author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Every year people show up at Everest Base Camp, believing they can climb the mountain with very little experience. Every year they get reported in the media, and more people believe that climbing Everest must be easy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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In this era of fake news, the BBC has launched a Reality Check series to analyse popular news stories that sound plausible and assess whether or not they’re bollocks. I thought it might be fun to run one the BBC’s own stories through a reality check.
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Why does The Guardian so often commission people who haven’t got a clue about Everest to write self-righteous opinion pieces about it, instead of asking someone knowledgeable to write them instead? It’s an exercise in shit stirring that achieves nothing useful.
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Last week The Economist published an article about why Everest is dangerous, without mentioning avalanches, rockfall, crevasses, precipitous terrain, oxygen deprivation, altitude sickness, exhaustion, exposure, extreme temperatures, frostbite, storms or murderous jetstream winds.
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We hear many stories of blame on Everest, but rarely stories of heroism. This isn’t because they don’t exist, but because the media prefer to focus on the negative. In this week’s post I do my bit to rectify this with the help of an old friend.
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I believe the Everest debate has progressed in the last couple of years, but then a badly-informed article appears in a mass-market publication which takes it back a few years, and reignites hatred against those who dream of climbing high mountains.
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One of the things that shocks people when I tell them about Everest is that I had to walk past dead bodies on my summit day. In this post I debunk a popular media myth, and discuss how we need a more mature attitude towards death.
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A few news sites have been reporting that five UK villages have slower broadband internet speeds than Everest. But where did these claims originate, and how plausible are they?
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Responding to reports that Everest has become too easy to climb, the government of Nepal has announced a new set of arbitrary criteria in an effort to limit the numbers and produce a better quality of climber.
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They’ve just released a big-budget film about the 1996 Everest tragedy, which I went to see at the BFI IMAX in London earlier this week. I was expecting to hate it, but although I had some reservations, I ended up really enjoying it.
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