In a development that has sent tremors through the pinstripe-and-tweed set, a Nepalese climbing guide has miraculously survived a near-fatal plunge on the world’s highest bin. The guide, a man whose lungs clearly contain more yak butter than oxygen, fell into a crevasse somewhere between Base Camp and an Instagram post. He was rescued after what the authorities describe as ‘a truly heroic amount of rope and patience.’ The UK Mountaineering Council, a body that spends most of its time polishing brass plaques and decrying the use of bottled oxygen, has now called for mandatory training for all Everest aspirants. Because nothing says ‘I respect the mountain’ like a laminated certificate and a PowerPoint presentation on altitude sickness.
Let us parse this latest salvo in the war between nature and ninnies. The guide in question, a man who has probably forgotten more about icefall navigation than the entire UK council has ever known, fell. He got back up. That is his job. But the suits in London have decided that what the Himalayas really need is a bit more British bureaucracy. They want mandatory training. They want rules. They want, one suspects, a small commemorative mug.
Here is a fact for the council: Everest is a vertical morgue with a queue of bodies. It is not a school trip. People die there every year, often because they have paid a fortune to be led up a slope by someone who has done it twenty times. The problem is not a lack of training. The problem is that climbing Everest is a fundamentally stupid thing to do, an act of sublime idiocy that we as a species have elevated to a virtue. You cannot train for stupid. You can only be born with it.
Mandatory training sounds grand. It sounds like safety. But it is really just a mechanism for transferring cash from climbers to consultants. The council will write a syllabus. They will accredit courses. They will sell you a weekend in Snowdonia where you learn to jam an ice axe into a slope while a man in a woolly hat shouts at you. And then you will still die on the Khumbu Icefall because a serac the size of a double-decker bus fell on your head.
Let us also consider the gall of this timing. A man has just had a brush with the grim reaper, and before he has even had time to buy a round of hot tea, the council is using his near-death experience as a fundraising pitch. They are the ambulance-chasers of the alpine world. We should call them what they are: a bunch of mountaineering muppets who have never felt the true cold.
The real tragedy here is not the fall. It is that we keep pretending that Everest can be made safe. It cannot. It is a pyramid of rock and ice that exists to kill you. Every gear shop in Kathmandu sells you a dream, and every mountain guide sells you a prayer. The council wants to sell you a course. I say sell me a gin, and let us toast the absurdity of it all.
Meanwhile, the guide who fell is probably already back on the mountain, carrying a load of oxygen bottles for a dentist from Ohio. He will not attend a training course. He will not get a certificate. He will simply keep climbing, because that is what he does. And the council will keep meeting, because that is what they do. And somewhere, a yeti is laughing into his yak-horn, because he knows the truth: the mountain always wins.
So here is my proposal. Instead of mandatory training, let us have mandatory honesty. Let us tell every hopeful summiteer that they are walking into a lottery with altitude. Let us tell them that the sherpas are the real heroes, and that the council is a bunch of blazers with nothing better to do. And let us all have a drink, for survival, for absurdity, and for the sheer bloody madness of it all.
