I haven't read this one yet, it's on my list. If you're interested in learning a lot more about the background and context, I'd recommend:
- "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest" by Wade Davis. I've read a lot of books on this period, and this one is the best at providing context to why they were there, how Mallory got picked, the team dynamics, and other key folks like Norton.
- "Everest - The First Ascent" by Harriet Tuckey. This one is very biased, and really about the 1952 expedition, but I like it because it really gets into what was different in the 50s vs the 20s (especially little things, like keeping healthy and properly hydrated, and cultural things like feeling like it's OK and not ungentlemanly to practice and train).
There's this idea that the '24 expedition went with the goal of getting Mallory up the mountain, but that's not really what happened at all. Mallory and Sandy Irvine (a distant relative of mine) ended up on their attempt as the result of a lot of game-time decisions made by them and the leaders of the expedition. The same decisions lead to Edward F. Norton holding the world altitude record for 30+ years, despite being far from the best mountaineer in the world, or on the expedition.
Wade Davis was a speaker at the 2012 American Alpine Club meeting at the Ford Assembly Plant in Richmond, CA. He had a line that stuck with me: death is the price we pay for living. Side note, Davis is mentioned in at least one episode of the X-Files, owing to his work on zombies in Haiti.
These aren't Everest specific recs, but if any of you are looking for mountaineering reading:
_The White Spider_ by Heinrich Harrer
_The Beckoning Silence_ and _Into the Void_ by Joe Simpson
_Eiger Obsession_ by John Harlin. Part of my enjoyment came from my familiarity with the geography of the book.
_Solo Faces_ by James Salter, fiction, loosely based on Gary Hemmings and Royal Robbins.
- The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman (one of my favorite of all books, two pretty normal guys doing something absolutely epic)
- Everest: The Cruel Way by Joe Tasker (maybe history's single greatest suffer-fest, incredible).
- Touching The Void by Joe Simpson (I avoided reading this for such a long time, because it's something of a cliche, but it's actually great).
- Seven Years in Tibet in Heinrich Harrer (It's hard to know how reliable this is, and it's a bit of a tall tale, but it's absolutely not the book I expected it to be going in).
- Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer (Bite-sized bits of great outdoor writing). "Into Thin Air" is a good read too.
The "classic" I disliked was Herzog's Annapurna. It just seemed so mechanical, and so missing the joy of exploration that makes the best of these books so fun to read.
Arlene Blum is another mountaineer author worth mentioning. She's written about her expeditions including Annapurna I, as well as her work as a chemist campaigning to ban toxic flame retardant from upholstery.
Annapurna A Woman’s Place and Breaking Trail. The first is about the namesake first American expedition to the top which she led, the second is her memoir. Both great reads, thankfully lacking much of the big headed bravado of other mountaineering books.
> Every time I imagine climbing the Eiger in hobnail books, my palms sweat.
My guess is that they were using Tricouni [1] nails in their boots, by all accounts they work well over a different range of conditions to a rubber sole and crampon combination.
> However, Mallory had a fatal flaw, well known to his companions. He was one of those people who are both absent-minded and clumsy with equipment. [...] above 21,000 feet in the death zone of Everest [...] intricacies of using the large, awkward oxygen bottles...
One really wonders about the competence of the committee which was selecting climbers for the fatal attempt.
The day napoleon was defeated, europe was filled with generals who knew it better and would have won. We know much more in hindsight - and every game is easier with perfect information.
We have send people to space in space-suits, which when under pressure would extend there arms and were no longer able to fold them back in. We know better now, but back then we didn't know. So the art to prepare for such "adventures" is very different to what we imagine. No endless information gathering, instead you select a person that can improvise on the spot with the spotty information you have. You give them tools to improvise: Knifes to cut the spacesuit open, duct-tape and rubber-tourniquets to keep the helmet pressurized. Not great, not terrible. Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?
> Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?
That is one of the incomprehensible things for me about the early pioneers of parachute technology. Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower when they could have tested and perfected the jump with a sack of potatoes or sand?
> Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower
Tangential, but I think there was just one incident, and the guy was considered a crackpot even when he was alive. They thought he was going to throw a dummy off, but against all advice he insisted on doing it himself.
> One really wonders about the competence of the committee which was selecting climbers for the fatal attempt.
That's not really what happened. There wasn't some committee deciding that Mallory and Irvine should go up that day - it was the result of health, weather, conditions, injuries, and politics inside the group. They were months of travel away from anything resembling a committee!
This is a pretty gross generalization, and not one that I recall Wade Davis (the best boo I have read so far on Mallory) adopts; He does go into the fiddly nature of the O2 tanks a lot - The oxygen apparatus was new to everyone back then, and Irvine was there because he was the most proficient in it's use.
Nobody had ever climbed mountains that high. There were no truly competent people around at that time, at least not competent in high altitude mountaineering.
Do you have a source for this? I have read quite a bit about climbing in the Himalayas and I have never heard of Sherpas climbing at high altitude in the 1920s.
Can I humbly suggest picking up Wade Davis's book? I think he does a fantastic job breaking apart the attitude and trauma that drove Mallory and Irvine to the mountain. Toxic masculinity was not in it. Some level of trench trauma was.
We don't call the mountain Chomolungma today, because, quite simply it was never widely called that historically. If anything Sagarmāthā was maybe slightly more popular, but even then written references to that name were rare.
Some other books if you wish to learn about Everest:
The mountain is usually called Everest, because British surveyors could not go to Nepal and Tibet to determine the local name. The name among the peoples living close to the mountain would have been Chomolungma (or something similar). Sagarmatha was apparently a name used further south in Nepal (outside the Tibetan cultural sphere), but the history of that name is poorly documented.
Humbly asking which parts of the article would get refuted by the books you listed?
Why and in which instances could they be seen more authoritative?
Toxic masculinity could arguably be extended to colonialism (see even the quoted passage before); let's keep it focused here though on context and the crushing constraints on choice with harmful outcomes.
The primary thesis - perhaps overstated - of Wade Davis's book - is that it was more or less the demons/memory of the Great War that drove them. having not read Conefry's book yet - it's only been published for less than a month, I don't know if this is Mick's thesis or your thesis.
All that said, Davis's book is held in high regard by the mountaineering and the historians of the period.
It'd be better to reserve "Toxic Masculinity" is the undesirable type of masculinity? Going foolishly into the unknown and dying is just standard masculinity. Someone has to venture into the terrible unknown and if it is a choice between men and women it'd better be the men.
It is stupid. But being stupid is hardly something to insult people over; it is too common when going on an adventure. Clever people generally have low risk tolerances and stay home.
Harm was done by going forward; not only to himself but to his wife and children.
"Mallory had premonitions about what might happen. Before leaving for that fatal attempt on Everest in 1924, he visited Kathleen, the widow of Captain Scott, and confessed to friends he was in two minds about whether he should leave his own wife and small children in Cambridge. In a way many will recognize, he never quite made the decision himself but let others make it for him. The Everest committee were determined that their finest climber would be part of the team, and Mallory’s wife Ruth did not want to be seen to dissuade him from going."
And at the root of the tragedy it's implied lay technicalities yes, as Mallory didn't want to go with pragmatic complement George Finch again.
But the underlying culprit seems to be the apparent lack of choice he must have felt in context; boiling down all the way to Francis Younghusband and his goal to "conquer Everest" for Britain (not good old masculinity without skin in his game either btw).
"Now, it appears, Mallory had told the committee, as one of his deferring mechanisms, that he would not think of joining the new expedition if Finch was going; so they fired Finch to persuade Mallory, and he was left with little alternative but to prove he was a better climber on the day, whatever risks might be involved."
Doing what others want you to do and going boldly into face great danger in the unknown is a respectable masculine behaviour though. There isn't anything toxic about that, it is the only way that the unknown is going to get explored. I agree that it'd be a much better idea if he'd stayed home to look after his wife and family. But the behaviour isn't toxic, it is still productive. Ill advised without a doubt.
But that is like saying a married man shouldn't join the army. There is a reasonable expectation that some married men will die horribly in service of their society leaving behind widows and orphans. Particularly in the pre-antibiotic era we're talking about when horrible death was a real possibility at any moment anyway.
At least the article implies that he was conflicted about his decision to go at it again. His surroundings pushed him towards that end; see quotes above.
- harmful (to him / his family)
- deplete of choice (context of strong social pressures / authority)
- no benefit other than for colonial grandstanding
I agree with 2/3rds of that but none of it is toxic. You aren't very well going to send women out to get themselves killed and being pressured into it is a good thing. Men aren't supposed to go out and get themselves killed for nothing, they're only supposed to do that when someone else tells them to. A key point of responsible manliness is accepting that you have a responsibility to support your community and that might require you to make some sacrifices. Hopefully not death, but that is very much on the table. If a death is going to be involved in that era they were going to be making sure that it is a man who dies because the alternative was a woman who are much more important at a societal level.
How else do you see them figuring out what is at the top of Everest? Someone had to go up and have a look. It is like spaceflight or exploring the oceans; death is highly likely for the first few people who attempt it but someone had to do it. They couldn't send a drone up - they didn't have them.
> no benefit other than for colonial grandstanding
This is the one I disagree on - they're dealing with the unknown. They didn't know very much about climbing tall mountains like the Everest. The point of that sort of thing is they don't know if there is anything worthwhile about the act or not, and they deal with that by doing it to see what happens.
The colonisation process was horrible but undeniably hugely beneficial to the European powers. "Colonial Grandstanding" of this sort turned out to be hugely net positive to the countries doing it on average.
The risk taking personality type has always been with us, and the thing is, they'll take risks whether it's necessary or not. I think we can all agree they're pretty good to have around when the shit hits the fan.
They can call it what they want in their language. In English we can call it what we want. We say United States and England and Australia but the Chinese and Japanese and Tibetans call them whatever they do in their languages. I don’t see a problem.
