George Mallory

One of the heroes of the climbing world, and perhaps the most famous mountaineer of all, Englishman George Mallory became famous for a series of unsuccessful (and ultimately tragic) attempts to summit Mount Everest (8848m) in the 1920’s. In what became a burning obsession, Mallory led three attempts on the summit. On the third attempt, on the 8th June 1924 he, and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine, disappeared somewhere on the slopes of Everest. Fierce debate has raged ever since as to whether or not Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit before they died. His famous quote (”Because it is there”, in response to a journalist asking why he wished to climb Everest) has inspired countless mountain lovers on their trekking holidays and climbing expeditions ever since.

Maurice Herzog

In 1950, French mountaineer Maurice Herzog made history by being the first person to successfully summit a peak over eight thousand metres above sea level – Annapurna I (8091m). He lost his gloves on the way up, and the terrible weather on the descent almost claimed the life of Herzog and his fellow climbers. Frostbite cost him most of his fingers and toes, but he managed to make it down alive. His book of the experience, Annapurna, became a massive best seller and trekking holidays in and around the Annapurna massif are hugely popular today – but only a few elite climbers have repeated Herzog’s feat and made it to the top of Annapurna I.

Sir Edmund Hillary

While a trekking holiday to Everest Base Camp is within the capabilities of most fit hikers, the summit of the world’s highest mountain eluded mountaineers for decades. New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary will forever be famous, alongside his climbing partner Sherpa Tenzing, for being one of the first men to finally make it to the top of the mountain in 1953.

Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner’s biography reads like a list of mountaineering records and world firsts. Born in Italy in 1944, he was one of the first two people to make a successful ascent of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen, the first person to make a solo ascent of Everest (also without oxygen), the first climber to successfully summit all fourteen eight-thousanders, and so on. In terms of raw achievement, Messner can be considered to be the world’s greatest mountaineer, living or dead.

Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson has become a modern day mountaineering hero due to a near death experience in 1985 in the Peruvian Andes. While attempting to climb the west face of Siula Grande (6344m), a route that had never been successfully attempted, he first broke his leg, then fell down a crevasse after his partner was forced to cut the rope connecting them. Astonishingly, despite suffering from hypothermia, dehydration and the severe pain of his broken leg, after three and a half days he managed to crawl back to their base camp to be rescued. His book of the experience, Touching the Void, has become one of the contemporary classics of mountaineering literature, and was recently made into an award winning documentary.

Jude Limburn Turner is the Marketing Manager for Mountain Kingdoms, an adventure tour company who have provided trekking holidays for over 20 years. They now offer treks and tours worldwide, including destinations in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Central and South East Asia.

In 2008, NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski embarked on his first expedition from Everest Base Camp, trekking towards the summit. He was forced to turn back on that occasion, but this year he returned for a second try. On May 20^th, with the support of his NASA trek team at Everest Base Camp below, he reached the summit at around four in the morning, in time to see the sunrise on the curved horizon.

The Views He’s Seen

Scott has had a remarkable life so far. His education spanned four continents, attending schools in Senegal, Lebanon, Iran and Greece, as well as the U.S. In 1989, he completed his doctorate at Stanford Medical School and then continued to study and practise medicine. With NASA, Scott had the enviable experience of seeing the world from a different and rare perspective, taking space walks while in orbit around the earth. These were part of his five NASA space shuttle missions where he worked on the Russian Mir Space Station and helped construct the International Space Station. This meant he spent hours floating in zero gravity with the blue planet spinning beneath him.

Astronauts and Everest Records

Scott Parazynski is not the only astronaut to crave further adventure after returning from space, and his association with the world of mountaineering is not unique. The Apollo 11 astronaut, Neil Armstrong, teamed up with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1985 to help Hillary set another record. It was more than thirty years after Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had returned safely to Everest Base Camp from the summit, becoming the first team to successfully reach the top. Armstrong flew Hillary to the South Pole in a small plane, helping Hillary become the first person to have stood on both poles and to have stood on Everest’s peak.

Twenty four years later, as part of his acclimatisation preparations for the Everest ascent, Scott and his NASA team approached the mountain via the classic Everest Base Camp Trek route. He then took a number of training runs up the mountain to get his body used to the exertion and thin air. Once he was ready, he headed for the summit with a lump of rock from the moon in hand, which had been collected during Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon landing.

Photographing the Top of the World

As part of Scott’s second and successful Everest trek, he carried a special, high-quality robotic camera to capture panoramic images of the mountain. Called a GigaPan Epic, it is mounted on a tripod and left to scan for a while, collecting a 360 degree image of the view which is then stored on a computer. The results are wide strip of an image that you can zoom into and pan across, with an image that sharpens and refocuses as you interact with it. It’s an interesting preview of what is waiting for trekkers at the culmination of the Everest Base Camp Trek.

The picture shows the many yellow and orange tents scattered among heaps of rock and boulders at the base camp. The fractured ice of the Khumbu Icefall is visible, as is the base of the Nuptse, an adjoining mountain. You can see the Khumbu valley leading up the mountain through which the NASA trek team approached on their Everest Base Camp Trek.

Scott took the camera up Everest to Camp IV. At 7,920 metres, it is believed to be the highest photo of its kind ever taken. However, the photos of Scott at the peak were more conventional: flags of sponsors and charities being held up for the camera, jackets adorned with memorial badges of space missions, and Scott with frosted eyebrows and a pink smiling face.

Jude Limburn Turner is the Marketing Manager for Mountain Kingdoms, an adventure tour company who have run the Everest Base Camp Trek for over 20 years. They now offer treks and tours worldwide, including destinations in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Central and South East Asia.

Tidying Everest

Tidying up at high altitudes is a difficult proposition. Beyond the altitude of about 7,000 metres, where the air gets significantly thin, climbers are understandably more concerned with lightening their loads and completing their journey than keeping the ground free of litter.

This is particularly the case beyond Camp 4 (7,920 m) where mountaineers make the final push to the summit, or are staggering back towards safety. Because of this, there has been discarded equipment and empty oxygen bottles accumulating for many years.

There have been a number of clean-up expeditions on Mount Everest (8,848 m). In 2000, National Geographic filmed an all-out clean-up effort on the mountain and even got Sharon Stone to do the voice-over for the documentary. Another full-scale cleaning trek from Everest Base Camp was organised by a Japanese team in 2007. Increasingly, mountaineers are encouraged to use recyclable metal containers, which feed Nepal’s scrap metal industry, and the toll for littering on Everest is being used to fund the ongoing tidying mission.

Despite these efforts, the outcry continues and the condition of the world’s tallest mountain has become symbolic of how we mistreat our natural wonders. Even the legendary Apa Sherpa, Everest trekking veteran with 19 Everest summits to his name, has used his fame to draw attention to the problem.

However, the emphasis of this concern has shifted more recently to focus upon the effects on Mount Everest of a more widespread problem. More alarming than litter (and less easily rectified) is the damage to the Everest environment being caused by global climate change.

And this is where the concerns of the environmentalists and the Everest community tend to overlap. The outdoor pursuits enthusiasts, mountaineers, and the adventure travel companies that conduct variations of the Everest Base Camp Trek all agree: they want to ensure the future of Nepal’s wonderful landscape.

Global Warming

It is easy to see even with anecdotal evidence how global warming is affecting the landscape around the Everest Base Camp Trek trails. For a while, the Sherpas have been reporting how the snow caps have retreated, and Greenpeace have issued a ‘before and after’ image comparing a photograph of the Rongbuk glacier taken in 1968 to how it looks today. The reduction of the ridges of snow and towers of ice is clear to see, and similar changes have been recorded on mountains thousands of miles away, such as Mount Kilimanjaro (5,893 m) in Tanzania.

Whatever the cause for this change, the importance of glacial melting should not be underestimated. The melt-water from Himalayan glaciers provides the water volume for the Indus, Yangtze, and Ganges rivers and affects the populations that depend upon that water. If the Himalayan glaciers melt considerably, it could mean dangerously increased flooding along those rivers, followed by severe long-term water shortages.

Again Everest trekking luminaries such as Apa Sherpa are outspoken on the cause. Following on from his Eco-Everest climb in 2009, his next expedition this month will be to climb an unnamed (and possibly unexplored) Nepalese peak. He will likely be armed with his banner for the summit photographs: “Stop Climate Change – Let the Himalayas Live!”

Jude Limburn Turner is the Marketing Manager for Mountain Kingdoms, an adventure tour company who have run the Everest Base Camp Trek for over 20 years. They now offer treks and tours worldwide, including destinations in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Central and South East Asia.

From summit pictures to those taken along the course of the Everest Base Camp Trek, the best photographs are those that capture some of the scale and beauty of the Everest landscape and transport us to places seen only by an adventurous few.

Tensing on Top of the World

Everyone will remember the iconic image of Tensing Norgay, masked and hooded with one boot on the peak of Everest, with blue daylight merging from the horizon into the darkness of space above. Above his head he is holds his ice axe, which bears the national flags of the expedition team that waits expectantly at Everest Base Camp three thousand metres beneath him. You can also see the guide rope curled at his feet which ties him to his climbing partner, who is out of shot. This photograph, of course, was taken by Edmund Hillary on May 29, 1953, just after they became the first mountaineers to reach the summit.

This is one of several striking images of Everest expeditions belonging to the Royal Geographic Society. Another powerful picture (that you can see for yourself on the National Geographic website) features Hillary and Norgay on the way up one of the steeper stages. They labour towards the camera which looks down the mountain, with the slopes twisting down behind them in giddy perspective towards the South Col and Lhotse Face below. As well as giving an impression of the steepness of the climb, this image conveys some of the effort involved in the long hard, trek from Everest Base Camp.

Reinhold Messner’s Tent

Reinhold Messner was the first recorded mountaineer to reach the summit alone and without the use of bottled oxygen. Imposing these limitations upon himself, it is no surprise that he described himself as “a single, narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists.” This notion is depicted by one of his arresting photographs: his tent tied on a precarious outcrop of snow in the foreground with only an expanse of cloud behind, and no sign of a safe place to stand.

Part of the visual impact of these images comes from the innate difficulty in attaining them; but you don’t have to be a professional photographer – or even a mountaineer – to take a breathtaking shot of Mount Everest. Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr contain a bounty of amateur snaps taken along the Everest Base Camp Trek trails and at Base Camp itself. They show that anyone has the potential to catch the world’s mightiest mountain in a good light, emerging from the mist, or cutting an impressive silhouette from the sky.

If you like the idea of gathering your own photo diary of an unforgettable adventure, then you should investigate the classic Everest Base Camp Trek, with the chance to see Mount Everest with your own eyes, and take some memorable photographs.

Jude Limburn Turner is the Marketing Manager for Mountain Kingdoms, an adventure tour company who have run the Everest Base Camp Trek for over 20 years. They now offer treks and tours worldwide, including destinations in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Central and South East Asia.

In May 2009, Sir Ranulph Fiennes finally achieved his ambition of reaching the summit of Mount Everest, having tried the Everest trekking routes up both the Tibetan and Nepalese sides of the mighty mountain. It was the culmination of a long-running charitable effort in which he raised huge amounts of money for Marie Curie Cancer care. It has been a cause close to his heart after Ranulph’s wife and several of his family members died from Cancer within a period of a few months.

Sir Ranulph’s accomplishments, which have always been startling, were even more remarkable with these Everest trekking expeditions because of his age and his state of health while he was climbing. At the age of 65 years, Fiennes is the oldest Britain to have reached the summit and the first pensioner.

His Everest adventure began in 2003 when he began preparing for a 2005 summit attempt from the Tibetan side of Everest. His first challenge was to prove that, at the age of 60 and recovering from cardiac surgery, he was strong enough even to attempt the mountain. After a series of trial mountain climbs and training expeditions Fiennes was passed fit for Everest. Nonetheless, because of a troublesome medical condition, he had to wear a gas mask while sleeping at base camp. Everest was clearly going to be one of his greater challenges.

On his first summit bid he suffered serious chest pains and considered himself lucky to get back down the mountain alive, having to rely on emergency medication to keep his heart working. In 2008 he tried again, but again, due to exhaustion, didn’t make it. But Sir Ranulph was a determined man, even spending his honeymoon with his second wife at Everest Base Camp.

In 2009, he tried a third time, taking a route up the South East Ridge from the Nepal side of Everest. Because of his health issues, Fiennes was well-placed to appreciate the difference in altitude between the Advance Base Camp in Tibet (at 6500 metres) and the Nepalese Everest Base Camp (5,380 metres), calling the latter “a far healthier launch point for the summit.” To keep him healthy, Fiennes was kept separate from other climbers at base camp to avoid catching a virus.

During the climb, Fiennes relied heavily on the skills and encouragement of his Sherpa co-climber, Thundu. They established a slow, steady pace out of Everest Base Camp, and Fiennes rested as much as he could at the camps along the route. Despite his uncertain health, and his difficulties in holding an ice axe properly because of his missing fingertips (that is another story), they made it to the summit of Everest on May 21st 2009.

When he returned to Everest Base Camp, exhausted, he told reporters what he had seen at the zenith of his Everest trekking adventure: “It felt like you could dive into the clouds,” he said. He could see “the sickle moon and stars everywhere.”

Not bad for a man with a fear of heights.

Kirsty Parsons is the Marketing Coordinator for Everest Base Camp Trek, an adventure website which features the classic trek to Everest Base Camp as well as several alternative Everest trekking routes in the Himalayan region.

The world’s highest mountain was the setting for a dramatic record-breaking attempt in September 2009 as three men jumped from a helicopter at an altitude of 6,154m, which is twice the exit altitude of an average recreational jump. Their aim was to land on a plateau called Gorak Shep (5,164m), a narrow, sandy area of open ground close to Everest Base Camp. To do this they were in freefall for only four seconds, during which they fell more than a thousand metres; they had this brief time to steady themselves before opening their chutes, after which they had to steer to safety. The whole event was over in three minutes.

It was not a feat to be attempted by the inexperienced, but the trio have accumulated more than 13,000 jumps between them. Two of the sky divers are British; veteran sky diver and cameraman Leo Dickinson and skydiving instructor Ralph Mitchell, and they were joined by Air Commodore Ramesh Tripathi from the Indian Air Force.

Ramesh commented on how the jump was challenging because of the high winds and freezing temperatures. At one point he was taken away on the wind. Their landing was also a risky prospect, having to avoid the glaciers, crevasses and ridges around Everest Base Camp. Leo Dickinson confirmed that it was a dangerous landing, suggesting that overshooting the plateau could mean death or ending up ‘with something important broken.’

They were rewarded for their nerve with a perspective of the Everest Base Camp trekking landscape that few people have seen before now. “It was not just Everest” said Dickinson, “I could see the whole panorama of fantastic mountains and it was just amazing.” He added: “The view of the mountain range was beyond my wildest dreams.”

An outdoor adventure cameraman, Leo Dickinson is no stranger to Mount Everest (8,848 m), having filmed Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler’s trek to the summit without supplementary oxygen. He has made a film about a team of canoeists who started 800 metres below Everest Base Camp and rode a freezing river down the mountain. Leo has also had airborne adventures around Everest prior to this record bid. In October 1991 he filmed the first successful balloon ride over the summit of Mount Everest, propelled over the peak by the powerful and volatile jet stream.

The three skydivers are waiting for confirmation from Guinness that they have beaten the existing the high-altitude landing world record. Last year, sky divers successfully landed on a drop zone near Everest at 3,765 metres, way below the altitude of this month’s jump.

The Nepal government permitted the daredevil record attempt and are considering proposals to run regular parachute jumps in the air space around Mount Everest. It is part of a scheme to expand tourism to Nepal for Visit Nepal 2011, building upon the visitors brought by the popular Everest Base Camp Trek experience.

Kirsty Parsons is the Marketing Coordinator for Everest Base Camp trek, an adventure website which features the classic Everest Base Camp Trek, as well as several alternative Everest trekking routes in the Himalayan region.