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I’ve always envisioned Mallory and Irvine rushing to the summit with light nailed boots, no oxygen and tweed jackets, dammit! Armed with only their insane courage. Turns out he had a gabardine jacket fortified with wool and silk: https://www.alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_2007_file.... But still … mad respect.
Speaking of insane courage, Henry Worsley, should be mentioned: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-white-dark.... His final photo on the plane to a Chilean hospital is haunting.
For the Mallories of the future there are so many options to continue the tradition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_mountains_in...
An article posted here a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40611058) wasn't so charitable. The Wikipedia article on the expedition also hints that sending these two specific people to climb Mt. Everest was pretty irresponsible:
> The question of which mountaineers would comprise the climbing party was no easy one. As a consequence of World War I, there was a lack of a whole generation of strong young men. George Mallory was again part of the mission, along with Howard Somervell, Edward "Teddy" Norton and Geoffrey Bruce. George Ingle Finch, who had gained the record height in 1922, was proposed as a member but eventually was not included. The committee's reasons included that he was divorced and that he had accepted money for lectures. The influential Secretary of the committee, Arthur Hinks, made it clear that for an Australian to be first on Everest was not acceptable; the British wanted the climb to be an example of British spirit to lift morale. Mallory refused to climb again without Finch, but changed his mind after being personally persuaded by the British royal family at Hinks's request. [...] Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, an engineering student whom Odell knew from an expedition to Spitsbergen, was a so-called "experiment" for the team and a test for "young blood" on the slopes of Mount Everest.
So Irvine was very inexperienced, and Mallory's absent-mindedness also didn't bide well for their chances of coming back alive. However, the article also directly contradicts the Wikipedia page (Wikipedia states that Mallory initially refused to go without Finch, while the article writes that "he would not think of joining the new expedition if Finch was going" - so make of it what you will...
You will find that on occasion grown men throw caution to the wind and consciously take seemingly unnecessary irresponsible risks for personal glory and the greater good.
As a consequence of World War I, there was a lack of a whole generation of strong young men.
The British wanted the climb to be an example of British spirit to lift morale.
If you'd like this sentiment expressed in a less somber manner Shatner got you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU2ftCitvyQ
I think that in cases like this the line between heroism and foolishness is very thin (and also subjective). Ok, these guys can probably be considered heroes. But how about the three Swedes that set out to reach the North Pole in a balloon that one of them hoped would be able to not only reach the Pole, but carry them past it to an inhabited place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e%27s_Arctic_balloon... - it later turned out that the balloon failed after only four days, followed by several grueling months of trying to trek back to civilization using the completely inadequate equipment that the balloon was able to carry, only to die, probably by being eaten by polar bears, on an uninhabited polar island)? Or that more recent guy who tried to dive to the Titanic using a largely untested submersible, which eventually killed himself and his four paying passengers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion)?
These are examples of foolhardy people who miscalculated risks. But at the same time these are also examples of people who were solely motivated by selfish reasons. There is a romance to it if you squint but it is not the same.
The mountaineers knew the odds are long and did it anyway for a cause greater than themselves. That is what makes them heroic.
Mountains are- a abstraction of our daily lifes. There can be no food gathered up there and no home errected. But you can look on the valleys, where our lifes happen and gain a "outsider" perspective. They make our important things small and put our lifes to scale. And the view down, is as close to space, as we earthworms could get for the longest time.
And a green valley opening up, deep below, half covered in clouds, has something of a treasure chest, opening up.
Upvoted :-)
Unrelated to the article content: I thought the headline typeface was lovely. It turns out it's Eskell Display: https://lettersfromsweden.se/font/eksell-display/
Robert Macfarlane has a fantastic book around this theme. "Mountains of the Mind" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/839157.Mountains_of_the_...
I read some studies a few years ago that suggest going that high can cause brain damage. Does anyone know the state of the research?
A 2023 meta-analysis (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36982007/) concluded that "as a short-term plateau exercise, high-altitude mountaineering has no significant negative impacts on the cognitive functions of climbers."
As context for anyone unfamiliar with the issue, below are some quotes from a 2008 SciAm article discussing a research paper by Fayed et al titled "Evidence of brain damage after high-altitude climbing by means of magnetic resonance imaging" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16443427/).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-into-... (emphasis added):
> … one of the sobering things about the Fayed study is that even when climbers showed no signs of acute sickness, the scans still found brain damage.
> The results in the Everest climbers were the starkest… The expedition had no major mishaps, and none of the 12 professional climbers evinced any obvious signs of high-altitude illness; the only acute case of mountain sickness was a mild one in the expedition’s amateur climber. Yet only one of the 13 climbers (a professional) returned with a normal brain scan. All the scans of the other 12 showed cortical atrophy or enlargement of the Virchow-Robin (VR) spaces. These spaces surround the blood vessels that drain brain fluid and communicate with the lymph system; widening of these VR spaces is seen in the elderly but rarely in the young.
> The body is remarkably resilient: Does the brain recover from these mountaineering wounds? To answer this question, the researchers reexamined the same climbers three years after the expedition, with no other high-altitude climbing intervening. In all cases, the damage was still apparent on the second set of scans.
Thanks for the links and quotes. I'm a little confused though. The 2023 meta-analysis says there's no significant negative impact on "cognitive functions", but the 2008 article says there is brain damage. Are these reports contradictory, or are we supposed to infer that the brain damage is not impacting their cognitive functions?
Non-expert here but it sounds like the enlarging of VR spaces is not known to be correlated with cognitive impairment, and more needs to be known about whether it does, but apparently it doesn't in any way that shows up in the cognitive tests done in the other study.
Old old news, research was conclusive decades ago. Going that high does indeed cause irreparable brain damage.
Like Hawaii!