Tough Spots: Over the edge

Two recent incidents on opposite sides of the world highlight the complex risks of 'extreme travel', says Jim Perri

'In the wrong place at the wrong time." The phrase has surfaced twice recently.

 First, it came from Jon Griffith, the young British alpinist whose actions on Everest late last month, along with those of Ueli Steck and Simone Moro, precipitated a violent reaction among a cadre of Sherpas.

The three men ran for their lives from a mob of between 100 and 150 Sherpas, who had been engaged in the annual fixing of a rope-trail up the mountain for the guiding season, now a mainstay of the region's economy. 

Ignoring a request not to climb above where ropes were being fixed, the mountaineers may have sent down chunks of ice that sparked the conflagration that ensued.

That this project introduces tensions into the Sherpa community is beyond doubt - rich Western clients are valued for their wealth, despised for their demands, and disliked for their arrogance.

 It's the old colonial experience from the indigenous side writ small. When elements of closed-shop favouritism are introduced, the mix becomes highly volatile.

Add the contempt thus engendered to the fact that the Sherpas are one of the Nepali hill tribes from which the famously ferocious Gurkha regiments are recruited, and the only surprising factor about the riot on Everest is that it has not happened on this scale before, though there are plenty of minor precedents.

Eric Shipton and HW Tilman, Himalayan explorers of the '30s who are now accepted as the paradigm for adventure travel, witnessed Sherpa aggression on several of their trips. The difference was the pair travelled with the Sherpas as equal companions, with whom they shared food, tents, hardship and decision-making.

Aggression was directed elsewhere, and Shipton and Tilman often viewed it as an entertaining, if occasionally awkward, floor show.

Sherpa Norbu, who acted in his old age as cook to the British expedition that made the first ascent of the difficult Garhwal rock-peak of Changabang in 1974, recalled his companion from 40 years before in the following terms: "Tilman was always away first in the morning, carrying a load in excess of the standard Sherpa load.

He always arrived first at the day's destination. He would have tea brewing by the time the rest caught up with him. On at least one rest day, he made all his Sherpas a cake. He was always the first to cross turbulent streams, pass hard rocky sections and shoulder heavy loads."

Would a modern Sherpa remember a commercial-expedition client in those terms? No.

A vital respect has gone. The mortality rate suffered by the Sherpa community over recent years through the shattered, perilous maze of Everest's Khumbu ice-fall adds to a litany of loss sustained through 90 years, and a consequent tragic resentment.

Yet one irony of the present situation is that the European trio who became the object of Sherpa animus are exemplary in their attitude towards the Sherpas. Here's Jon Griffith in a post from Everest base camp: "Sherpa Tenji was booted out from a commercial expedition last year, as it was decided that he wasn't needed.

Ueli [Steck] offered to partner him, as Tenji's aim had always been to summit Everest without oxygen. Tenji was part of our team this year. Simone [Moro] has done 43 trips to Nepal. If you talk to Sherpas at base camp, they have nothing but good things to say about him.

 Both Ueli and Simone have a long history of respect and friendship with the Sherpas."

Not all Westerners are so enlightened. Once, at Tapovan, the sublime meadow high above the source of the Ganges that serves as a base camp for attempts on some of the world's most beautiful mountains, our expedition took in the Hindu liaison officer to a Czech team. He had been taunted with beef in his rations every day, left, joined us, climbed the mountain and formed enduring friendships.

You can behave well towards people, or you can behave badly.

 It may be that rich clients who are incapable of reaching their goal without assistance have been too involved in their own egos to remember their manners or to respect those who help them attain it. Steck, Moro and Griffith clearly suffered from the others' legacy.

The second use of the "wrong place, wrong time" phrase that came up was by the chief inspector of Greenland Police, in reference to the death from exposure of Philip Goodeve-Docker, a 31-year-old comedy promoter and "rookie to the Arctic" from west London who, with two companions, had been participating in a commercial trek across the Greenland ice cap to raise funds for the Queen's Nursing Institute.

He has been widely characterised in the British press as an "explorer", though his itinerary was first completed by Fridtjof Nansen and his team in 1888, has been followed by hundreds since, and 30 traverses are planned for this year alone.

So, to cross Greenland in the manner of Goodeve-Docker - a likeable and altruistic character in the accounts of all who knew him - stands in much the same relationship to exploration as those wealthy clients on commercial Everest climbs do to the true practice of mountaineering.

All this reminds me of the inquest into the deaths of six schoolchildren on a Cairngorms outdoor-activity expedition in November 1971.

The jury's prudent voice deserves to resonate down the decades and remind people that, as they stated, the supreme mountaineering virtue is that of experience - and clearly there is only one way to acquire that.

At odds with the YouTube generation's fixation on sensation-seeking, so-called "X-treme sports", it requires rigorous apprenticeship, long assimilation of knowledge, and recognition of primacy for experience and those who possess it. Its implied philosophy is set against nannied achievement that can be bought in the marketplace.

Yet even that, as the mountaineer Jon Krakauer argued in Into Thin Air , his account of a 1996 Everest disaster when eight climbers died, comes with no guarantees, given the environments where the challenges lie.

We cannot but feel sympathy for the Goodeve-Docker family in their loss. But perhaps it is time to feed in some anger against the old, heedless colonial imperatives of entitlement and conquest that underpin these ersatz versions of adventuring, so tied up with cash, status or even the more honourable fundraising.

One report on the Goodeve-Docker disaster noted that the "team had met requirements on food, drink, clothing and equipment set by authorities", carried satellite phones, and were suitably insured against the possibility of rescue.

Perhaps in future, those same authorities could ask if awareness of risk is properly attuned, and the participants' sense of reality about what they are undertaking is more than merely virtual. In doing so, they might begin to address a sickness not just in the present vogue for "adventure travel", but also at the heart of modern society.

©The Sunday Telegraph