Find a friend or relative who weighs in at about 180 lbs and feed them some potent downers (without their knowledge, if you value their friendship or relationship) When they are good and limp, pick them up, carry them into the kitchen, climb onto the counter-top (with this person in your arms) and travel the Formica surfaces for a few hours. Can you do that? Then try it with a bag over your head to simulate the good air at 27,000 ft. Realize that in any "normal" mountain rescue situation (i.e. transporting a litter case on an uncomplicated trail or path) it would take about six people to carry a person with six other people along to relieve those carriers every few minutes.

Make that "normal" situation any more technical, say by narrowing the path and making the ground a little uneven, and you might have to add another six carriers. Make it real now, with drop-offs and loose rock and ledges and snow-slopes to traverse. Now there exists the potential for some of these dozen to eighteen rescuers to get hurt or killed in the process of moving this awkward load on a mountain. Make it Everest by dropping the temperature and atmospheric pressure to silly numbers... now you can't really do much more than simply "climb" with everything going right and swell. Now if your best friend or partner can't walk and you are up by the Second Step on the Northeast Ridge, you can die with him or her, you can freeze your limbs in the time it takes this person to die... you can possibly explore a few other mind-numbingly awful options... but you can't pick up this 180 lbs at 28,500 ft and go anywhere nice.

If it is a physical impossibility to do for a dying person, it is a moral impossibility for a dead person... no matter how much we loved and respected our fellow climbers, donating our own lives for the transport of their remains would be unquestionably wasteful. If a climber has died directly on the climbing route, the kindest thing would probably be to team up in an effort to move them away from the well traveled areas. If this is not possible, perhaps future climbers will encounter this body without knowing the climber's story or identity. That can be a sad and lonely encounter, but most climbers I've met have maturity about such matters and enough respect for their compatriots, living and dead, that such meetings are dignified.

To a climber, a body, high on a beautiful mountain is not gruesome... but perhaps a firm reminder of a good life cut short. Many of us make clear at a trip's outset what we wish to have done with our bodies if they are recoverable (possible if an incident takes place below Camp IV, for instance). We also try to make clear who will pay the enormous costs of transport back to our particular shady grove in our hometown if we are determined that it should be our final resting place. A climber must be able to address such matters without emotion, without any inclination toward doom and self destruction, and without undue burden being placed on those who survive.

But finally, realize that these responsibilities are in no way the exclusive concern of mountain climbers. Personally, I have trouble imagining a better "resting place" in the world than the great glacial ranges (although I have persistent fantasies of being laid out just above the high-tide mark on some sun-drenched tropical beach while strangers frolic in the surf and sip from drinks that have little umbrellas in them). The British called Everest "the finest Cenotaph" (tombstone or memorial in old Brit-speak) when in 1924 it became apparent that Mallory and Irvine would be there forever. Whatever you call Everest, for many of us, it can stand quite ably for some wonderful people we were lucky to know, and for earlier climbers who've now become our history and our legends.

—Dave Hahn, Climber

EVEREST FAQ