, which includes fixing robes, carrying loads and preparing the route. 25 men were buried in the avalanche, 16 of them died. It was the deadliest single day in Everest's history up to that .13 bodies were recovered within two days when search and rescue operations were called off due to too much risk. 3 victims are still buried under roughly 80 to 100 meters of snow and ice, and they're still there today. Now, almost all of the 16 who died were Nepali mountain workers, mostly from the Sherpa ethnic group. And the aftermath of those deaths exposed something that the climbing world had been uncomfortable about for a long time. So the Nepali government's initial response was to offer the families of the dead approximately $400 each in compensation. That figure very reasonably infuriated the Sherpa community. Tempers flared when a group of Sherpas marched in a procession with the bodies of six of the dead and ended in the middle of town. Very, very angry with the government. The anger wasn't just about the $400.00, though of course that was appalling on its own. It was about a whole system that had been building resentment for years. So to give a little bit of background, and I promise this won't be boring. So the Nepali government charges each climber a permit fee. At the time, it was around 10,000 to $11,000. Commercial expedition companies then charge their clients anywhere from 40,000 to over $100,000 for a guided climb. Western guides working on those expeditions earned around $50,000 for the season. Sherpa guides doing the most dangerous work on the mountain earned around 4000. That's for a season that involves crossing the Kumbu Icefall dozens of times, fixing ropes up to the summit, carrying oxygen, setting up camps at 26,000 feet, and essentially making the entire enterprise possible. And as Outside Magazine puts it, there's no other service industry in the world that so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefits of paying clients. The Sherpas also had a deep cultural grievance about the three bodies still buried in the icefall. Buddha's tradition involves important rituals after death to prepare the body for reincarnation. Having three of their own trapped under 100 meters of ice? Irretrievable was devastating for them. On April 22nd, the Sherpas announced that they would not work on Everest for the remainder of the 2014 season. As a mark of respect for the victims. The climbing season effectively collapsed. Hundreds of paying clients who had spent 10s of thousands of dollars and years of preparation just packed up and went home. The mountain, for the first time in living memory, was shut down, not by weather or disaster, but by the people whose labor had been keeping the whole operation running in the 1st place. And then the Sherpas presented a list of demands, higher insurance payouts for families of the dead, a Relief Fund drawn from climbing permit revenues, and better safety provisions. The government eventually agreed to raise minimum insurance rates to around $15,000, erect a memorial to lost to guides, and create a Relief Fund from climbers fees. It was a partial concession, better than nothing, but it was far short of what many felt was fair. Devastation at Base Camp: The 2015 Nepal Earthquake I want to talk about the 2015 earthquake. So in the year after 2014 that we just talked about, climbers came back to Everest in record numbers. Many of them, like I talked about, were the same people who had been turned away the previous season. People who had spent those 10s of thousands of dollars and years of preparation only to go home without ever actually setting foot on the mountain. By spring 2015, 359 foreign climbers were at base camp, with around 1200 people in total living there, including support staff, cooks and doctors. At 11:56 AM on April 25th, 2015, the ground moved. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near Kathmandu, the worst Nepal had experienced in more than 80 years. The epicenter was roughly 150 miles from Everest, but the shock waves reached the mountain almost immediately. Climbers higher on the slopes felt the glacier physically drop beneath their feet. At base camp, the shaking arrived 1st and then a few seconds later the sound. The earthquake shook loose decades of accumulated ice from the nearby peak of Pumori and the Ridge leading to Ling trim the mass speed downhill, picking up loose rocks into boulders that became projectiles. It swept directly into the middle of base camp. A Romanian climber posted to Twitter from the chaos quote Running for life from my tent. Survivors described of the aftermath as looking like a nuclear bomb had gone off. Temps shredded equipment scattered across the glacier, bodies in the snow. Early reports put the death toll at base camp at 18, with several more badly injured. The final count was higher. At least 22 people died on the mountain in total, surpassing 2014 as the deadliest disaster in Everest's history. Among them was a Google executive named Dan Fredenberg, who had been on the mountain working on a Street Great View mapping project. Hundreds more were stranded higher up. The avalanche had destroyed the ladders and fixed ropes through the Kumbu Icefall, the only way down for climbers at Camps 1 and 2. They couldn't move. They sat and waited with limited supplies while the mountain kept shaking with aftershocks. On April 27th alone at 60, people were rescued from Camp 1 and 170 from Camp 2 by helicopter across Nepal. The picture was really devastating. Around 9000 people were killed, more than 600,000 structures were damaged or destroyed, and centuries old temples in Kathmandu that had stood for centuries came down in minutes. Economic damage reached as high as $10 billion, roughly half of Nepal's entire GDP at the time. Entire villages and remote mountain areas were gone completely. The climbing season was officially over for the first time in 41 years. Nobody summited at Everest. The north side was closed by Chinese authorities. The Icefall route on the South side was destroyed. Everyone left. The grief and anger that had built up in the Sherpa community after 2014 had barely had time to settle before 2015 hit again. The people who bore the worst of it were the Nepali workers, the ones who had been living at base camp through the preseason, fixing ropes, carrying loads, doing the work that again makes commercial climbing at all possible. It's really sad. Dude, these two years are horrible, OK? Chamalungma: The Mother Goddess and Everest's Sacred Lore For the rest of this video, I want to focus on less like real life disasters and incidents and more just lore and folklore and urban legends and stuff like that surrounding the mountain in general. So first I want to talk about just in general where the mountain comes from and its history, just for some context going further into this. So the name that most of the world uses for this mountain, Everest, was assigned in 1860, 65 by the British Survey of India after Sir George Everest, a Welsh surveyor who never actually saw the mountain. The Sherpa in Tibetan people who would have been living in the region for centuries already had their own name for it, Chamalungma, the name that comes from Miya Lang Sangma, a goddess in Tibetan Buddhism. Miya Lang Sangma is the goddess who lives at the top of Chamalungma. She is one of the five long life sisters and her virtue is inexhaustible possible giving. She started out as a malevolent demoness and was converted by a great Buddhist teacher. She rides a golden tigress and hands out the jewels of wishes to those deserving and the mountain itself. The whole mountain is seen as like her palace and her playground, and Sherpas view climbers and themselves as only partially welcome guests and all of them having arrived without invitation. And this belief has practical consequences on the mountain. Every single season. Before any expedition begins climbing, the Sherpas hold a puja ceremony at base camp. A Buddhist llama comes in from a nearby monastery to lead it, A stone altar is built, prayer flags are hung, and offerings of food and drink are made. The team's climbing equipment, harnesses, Krampens, ice axes, is brought out to be blessed. The puja asks the mountain gods for permission to climb, forgiveness for the damage caused by the climbing, the holes put in the mountain and the ice, taxes and stuff, and for safety for everyone involved and for sherpas. Honestly, the puja really isn't optional. They won't climb without it. So Meow Lang Sang Ma is considered a benevolent deity now who provides wealth and fortune, but she must be respected. Disrespecting her or the mountain is believed to bring misfortune. Tenzing and Norgay himself believed that Meow Lang Sang Ma guided him safely to the summit in 1953. In his account of the expedition, he credited the goddess with granting him safe passage and guiding him and Hillary to the top. If you remember those people, that's how we understood what happened on May 29th, 1953. He didn't think that he and Hillary just conquered the mountain. He believed that the goddess allowed them to reach the summit. A local artist interviewed by a geographical magazine explained the Sherpa relationship with the mountain in like straightforward terms. He said that Everest is just a nickname, that the real name is Chamalungma, the mother goddess of the world, and that people still pray to her because if you respect her, you will have no problems with money or food. He also said that he was worried about the direction that things were heading and his view. People are now exploiting Everest for financial gain and showing no respect to the mountain. And in his words, he said, quote, we are killing it. So yeah, we got to respect Chamalangma and Miyo Lang Sangma. Honestly, I mean, I'm not Buddhist. I'm not religious at all, guys. But if I were to be religious, I'd probably want to be Buddhist. That's the one that appeals to me the most. So yeah, I fuck with shit. Hell yeah. Beyond the Abominable Snowman: Unveiling the True Yeti Legend OK, next thing I want to talk about is a very fun one. This is the Yeti. The Yeti is one of those subjects where the western version of the story and the actual local version are so different that they're almost unrecognizable. Most people in the West picture a big white monster stomping through the snow, the abominable snowman of movies and cartoons. And that image honestly has almost nothing to do with how the Yeti has been understood in the Himalayas for centuries. Start with the name itself. The word Yeti comes from Sherpa. The most commonly cited meaning is something like small man, like animal or rock animal, though the exact etymology is disputed. Depending on which linguist or source you can solve. In Tibetan, similar terms include migo meaning Wildman and mehto, Kang me roughly meaning man, bear, snowman. Tibetan lore actually describes 3 main varieties of Yeti. The Nile MO, which has black fur and stands about 15 feet tall and is the largest and fiercest. The Chudi, which stands at about 8 feet tall and lives between 8000 and 10,000 feet above sea level. And the Rang Shim Bombo, which has reddish brown fur and is only between 3:00 and 5:00 feet tall. And that's already a way more complicated idea than just a big white scary guy. The name? Abominable Snow man, which you know, is the term that most Westerners know, was created entirely by accident and has the most nothing to do with the original Tibetan or Sherpa concept. In 1921, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard Berry LED a British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition. While crossing a high pass at around 21,000 feet, he found footprints in the snow that he believed were probably caused by a large, loping Gray wolf. His Sherpa guides disagreed and told that the tracks were made by a wild man of the snows, which they called Meadow King me. And then, when Howard Berry's report reached Calcutta, a journalist named Henry Newman interviewed the Sherpa porters from the expedition. On their return, Newman mistranslated the word Meadow as filthy, substituting in the word abominable, perhaps out of artistic license. And then, as he later wrote in a letter to the Times quote, the whole story seemed such a joyous creation. I sent it to one or two newspapers and that was it. The term abominable snowman entered the global press and stuck immediately. Even though it was a mistranslation of a word that didn't mean abominable applied to a creature that the local people didn't even describe as a snowman. It's pretty crazy how different this is from the actual, you know, legend. As one critic put it at the time, it was an appellation that could only appeal to the Music Hall minded and it seriously handicapped anyone trying to engage seriously with the actual tradition and behind the legend. So what does the actual tradition look like? The Yeti in Sherpa in Tibetan Buddhist culture sits in a lot more of a complex position. In the Sherpa tradition, the Yeti is known as the sun of the snowy mountains with divine powers. Out of reverence for it, Sherpas often enshrine body tissues or skeletons supposedly from Yeti in their temples. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Yeti is considered a non human animal, yet possesses human spirituality and is sometimes able to follow Dharma. There are several stories of Yeti becoming helpers and disciples of religious figures. Because mountain deity Yetis function as keepers of community order, Himalayan people frequently regard hearing or seeing a Yeti as a bad omen, and some mountain dwellers may seek the aid of a Buddhist leader to dispel negative forces and accumulate merit if they've encountered one. Among the Lepcha people of the Thickum region, the understanding of the Yeti is even more so. The Lepchas are said to worship the Yeti as the spirit of the hunt, and they regarded as the master and protector of all animals who live in the mountain forests. One other name used in some areas is Mirka, meaning Wildman, and local legend holds that anyone who sees one dies or is killed. And that's very different from the Western encrypted framing where like if you see a Bigfoot or a Yeti, it's exciting and you want to get a picture of it. In the local tradition, an encounter with this being is something to be afraid of and to seek spiritual help for afterward. The section of the Himalayas that includes Everest and a bunch of other mountains is actually called Mahalonger Himal, which translates as great monkey and is traditionally believed to be one of the creatures abodes. So the Yetis territory and Everest territory are the same geography, and have been for as long as local people have been naming these places. The Yeti entered Western popular consciousness primarily through the early Everest expeditions of the 20th century. After the Abominable Snowman caught on in 1921, every subsequent expedition that found unusual footprints or heard strange sounds from the Sherpas added more fuel to that story. The 1951 British Everest Reconnaissance expedition, the same one that found the root Hillary would eventually use to summit, produced what became the most famous set of alleged Yeti prints. Melania Eric Shipton photographed large footprints in the snow on the Men Lung glacier, and those photographs circulated globally and reignited the Western fascination. Hillary later said that Shipton was a joker who had manipulated the Prince, though that claim itself was disputed. By the 1950's, the Yeti had become a full international phenomenon. The British newspaper the Daily Mail launched a dedicated expedition to find one in 1954, at a cost of what would be equivalent to over $1,000,000 today. They found footprints and some hair samples, but no Yeti. The most scientifically serious attempt to investigate the physical evidence came in 1960 and 61, when Edmund Hillary, by then the most famous Mountaineer in the world, LED an expedition specifically tasked with collecting and analyzing Yeti evidence. Hillary borrowed a supposed hosed Yeti scalp from the Kumjiang monastery, a relic the village had kept for over 200 years, and brought it along with the village headman as a guardian to London, Paris and Chicago for scientific examination. The village was reluctant to let the scalp leave at all, and Hillary had to promise donations to the local school and the monastery before they agreed. The scalp's guardian, a monk named Kumjo Chumbi, said at the time. We don't believe in giraffes and lions in Nepal because there aren't any there. Likewise, you don't believe in yetis because you have none in your country. But the scalp turned out to be a fabricated one from the skin of a Himalayan Sorrow, a goat antelope native to the region. Hillary was dismissive of the Yeti evidence after the expedition, saying that the footprints in the snow were distortions from melting and that the physical relics held in monasteries were not what they claimed to be. The scalp was returned to Kumjung, where it still sits today in a padlocked glass box in the monastery. Pilgrims and trickers still pay a small fee to look at it. The scientific investigation of the Yeti continued intermittently through the following decades. In 2017, so quite a long time later, the most rigorous genetic analysis to date was published in the Proceedings of Royal Society BA team led by biologist Charlotte Linkvist of the University of Buffalo and finalized 9 samples from museums and private collections. Bones, hair, skin, feces that had been collected from the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau and identified by their owners as a possible Yeti material. 1 sample turned out to be from a domestic dog. The other eight were from Asian bears, one from an Asian black bear, one from a Himalayan brown bear, and six from Tibetan brown bears. The researchers concluded that their findings strongly suggest that the biological underpinnings for what are these words that they use of the Yeti legend can be found in local bears. So yeah, the Yeti is a really interesting urban legend in encrypted. Coughing to Broken Ribs: The Horrors of Khumbu Cough I really find it interesting that if you see one, you are going to die and you need to, like, seek spiritual help. That part to me is really interesting for a Cryptid, and it kind of sucks. The Western version never really got as interesting. OK, Next I'm going to get into some of the physical stuff, like the physical worry fees and cautions that can happen to you when you're on Mount Everest because it gets so high. So starting it with the Khumbu cough. The Khumbu cough gets dismissed as a minor inconvenience when people first hear about it. It's a cough. How bad can it be? But if you've spent any time reading accounts from Everest climbers, it's pretty bad. So it's named after the Khumbu Valley, which we've already kind of talked about, is where climbers pass through on the approach to Everest from the Nepal side. The condition develops at high altitude, generally above about 2500 meters. And it gets worse the higher you go. In a survey of 283 trekkers walking in the Everest region of Nepal, 42% suffered from cough. Among actual climbers going higher than base camp, the rate is effectively universal. Research shows that nearly all people who spend lengthy periods at altitude develop some degree of the cough. The traditional explanation has been that breathing cold, dry air at an altitude that high dries out the lining of the lungs and bronchi, and the irritation produces a persistent hacking cough. So basically it makes the lining of your lungs dry and can make it start to crack. And that's already an unpleasant image, the inner lining of your lungs cracking from dryness. But the actual cause, because what I just said was the traditional explanation, the actual cause turns out to be more complicated and less well understood than that. During a major hypobaric chamber study simulating in a scent of Everest, the majority of subjects developed throat pain, dryness and an irritating cough at altitudes above 7000 meters, despite the chamber being maintained at controlled temperature and humidity levels. And this obviously brought into question the widely held view that the Kumbu cough is simply due to breathing cold, dry air. Something about the altitude itself appears to lower the cough threshold independent of the air conditions, though exactly what is still not fully established. What is established is what happens to people who get it badly. The cough itself is loud, rough and hoarse. Climbers describe it as coming in violent spasms that they can control. It's persistent through the night. The nocturnal cough frequency was found to increase steadily with increasing altitude in every study conducted, and immediately returned to normal values on descent to sea level. So the cough tracks the altitude precisely. The higher you are, the worse it gets. Descend and it eases. Go back up and it returns. At its worst, the physical consequences go well beyond a sore throat. In its most severe forms, the kumbu cough can result in the victim coughing so hard and frequently that they tear chest muscles or even break ribs. And this isn't even rare enough to be considered unusual in Everest circles. Four members of the 1971 International Himalayan Expedition to Mount Everest suffered rib fractures as a result of coughing, and other similar accounts of cough related the rib fractures at high altitude exist. One climber's account describes his partner only discovering after returning home that he had cracked 2 ribs during his expedition. The coughing had been so constant and so forceful that two of his ribs gave way and he didn't even fully register at the time because at that altitude everything hurts. Another climber who was later discovered to have climbed Everest with a broken rib said he had suppressed the possibility because climbing with a rib fracture would be crazy. And as long as he kept his chest at the proper angle, didn't cough, it didn't hurt, didn't cough on an Everest expedition. Now think about that in the context of everything else that's happening to a climber on the upper mountain. They're already breathing as hard as they can just to get enough oxygen to take that next step. Every breath at altitude above 8000 meters is labored and insufficient. The body is slowly shutting down. Judgement is impaired. Frostbite is starting in the extremities. And on top of all of that, they're being hit with. The uncontrollable spasms of violent coughing that physically damages their bodies. Some climbers have had to been like flown down just to avoid the cough. It's been that bad. Sometimes it's really weird that this cough even happens. High Altitude Cerebral Edema: When Your Brain Swells on Everest It's really scary. Next I want to talk about hace or HACE. Hace stands for high altitude cerebral edema. What it means in plain terms is that your brain swells at altitude. The reduced oxygen causes the blood vessels in the brain to dilate. Capillaries begin to leak fluid, and that fluid has nowhere to go. Because the brain sits inside a rigid skull. The walls of blood capillaries begin to leak at high altitudes, and the leaked fluid can cause dangerous swelling, pressing the brain outward against the rigid skull. Sometimes the optic nerves swell so badly they bulge into the back of the eye, degrading vision and causing retinal hemorrhages. The brain is being physically compressed inside the head, and that compression effects everything the brain is responsible for, which is everything. Haste is considered the advanced stage of acute mountain sickness. It doesn't really appear without warning. In patients with AMS or acute mountain sickness. The onset of Haste is usually indicated by vomiting, headache that does not respond to painkillers, hallucinations and a stupor. But the progression from those early warning signs to a genuine neurological emergency can happen very fast. The progression from initial symptoms to coma may take as little as 12 hours. Although Haste is not life threatening in its early stages, it usually is fatal within 24 hours if untreated. Without treatment, the patient will enter a coma and then die. In some cases, patients have died within a few hours. The symptoms that appear along the way are what make it so dangerous. In the specific context of Everest, a climber with haste may experience amnesia, confusion, delusions, emotional disturbance, personality changes, and the loss of consciousness. They lose coordination, the medical term is ataxia, and start staggering, as if drunk, and their judgement just goes. Their ability to assess their situation goes with it. And that last one is the critical one. With most medical emergencies on Everest, the person in trouble knows they're in trouble. With haste, the person may not. Their brain is malfunctioning, and one of the things a malfunctioning brain is bad at recognizing is that it's malfunctioning. Climbers have been documented continuing to ascend while experiencing haste symptoms because the cognitive impairment prevents them from even understanding that it's a serious situation. Like it stops them from realizing that they're cognitively impaired. Descriptions of fatal cases often involve climbers who continue ascending while experiencing the symptoms. John and Krakauer documented a clear example in Intuit Thin Air. A climber named Dale Cruz, a dentist on Scott Fischer's 1996 team, developed haste at Camp 3 on the Lopes face. Cruz was having an incredible difficult time simply trying to dress himself. He put his climbing harness on inside out, threaded it through the fly of his Windsuit and failed to fasten the buckle. If he tried to rappel down the ropes like that, he would have immediately popped out of his harness. And to fall in it was like I was very drunk, Cruz later said. Quote I couldn't walk without stumbling and and completely lost the ability to think or speak. Cruz was lucky Fischer and another guy noticed what he was doing before he tried to move. But on Everest nobody always notices. The treatment for haste is just immediate descent. That's it. That's the only thing really get lower where the air is thicker and the brain can start to recover. If descent is immediate and treatment is started promptly, the usual course of haste is rapid complete recovery. If treatment is delayed, recovery is slower, and once has developed, the patient is more likely to die, even if aggressive treatment is provided. Dexamethasone, a steroid, can reduce the swelling in by time, and a portable hyperbaric chamber, a device that simulates lower altitude by pressuring the air around a person, can also help. But none of those are substitutes for just getting down. The problem on Everest is that getting down is rarely simple. If someone develops haze at Camp Four at 8000 meters in the middle of the night during a storm, descending immediately is a significant undertaking that requires other people to be present, capable and aware of the situation. A haste patient can't descend alone, like by themselves, they can barely walk in a straight line. There's also a pretty disturbing thing if you look at it more long term. MRI brain scans of 35 climbers who had returned from high altitude expeditions, including thirteen who had attempted Everest, found brain damage in virtually every Everest climber, but also in many climbers of Lesser who returned unaware that they had injured their brain. It's kind of crazy, but I think that brings us to the end of the video. Guys, thank you so much for watching this far. Let me know what you want to see next. I really appreciate you guys checking this out and watching. I really really genuinely hope you enjoyed and yeah, have a great night everyone and sweet dreams.