Three Sides of
Everest
There’s more to
a mountain than
the summit
0
n a beautiful, clear morning in May 2012, I headed through a forest high above the Imja River in
Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park. Rarely used by
trekking groups or visitors, it is a trail I discovered
years ago while living in this region, known as Khumbu,
conducting the fieldwork for my PhD in geography. The
trail contours along steep, north-facing slopes that are
blanketed by a thick cloud forest of Himalayan fir, silver
birch, and numerous tree and dwarf rhododendrons. The
national flower, the blood-red Rhododendron arboreum,
was in full bloom. Old-man’s-beard lichens draped the
limbs, catching moisture from the early morning mists
that were beginning to lift. On either side of the trail
bloomed purple and yellow primroses and blue starshaped gentians. These pioneers of spring foretold the arrival of the many hundreds of flowers to come.
I pretended not to look at a lone musk deer, the fanged,
tree-climbing resident of moist forests in Nepal and Tibet,
that stood frozen beneath a lone rhododendron tree just
below me. I carefully stepped over the large pile of his tiny,
bullet-shaped scat that clearly announced that I was an invader of his marked territory. These creatures once were
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rare because poachers hunted them for the
musk pods in their bellies that are used for
making perfume. Yet musk deer had become quite common in this part of the
park, thanks to the enforcement of wildlife
protection laws since the mid-1970s.
A small group of shaggy, goatlike Himalayan tahr browsed on the drier, shrubby south-facing slopes directly across the
river. Ten years ago they posed a serious threat to many
communities when local crops became their preferred
food source. Now they are becoming increasingly scarce
because the snow leopard, with its taste for tahr, has returned to these slopes. Scalps purported to come from
the yeti, the legendary apelike creature that everyone’s
uncle claims to have seen, are probably made of the reddish hide of a Himalayan tahr, or so some scientists think.
An orange-barred leaf warbler and red-breasted rosefinch sang in the distance, the first of many songbirds
that would return to the region within the next several
weeks. Gliding silently above was a lone lammergeier
(German for “lamb vulture”), or bearded vulture, with a
wingspan of ten feet.
The trail emerges from the cool forest into a highaltitude shrubland of dwarf rhododendron. The most
conspicuous, the sunpati (R. anthopogon), has an aromatic
scent that is among the most pleasing that I have ever
encountered—in small quantities, that is. Porters often
complain of “sunpati headaches” if their routes take them
through too many miles of the pungent shrub.
Looming above is one of the grandest sights in the en-
Yon g yu t K um s ri
La n g t a n g R i Trek k in g & E x ped it io n Pv t L TD
By Alton C. Byers
April 2013
4/28/13 2:08 PM
Himalayan tahr is
a relative of wild
goats. Opposite
page: Mount
Everest rises in
the distance, in
a view from the
north, in Tibet.
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Ma p p r epa r ed f o r N at u r a l H is t o r y © J o e L eMo nnier , w w w .ma pa r t is t .c o m
tire world—the black, pyramid-shaped, ice-clad, and
wind-blasted summit of Mount Everest. Tibetans revere
it as Qomolangma (“holy mother”), and local Nepalis
used that name until the Nepali government renamed it
Sagarmatha (a Sanskrit word often translated as “mother
of the universe”) in the early 1960s for political reasons.
The mountain successfully resisted all Western attempts
to climb it for thirty-two years, beginning with the first
British reconnaissance in 1921 through numerous attempts
until Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful
climb in 1953. Fifty-nine years later, in the spring of 2012,
almost 400 climbers summited. Even so, the world’s highest pinnacle casts its spell on all who dare approach it.
The
1,500-mile-long Himalaya mountain range
separates the Asian mainland from the Indian
subcontinent. The curious band of yellowish rock that
stretches across Everest’s exposed face actually began as
sediments on the bottom of what was once the Tethys
Ocean. Unimaginable heat and pressure over the eons
caused these sediments to metamorphose into marble,
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slate, and gneiss, and the slow-motion collision of the
northward-moving Indian tectonic plate with the Eurasian plate thrust the rocks upward toward the skies.
The Himalayas are still growing, as evidenced by the
frequency of earthquakes in the region. A magnitude 6.9
earthquake in September 2011 triggered massive avalanches that resulted in tragic loss of life in Nepal and
especially the Indian state of Sikkim to the east, where
the epicenter was located.
Mountains in the region have also been largely shaped
by the sculpting action of ice. Valleys are U-shaped after thousands of years of glaciers gouging their relentless
paths. Debris-covered glaciers, an indication of glacial
stagnation that began with the end of the Little Ice Age
in the 1850s, dominate the valleys of the high country.
Lateral moraines—the deposits of boulders, rocks, and
soil that form on each side of a glacier—are a common
sight in the upper Imja and other Khumbu valleys. The
famous Tengboche monastery is located on an ancient
terminal moraine, the deposit of material that indicates
the farthest extent that a glacier reached.
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Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
More recent evidence of this dynamic environment includes the large gullies that are periodically flooded by
torrents—spates of snowmelt or rainfall or floodwaters
from glacial lakes that have burst out and sluiced down
mountainsides. Less dramatic are the globular landforms
known as solifluction
(moving soil) lobes, where
Red panda, an animal that
saturated soils have flowed is active during twilight and
slowly downward on steep night hours, sleeps in trees
during the daytime.
mountain slopes.
Most people identify Mount Everest with
Khumbu, or the southern side of the mountain,
a region inhabited by the
charismatic Sherpa people
and, more recently, by Rai
laborers and lodge managers from farther south.
Following Hillary and
Norgay’s lead, the bulk of
the annual climbs, treks,
research, cleanup expeditions, TV specials, IMAX and
Hollywood films, and special events—such as the May
2011 summit climb and paraglide down to Syangboche
airstrip by Sano Babu Sunuwar and Lhakpa Tshering
Sherpa—take place on this side.
But Everest contains two other sides as well. All of
the early-twentieth-century British attempts to reach
the summit took place on
the north side, in the Tibet Autonomous Region
of China, prior to the closing of Tibet and opening of
Nepal in the late 1940s and
early ’50s. On the north
side, commonly associated
with the famous Rongbuk monastery, a road used
by motor vehicles leads to
Base Camp, a tent village
that hosts several dozen
foreign climbing expeditions per year and, more
recently, thousands of Chinese tourists. Finally, the
Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
Rhododendron arboreum, Nepal’s national flowe
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Kama Valley in eastern Tibet is the gateway to the technically challenging east face of Everest, which has been
successfully climbed by only a handful of people. Since
its access is so difficult, this seasonally inhabited valley is
much more pristine than either of the other two sides.
The Qomolangma National Nature Preserve, created in
1989, protects the valley.
Geographically,
Everest lies within the subtropical
Asian monsoon zone, where more than 80 percent of the
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annual precipitation falls between June and September.
Most of the thousands of people who visit Khumbu each
year do so in the fall or spring seasons, avoiding the monsoon rain and attendant leeches found at lower elevations.
Having spent a summer there in the 1980s, however, I
have always felt that the Khumbu monsoon period is one
The southern flanks of the mountains near Eve est, below, are part
of Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park. Right: Tibet’s Kama Valley, the
gateway to Everest’s eastern flank, is uninhabited except for seasonal
yak herders. Access to the valley is limited to several months per year
because snow blocks most of the passes.
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Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
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Gille s Pr iv at - f l ic k r .co m/ph o t o s /s t e y n a r d
of the world’s best-kept secrets. The days are normally
sunny and partly cloudy until the early afternoon, when
the clouds finally make their way up the valleys and to
the villages. The rains, usually mild, arrive in the late
afternoon or evening, encouraging the subalpine and alpine wildflower bloom throughout the period.
During the monsoon season in the Kama Valley, a lowpressure system caused by prevailing winds draws moisture up the Arun River, creating conditions much wetter
than those in Khumbu or in the Rongbuk region of Tibet.
Old-growth forests of spruce, fir, hemlock, and rhododendron ascend to 15,000 feet. Clouded leopard, Himalayan
tahr, musk deer, Himalayan black bear, barking deer, and
other large mammals are found in these forests in relative abundance. As opposed to the dry, eroded, humanand cattle-impacted alpine shrub/grasslands of Khumbu,
the alpine slopes in the Kama Valley are lush and verdant
grasslands, a seasonal breeding ground for yaks since the
1920s. The shrub juniper and dwarf rhododendron have
been removed by yak herders to increase grazing land, but
this conversion to grassland has also facilitated the dra-
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C o mpar at iv e A l pin e Resear c h , Mu n ic h , Germ an y
Mount Taboche was photographed by the author in 2007, top, for comparison with the composite image, above, taken in the 1950s by the
Austrian climber-cartographer Erwin Schneider. The waters of a glacial
lake, visible in the distance, are held back by a glacial moraine. The
route toward the Everest Base Camp is upriver along the glacial river
that enters the valley from the right and passes in front of the moraine.
matic growth of once rare blue sheep populations, which
in turn has encouraged the return of the equally rare snow
leopard during the past several decades.
Access to Kama Valley is limited to only several months
per year because snow blocks most of the passes during
the rest of the year. Only 200 foreigners—their luggage
carried by yaks, since portering is unknown in Tibet—
visit the region per year. This daunting trek takes two
weeks to complete, and any expedition must be entirely
self-sufficient in terms of emergencies and evacuation
plans. Located downwind of the Everest snow plume,
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the valley’s passes can also be blocked by more than three
feet of snow falling over the course of one day.
On the north side of mountain, the Himalayas represent
a much higher topographic barrier to the monsoon, and
the region is dry year-round. Partly as a result, glaciers on
the north side of Everest are retreating at a faster rate than
those on the south, since little moisture replenishes the
snow that would ensure their continued growth.
Ten years ago, the topic of climate change in the Everest
region was practically unheard of. Today it is widely discussed among visitors and Sherpas alike. Dramatic indicators of climate change can be seen in phenomena such as
the recession of glaciers and the formation and expansion
of glacial lakes. Traditional planting dates are often delayed because of the late arrival of spring rains, and young
crops are vulnerable to the often devastating downpours
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The
northern side of Mount Everest is sparsely populated. The only year-round residents are the
Buddhist monks at the Rongbuk monastery, and the Kama
Valley is uninhabited except for seasonal Tibetan yak
herders. But the Khumbu region has been heavily affected
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A l t o n C . By er s, 2007/T h e Mo u n t a in In st it u t e
At the entrance of Sagarmatha National Park, altitude
9,200 feet, Himalayan blue pine dominates the landscape,
sprinkled with Himalayan hemlock, prickly oak, rhododendron, and Wallich’s yew—trees that benefit from the
heavier rainfall at these lower altitudes. Fir-birch-rhododendron forests occur
between 8,200 and
Delphinium blooming
12,800 feet, mostly on
on the route to Tibet’s
north-facing aspects.
Rongbuk Monastery
Maple,
whitebeam,
and tree juniper occur occasionally, as
do a great variety of
dwarf and tree-form
rhododendrons, particularly colorful in
the early to late spring,
blossoming and fading in sequence until
the beginning of the
monsoon rains. Huge
ancient juniper trees
cluster around monasteries where they have
been protected for
hundreds of years, showing how large these and other
trees can grow if left undisturbed.
Ma r y L oo semo r e
Er w in Sc hn eid er , Kh u mb u , Ne pa l , 1956–1961/co u r t esy o f t h e Assoc iat io n
f o r C o mpar at iv e A l pin e Resear c h , Mu n ic h , Germ an y
once the rain does arrive. People claim that more snow
and more rain are falling than at any time in living memory. The monsoon used to end by the end of August but
now extends well into, if not to the end of, September.
As on all mountains, vegetation patterns on Mount
Everest depend largely
on altitude, slope, aspect,
precipitation,
geology, and human
use. On the south-facing side, warm and dry
shrub grasslands were
created by herders
hundreds to thousands
of years ago, and they
now cover the highly
modified, but stable,
slopes. On the moist
and cool north-facing
slopes, fir, birch, and
rhododendron forests
grow. Above 13,000
feet, shrub juniper and
dwarf rhododendron
also contribute to the
geomorphic glue that holds the thin, young, and fragile alpine soils in place. Above 16,700 feet only sparsely distributed cushion plants can survive. In 1938, the
mountaineer Eric Shipton found a saw-wort (Saussurea
gnaphalodes) on a slope of scree (loose rock debris) at an
altitude of 21,000 feet on the north flank of Mount Everest—the world record for the highest known vascular
plant growth.
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Rhododendron forest in Sagarmatha National Park
by human activities, especially during the past twenty to
thirty years with the exponential growth of mountaineering, trekking, and adventure tourism. The most common damage includes the removal of slow-growing alpine
shrubs and cushion plants by lodge owners, porters, and
climbing parties for use as fuel. Such clearing accelerates
soil erosion and decreases slope stability, as I was able to
quantify in the 1980s. Other disturbances in the alpine
zone are caused by increased numbers of pack animals,
primarily yak and dzo (a mix of yak and cow), brought
in to accommodate growing numbers of tourists. Waterborne health hazards have accelerated as a result of improper human waste disposal. Camping sites, base camps,
and high camp regions are marred by accumulations of
solid waste.
In 2004, the Mountain Institute and American Alpine
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Club joined with local people in the upper Imja Valley to
form the first Khumbu Alpine Conservation Committee. This community organization began active efforts
to protect and restore its alpine ecosystems by promoting
the use of imported kerosene as a fuel alternative to wood
from juniper and alpine cushion plants. Juniper cover has
regained a strong foothold in the last decade, but much
more work remains to be done to remedy the growing
problems of solid waste and human waste management.
The 3,500 Sherpa people who live on the Nepal side
of the mountain in Khumbu are believed to be descendants of the original Sherpa pioneers who arrived from
Tibet 500 years ago. Pangboche and Dingboche villages
were already well known as meditation sites by the time
of the migration, however, and Sherpa legends state that
shepherds grazed their herds here well before the arrival of
their ancestors. Geographer Stan Stevens writes of “certain
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Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
ruins in high places in the
Dudh Kosi valley” believed to have been early
shepherd huts. Testing of
charcoal and soil samples
I have collected shows
that humans began cutting and burning the
south-facing Himalayan
forests between 3,000
and 5,000 years ago.
Fir-birch-rhododendron
forest (still common
on most north-facing
slopes) was opened up
over time, most likely by
Himalayan vulture
Rai or Gurung ethnic
groups from the south
transforming the land for cattle grazing. greet the park and its staff with enthusiasm. Reforestation exclosures built in the 1980s by park wardens were
1976, the government of Nepal criticized as taking away valuable grazing land. Because
surveyed and documented the tract the animals’ browsing habits heavily damage vegetation,
for Sagarmatha National Park, which goats were banned and removed from the park, which annow encompasses 443 square miles. gered goat owners. The sudden presence of the military,
New Zealanders worked with the staff assigned to patrol against poaching in national parklands,
of Nepal’s Department of National created new tensions. Regulations prohibiting the harParks and Wildlife Conservation to de- vesting of shrub juniper in the alpine zone continued to
sign a management plan. This strategic be ignored by dozens of trekking lodges. But today many
and beneficial partnership drew on the of these former attitudes have changed, and local residents
New Zealanders’ extensive experience now view the blue pine and fir forests reestablished on the
in managing their own mountain parks slopes with pride.
Established in 1989, the Qomolangma National Naas well as their long familiarity with
the Khumbu region, embodied in none ture Preserve covers an area of 13,500 square miles,
including the Kama Valley, in the Tibet Autonomous
other than Edmund Hillary.
At first the Sherpa people did not Region of China. Compared with the Nepal side, the
Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
In
Dave Jackson
Snow leopard dines after reclaiming—or
appropriating—a carcass from a group of
Himalayan vultures.
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Pe t er Pr o k o s c h
A glacial river flows in Sagarmatha National Park
Tibetan terrain is generally much higher in elevation
but considerably less rugged. An estimated 68,000
people live in the preserve, engaged in agriculture,
animal husbandry, or both. Unlike the high-altitude
plateau that most people associate with Tibet, the
preserve contains a diversity of landscapes that range
from subtropical, densely forested river valleys below
6,500 feet to ice-clad peaks of the Higher Himalayas at 26,000 feet and above. The preserve provides
habitat for the rare snow leopard, kiang (wild ass),
and black-necked crane as well as Tibet’s only populations of the Assamese macaque. Langur monkeys,
Himalayan palm civets, jungle cats, musk deer, and
tahrs are also found in abundance.
During
the 1970s and 1980s, Khumbu was
frequently cited as a case study of
poor land management. Scientific and popular articles
at that time proclaimed that the region was suffering
from extensive deforestation as the result of a growing population, the influx of Tibetan refugees in the
early 1950s, increased and unregulated tourism, and
Monsoon clouds hover over yak herders in Kama Valley
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tunity to demonstrate just how dynamic a landscape the
Everest region was. The scars and impacts of destructive
glacial-lake-outburst floods, landslides, and torrents that
had occurred in the interim could be easily seen.
In the fall of 2007, I was climbing at 18,000 feet in the
upper reaches of the Imja River watershed, near where
Erwin Schneider had taken one of his photographs. The
view in front of me now revealed a dramatic change. The
Imja Glacier that I had hoped to rephotograph was gone,
replaced by a lake almost half a mile long. Icebergs as big as
houses had broken off the former glacier and now floated
aimlessly in the water. Dozens of such glacier lakes holding
hundreds of millions of gallons of water have been created
in the Khumbu region since the early 1960s. Usually contained by dams of loose boulders and soil, these lakes present a risk of glacial-lake-outburst floods. One such event
in 1998 in the Hinku Valley of Makalu Barun National
Park in Nepal destroyed trails and seasonal settlements for
more than fifty miles downstream, and the damage is still
visible in satellite images taken a decade later.
The mountain itself, however, will adapt. Mount Everest has survived the spread of humankind over the Earth,
the sweep of ice ages and interglacial periods, the slow
migration of flora and fauna up and down its slopes, and
the recent discovery of its lower slopes by farmers, yak
herders, and adventure tourists.
It will continue to tower among
the clouds long, long beyond
human memory.
the breakdown of traditional Sherpa practices of natural
resource management. At the same time, a much smaller,
but equally vocal, contingent of people held the exact opposite view. “There are more trees in Khumbu now than
there were in 1950, and I have the photographs to prove
it,” said Charles Houston, an American physician, highaltitude expert, and member of the 1953 K2 expedition.
Who was right? For answers, I turned to one of the
best mentors that I’ve ever had, and whom, incidentally,
I never met: the Austrian climber-cartographer Erwin
Schneider, who passed away in the late 1980s. Between
1955 and 1963, Schneider completed a field survey of
the Khumbu region that included the use of terrestrial
photogrammetry—determining geometric properties
of objects and making maps from photographs taken
at high-altitude vantage points. In 1984, while living
in Khumbu, I was given a packet of Schneider’s photographs taken in the 1950s. I instantly realized that they
might help to resolve some of the controversy concerning the changes in the landscape. Beginning in 1984 and
in the course of later research expeditions, I retraced
Schneider’s footsteps to replicate his photographs. From
the start it became clear that Charles Houston was right,
after all: the landscapes of the 1950s were essentially unchanged thirty years later.
Replicating the photographs taken by Schneider, Houston, and others in the 1950s also provided a unique oppor-
Jo Wil k in s /S k y l in e Tr ek s
Reprinted by arrangement from the
book The Call of Everest: The
History, Science, and Future
of the World’s Tallest Peak by
Conrad Anker. Copyright ©2013
National Geographic Society.
Alton C. Byers, a National Geographic explorer, is a mountain geographer, photographer,
writer, and climber with more
than thirty years of experience
working in major mountain regions throughout the world. His
areas of expertise include applied
research, community-based alpine conservation and restoration
methods, and climate-change
impacts in high mountain environments. In 1990 Byers joined
the Mountain Institute (www.mountain.org), where he is Director
of Science and Exploration, and has since lived and worked in
Nepal, Peru, and West Virginia directing various programs for
the organization. Among other awards he is the recipient of the Sir
Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal from the Nepali NGO
Mountain Legacy.
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