There Will Be Many Deaths This Year...

The queue of brightly suited climbers shuffles forward a few steps. "For God's sake, move!" someone yells from the back. They’ve been here an hour already, waiting in the highest traffic jam in the world.

On many of their faces, between goggles and oxygen mask, you can see that the silent fingers of frostbite are beginning to leave their mark. First, the skin turns white and waxy, later these marks will turn purple and swell, forming blisters. These are just the superficial injuries.

Shivering in the freezing blast of the jet stream near the summit of Everest, each of the climbers is effectively dying. They are well into the "death zone," the height above which it is impossible to live permanently. Their blood, already the consistency of syrup after weeks of acclimatizing, struggles to pump through the capillaries in fingers and toes. As a result, muscles, bones and tendons are slowly freezing. Ice crystals are forming inside the cells, growing by extracting the vital fluids and freeze-drying the tissues.

Later we will see the results: First the digits will appear normal but blackened beneath the skin. Then blisters will form, filled with bloody fluid. Then doctors will decide which fingers and toes to amputate, and which to try to save.

Another shuffle forward on the foot-wide ledge. The bottleneck is caused by the aluminum ladder that surmounts the Second Step, a 30-foot rock cliff near the summit of Everest.

The problem is that a Chinese climber appears to be trying to learn how to use his ascending device while balanced on the ladder. Some of the guides in the queue become exasperated by his incompetence and start to push past. The traffic jam starts to move.

Foreshadows

When I climbed around the corner to Advanced Base Camp a few weeks ago, I gasped at the sight of well over 200 multicolored tents. Usually I would expect to see a couple dozen. "There will be many deaths this year," my Sherpa companion remarked. "Let's hope Russell Brice has a plan to avoid the rush then," I said.

We had spent 20 days just to get to that point. After flying to Lhasa, our group of 25 climbers and filmmakers had traveled overland for a week across the endless orange-brown desert hills of Tibet. We couldn't move any faster or we would succumb to altitude sickness: First you experience headaches, then your lungs fill with fluid, then you die.

Base Camp is pitched in a spectacular setting right at the nose of the Rongbuk Glacier, with the vast pyramid of Everest rearing up at the head of the valley, usually with a mile-long flag of spindrift flying from the summit at 29,000 feet.

After Base Camp you walk up a stony valley for 12 miles past 80-foot-high ice pinnacles shaped like shark's fins. Advanced Base Camp is a motley collection of tents strung along the side of the icy glacier, right underneath the flanks of the mountain. The real climbing begins there: You have to surmount the 23,000-foot saddle of the North Col, then spend a day climbing up to each of four camps, one by one.

You spend your last evening in Camp 4, melting snow on your gas stove, desperately trying to get as much liquid into yourself as possible — due to the dry air you have to drink over a gallon a day. You probably don't have much appetite but you must eat — a climber burns 15,000 calories on summit day, the equivalent of 53 hamburgers.

The year I first climbed Everest I went from 170 pounds to 140 pounds in two months — it's a guaranteed "fat camp." Because you don't have much appetite at high altitude you tend to overeat at base camp. Where else could you stuff yourself until you're bloated and end up losing 30 pounds?

Finally, you get up at midnight and go for the summit wearing a padded down suit and a rucksack containing a couple of oxygen cylinders and a bottle of water. Using a jumar (a ratchet device) you slide up fixed ropes placed days before by the Sherpas. It's tough, but it's hardly mountaineering. The whole expedition takes around 70 days.

Next: Worried This Year

I became the 15th Briton to climb Mount Everest in 1993, and this year I am there on my eighth expedition. In total I have spent a year and a half of my life living on the mountain, and the one thing I have learned is which expedition leader is best to go with.

I've known Russell Brice for nearly 20 years and I can say unequivocally that he is the world's top Everest guide. A 53-year-old Kiwi, he has a management style more abrasive than a sawmill.

I met him in 1988, on a new route on Himal Chuli, a mountain in Nepal. He clearly regarded me as a "soft Brit" until I proved myself by carrying more loads of cooking gas and food up to Camp 1 than the others. Until that moment he "ripped the piss" out of me mercilessly.

Because most of his climbing clients are alpha males he has to top them with aggression. But beneath this rough exterior he has a heart of gold that only shows itself to his Sherpa guides and cooks, i.e., his "family." Woe to any client who dares treat one of Russell's staff with anything less than total respect.

And yet I could see that even Russell Brice was worried this year. We didn't know yet that there would be 11 deaths this season. He attempted to avoid the crowds of lemming-like climbers by sending his clients to the summit much earlier than usual — mid-May instead of toward the end of the month. Word slipped out, though, and the other teams copied what he was doing, leading to the queues below the summit.

The Old Days

The romantic picture of climbing the mountain that I had as a boy has largely been destroyed by the hordes that try to climb it now.

On my first expedition I was working as a climbing minder to the actor Brian Blessed of Flash Gordon fame. We were attempting the mountain after the monsoon, in October, when there are more avalanches and colder winds. Brian and I shared the boyhood romance of the mountain. We had both read about the pioneering climbers Mallory and Irvine, who had disappeared while climbing Everest.

There weren't plastic flowers and hot showers at ABC like Russell provides now — just a tarpaulin stretched over a couple of rubble walls. There wasn't a line of fixed ropes stretched all the way to the summit to slide up. We escaped three huge avalanches by the skin of our teeth. And when I got to the last camp, on the South Col at 7,900 meters (or 25,920 feet), we didn't find the camp already set up by the Sherpas. I had to help the expedition leader put up four tents.

As we put each tent up, our fellow climbers gratefully slid inside. The leader and I got inside the last one, and I have to say that was my proudest moment ever on the mountain — helping to set up such a high camp. And to me that is mountaineering — solving problems and helping your companions to get to the summit.

Next: The New Days

A great deal of that pride has been lost today. Many of the people who go to Everest now are wealthy businessmen or people who are successful in some other arena of life. They want the cocktail party trophy; they want to "tick the box." They are treating the mountain more as an extreme bungee jump, rather than a potential killer.

You can spot them around ABC: There's the rich guy with the suspiciously new looking gear. There's the girl our guides found high on the mountain unable to operate her ascending device. If they go with one of the best commercial expedition organizers and pay the fee of $40,000, they may be lucky.

By acclimatizing for the standard nine weeks or so, by obeying instructions to the letter and by investing a fair amount of physical exertion they will probably get lucky and "top out." They will get the summit photo, but where is the romance? Where is the mystique?

Everest on the Cheap

But what is far more worrying is the fact that Mount Everest has become a trap for the unwary. If you don't have that much money it is tempting to go with one of the cheaper expedition organizers. They seem to have nearly as much to offer as the others, but only charge around $13,000.

Russell Brice's Sherpas fixed the ropes up to the summit this year for his own clients, and the other teams used his ropes. Some paid him $100 per client to share the ropes; however, most didn't bother. Russell makes sure his clients have a minimum standard of climbing ability — most of them have climbed at least one other 8,000-meter (26,000-foot) peak. Some of the other teams aren't so careful.

These days, people with frighteningly little ability are finding themselves far, far too high. In the past the weaker climbers would drop out low enough on the mountain to get back safely. Now it's relatively straightforward to ratchet your way up the fixed ropes to the North Col, up to Camp 1, 2, 3, 4… and then on to the summit.

The danger is that you don't know how little you have left in reserve. In his briefings, Russell Brice tells his clients that they must have 25 percent of their strength left when they get to the summit. He monitors them on the radio and he has strict turnaround times. If they haven't reached the top by the set time he demands they turn back, no matter how close they are.

By far the most fatalities happen on the descent, like Mallory and Irvine. Sometimes you will just run out of oxygen and sit down in the snow and wait for rescue. Chances are rescue won't happen.

Next: Controversial Decisions

There have been much-publicized cases over the years of people on their way to the summit walking past dying climbers, and it happened again this year. A young Briton collapsed next to the summit route. Many climbers passed him on their way to the top.

Sir Edmund Hillary has been very vocal about this in the past and he had this to say this year: "I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die."

I agree with his view that the attitude of climbing Everest has changed. In his day mountaineers had a code of conduct, and only real mountaineers would attempt the big mountains. You didn't boast, you didn't lie about your achievements, and you helped those in trouble. These were the values held dear by climbers like Mallory.

But there is more to it than that. I listened to one of our team members on the radio weeping as he tried to administer oxygen to the casualty. It was one of the most harrowing things I have ever heard. He did his very best to help.

Everyday Rescues

In fact, it was completely ignored by the press that our expedition had already rescued a fellow climber this season lower down the mountain. An Indian climber had lost consciousness on the descent from the North Col and had the luck to do this right in front of our group on the way up.

Far from climbing past him, our doctor, Terry O'Connor, started treatment while guides Shaun Hutson, Bill Crouse and Mark Wynton improvised a stretcher and organized the team to carry him down the mountain. He spent the night in Russell's tent on our oxygen supplies and the next day he was on his way home. He was seriously ill from cerebral edema (swelling of the brain) and he certainly would have died without our intervention The last I heard from the Indian expedition leader, the climber was "95 percent OK."

I have seen Russell's guides perform this kind of rescue every season that I've been with them, with no mention in the press. Russell Brice never gets paid for the oxygen ($400 a bottle) and rarely gets any thanks. But when a dying climber is encountered high on the mountain there is a storm of criticism.

The simple truth is that it is very hard to rescue someone from near the summit. Everyone is very near their personal limit, everyone is self-absorbed, and it takes a huge effort of will to organize a dozen other people to carry the casualty, prepare tents and safeguard the route down.

And let's be blunt, when people have paid $40,000 for a package holiday they are reluctant to turn away from their goal. In my experience, most climbers are decent people only too willing to help. But near the summit of Mount Everest, up in the death zone, your moral being is stripped away to a self-preserving core.

Money has perverted the spirit of mountaineering as it has perverted so many other things. Real climbers follow their passion well away from Mount Everest. I'm only sad that my boyhood dream of an impossibly remote Himalayan peak has evaporated like the clouds that embraced George Mallory.