Carlos Pauner Mt. Everest 2005: From my tent

By José Manuel Herraiz

From inside my tent I see a sparrow jumping on the stones.  I ask myself what could have brought it here.  In this primitive and wild glacier it won't find a twig in which to rest.  Maybe it will also ask itself, what we are doing here more than 400 people, dressed in bright colors, at more than 5,300 meters, looking from time to time to the heights, as if waiting for something miraculous to happen.  

The answer to its question won't be easy, and it would be more difficult at Everest's base camp.  From the elite climber to the last client of a commercial expedition who has paid many thousand of euros to get to the highest summit of the world, Everest gathers at its bottom the richest variety of personalities and motivations that this sport can give.  Does the sporting spirit survive on this mountain?  I think that even the most eccentric American who wears crampons for the first time at the bottom of the Icefall has a sport ambition, a will to overcome the difficulties to reach an objective.  But there are circumstances on Everest that make you think that along with the sporting spirit, there is vanity and commercial interests in very considerable proportions.  First, Everest is a mountain for the masses.  More than 40 expeditions crowd both faces.  However, just a few hundreds of kilometers away, one mountain with an exotic name, the Kangchenjunga, which geologic nature has given 8,586 meters of altitude, remains almost deserted.  How to explain the contrast between passion provoked by a mountain and the indifference to the other? 

Sherpas have in Everest the prestige of the times of glory of the first conquests.  They install equipment and open the trail so that foreign climbers face a domesticated mountain.

The oxygen bottles of Russian fabrication are stored out of the curious view, waiting to be used in the high altitude camps.  As Hillary and Tenzing did some 53 years ago.

Under the canvas of our mess tent, mountain ethics are debated with passion.  Each member of the expedition defends his or her way to approach the mountain.  Yours truly, from his comfortable position behind a barrier, tries to organize his ideas.  I think that everybody who inhabits base camp with the intention of climbing the mountain can be considered a climber.  This condition is perfectly compatible with vanity, of course!  And even with commercial interests.  One of the particularities of this sport is that on the mountain itself can coincide first category climbers who climb with no oxygen and without the help of Sherpas, and second, third or fourth class climbers, who don't want to risk or lack the physical or technical conditions to do it as the first ones.  None of them lack mountain ethics.  He or she who lies about how far they went or how they did it lack ethics.  They who state they reached the summit of Everest, avoiding mentioning deliberately that they did with the help of artificial oxygen.  Yes, the latter also lacks mountain ethics.  With their attitude, they contribute keep non specialized public in confusion, and make a great injustice by wanting to equalize their merit with the effort of that one who climbed with no artificial oxygen, a sporting feat who has been done by few.

This is my way of thinking.  I ask myself if these topics are also being discussed in the neighboring tents, the Iranian, the Czech, the Canadian...  It snows hard now that I write these lines and I think that it would be hard to dominate Everest completely some day.  Everyone who faces it should do it with the humbleness who knows their inferiority.  Waiting that the mountain shows its generosity and lets them show on its summit.  I want Pauner, Pérez and the rest of the expedition to be among the chosen ones.  A hug for everybody who follows us in the net and a special memory for Charo, family and friends in Spain.  So long. 

Translated from Spanish by Jorge Rivera

Dispatches

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