Death Warmed Over

Sir Edmund Hillary, perhaps the world's most well known and best loved mountaineer, has passed away at age 88. A humble New Zealand beekeeper by trade, Hillary achieved everlasting fame by finally doing what scores of mountaineers had attempted unsuccessfully, ever since the particular high point known to the Tibetans as 'Chomolungma' (Mother Goddess of the World) was first established as the tallest mountain on the planet. With his Sherpa guide and climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay, Hillary managed to…as he put it…'knock the bastard off' just scant days before Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1954.

A modest, unassuming, and very down to earth fellow, Hillary eschewed the fame and limelight resulting from his feat and spent the rest of his life promoting natural preservation efforts and supporting the Nepali people's efforts to improve the quality of their lives. Such was the publicity and sensationalism resulting from Hillary's feat that the nature of Hillary's actual climbing ability has been largely overshadowed by the legend that has grown up around him. Accomplished mountaineers who knew him and who were his peers and contemporaries have stated that insofar as his actual climbing expertise was concerned, he was really only a mediocre climber and not at all in the same exalted ranks as climbing superman Rheinhold Meissner. Hillary's partner, Tenzing, was actually a far better climber (according to some) than Hillary, and Sir Edmund's success on Everest was largely attributable to a combination of fortunate weather patterns and basic New Zealand tenacity.

Still, it's no small feat to ascend the 'Hillary Step', a steep rock face that lies just below the final summit push on the South Col Route, given its supremely high altitude (oxygen or not), and to Hillary and Tenzing belong history's cachet of accolade over being first on top. All arguments over the finer points attending the climb fall away, in ultimate acknowledgement that they were, after all, the first ones on top!

Decades before Hillary finally 'knocked the bastard off', others went after Everest (or Chomolungma) with equal determination. Their misfortune was simply that technology had not been able to present them with as much help as did that used by Hillary. The weather on Everest remains ever a formidable variable, with little predictability, owing to the vagaries of the monsoons that sweep in to frequently make it a whiteout hell, but the fact is that Hillary's predecessors simply did not have the technical materials advancements enjoyed by climbers of the early 50s. Given these facts and the fact that Everest was still largely unknown at the turn of the last century (1900), it would have taken a minor miracle for the earlier mountaineers to have succeeded in summiting Everest and returning alive to tell the tale. Many did not, including some of the best known and most proficient climbers of the day. Among these unfortunates was George Herbert Leigh Mallory.

George Herbert Leigh Mallory, you will doubtless not recall from your history lessons, was one of those mountain obsessed post-Victorian Englishmen who is today forever associated in our minds with Chomolungma (Tibetan for 'Goddess Mother of the World') or Peak H, later renamed 'Peak XV' by English surveyor John Nicholson in the late 1840s, and finally christened 'Mount Everest' by the British. In 1999, Mallory's body was found, seventy-five years after his legendary third attempt to ascend that storied mass of up-thrust seabed floor (you did know, did you not, that the famed 'Yellow Band' found way up there near the snow-banner streaming crest of Everest is composed of fossilized remains of ancient seas creatures, deposited at the bottom of the Tethys Sea roughly 180 million years ago?), at an altitude of about 27,000 feet on the steep talus slopes of Everest's North face.

Mallory's remains were, considering the fact that they had lain exposed to the elements for more than seven decades, in remarkably good condition. He was found lying face down, arms outstretched upwards, and with one leg crossed protectively at an angle over the other (which was discovered to have a severely compounded fracture of the lower Tibia). Most of the multiple layers of fabric clothing he was wearing had long-since been torn away, exposing his back and buttocks, and the skin had turned a sort of alabaster white, almost mimicking the smooth stone of a statue, so it was remarked upon. Birds of an extraordinarily sturdy order of a high altitude Himalayan type had pecked their way into the body's lower abdominal recesses and removed all contents therein, but otherwise the state of Mallory's musculo-skeletal preservation was remarkable.

[It should come as no surprise that birds are able to venture high up into what human beings consider the 'death zone' (normally regarded as that extreme high altitude in excess of 24,000 feet or so and it is known that the Bar-Headed Goose has been observed in flights over Everest and Makalau. In fact, the highest-flying bird ever recorded was a Ruppell's Griffon, a mountain vulture with a wingspan of about 10 feet. On November 29, 1975, a Ruppell's Griffon was sucked into a jet engine 37,900 feet above the Ivory Coast--more than a mile and a half higher than the summit of Mount Everest. The plane was damaged, though it landed safely; no word was received on the damage done to the vulture].

A number of photos of Mallory's remains were taken by the climbers who came across what remained of that famed mountaineering figure, and the life-long climbers amongst us have seen all of them many times, doubtless. Fortunately, although his body was dug out and turned over, no photographs of his face were ever released to the public, to the best of my knowledge. The climbing party that came across him performed simple ceremonies in that sanctuary of ultra-thin air and built a cairn of rocks over him, after first placing his body in a small nearby depression.

Any effort to do more than that at such extreme altitude would have been physically taxing beyond description, and thereupon the mystery surrounding Mallory's fateful disappearance on that distant day in 1924 was at least partly clarified. Andrew Irvine, Malory's youthful Oxford companion, remains undiscovered up on that terribly hostile route and although his ice axe (a Gebrüdern Willisch made climbing axe, forged in the small village of Tæsch, just below Zermatt) was recovered on a subsequent English expedition in 1933, the final disposition of his body has never been ascertained and it is suspected that he met his end falling off the route into the remote oblivion awaiting below.

For all the answers that the discovery of Mallory's remains offered, hundreds more questions about that final, famous ascent of 1924 were evoked, however, and thus today the mystery of his final disappearance into an enveloping cloud bank high up on Everest's Northeast Ridge still tantalizes us and draws our thoughts back to whatever final moments must have occurred on that now-legendary attempt to summit 29,000+ high Everest.

The flanks of Everest's highest reaches are a literal graveyard of unsuccessful climbers, incidentally, and mention is often made by more recent groups of climbers coming across yet another brightly clad corpse amidst the scattered drifts and ice-glazed jumbles of the ancient rock that comprise the Everest massif. Eternal rest in the 'Death Zone' would appear to be anything but restful, judging from the contorted postures and twisted contortions graphically manifest in these brightly colored little sacks of once normal appearing human flesh, since falls from that altitude (even modest ones) can do great damage to surprisingly strong, yet ultimately fragile bones and flesh. The more pleasant deathly tableaus that greet still lively and hopeful summiteers on Everest's highest ramparts are those in which a climber has simply slumped down in a seated expression of momentary listlessness, only to never rise again, and remain frozen in that defeated slump of mortal exhaustion forever.

Although I have never myself been on Everest (or even above 18,000 feet, actually), I have been assured by numerous friends who have that no matter how mindful one is of the possibilities of dying up there in that remote and chilly fastness, there is nothing down in the lower, warmer, and more hospitable regions of the planet that can adequately prepare you to gaze brashly upon the face of death itself in that uniquely chilling manner without forcibly repressing a wrenching shudder of body and soul. Such is the immediate and shocking effect of staring death in the face that is produced, when one comes across yet another of the hundreds of bodies of dead climbers that now litter Everest's upper reaches, that the image remains vividly and enduring etched into the mind's awareness of its own mortality.

As one of the few creatures on the planet that has the ability to foresee and contemplate the immediate end of one's existence (as far as we know, at any rate), human beings have endlessly been fascinated by death…and especially by the thought of their own death. Nowhere is this more so than in the high regions of rarified altitude and endless frozenness that characterise terrestrial altitudes above 20,000 feet. There, death has been picturesquely depicted in paintings and artwork of a certain spectacular type common to men's adventure magazines of the 50s and 60s.

Taken from the cover of a popular man's magazine of the 50s, there is a scene that shows a sensationalized rendering of a frozen climber in the 'Death Zone' and I mention it here for several reasons. Chief among them is the fact that it is about as realistic in its own manner of illustrating high altitude death as your average contemporary painting of the culturally idealised, highly Westernised, Caucasian Jesus is, with his ruggedly handsome, Anglo-Saxon face, brown hair, and noble features, in representing the erstwhile 'son of God.' The frozen climber in reference  is shown facing upwards, eyes open, and still reaching for the dreamt-of goal that now forever eludes his reach. In reality, it would never happen like that, since the terminal effects of supreme cold would cause an uncontrollable urge to collapse in on one's self, in an attempt to shut out the brutal and hellishly cold wind that eventually snuffs out human life up there, and not freeze one into a comic-book caricature (such as is shown). [A much more realistic depiction of high altitude death by severe cold is to be seen in the otherwise rather schmaltzy film 'Vertical Limit' (2003), wherein one of the principal actors discovers his frozen climber wife huddled in the snow near a rock, high up on an exposed face. Death by 'pure' hypothermia (that is, uncomplicated by pulmonary or cerebral edema) is not a dramatic thing, but rather a disappointingly ordinary process whereby a person's circulation gradually shuts down altogether, first creating mental confusion, followed by loss of physical coordination, and finally by complete collapse into unconsciousness (followed by death).]

Still, the picture in reference is at least amusing to note in passing, since it is so perfectly representative of an entire range of so-called 'Men's Magazines' that populated newsstand racks from the end of the Second World War till the late 1960s. These magazines were usually so stereotypically exaggerated in their accounts of rugged, rough-tough, blood'n guts masculine adventure that seen in today's slightly less chauvinistic light, they are both remarkable and hilarious. The stories accompanying them were hysterical in and of themselves, but the illustrations that they featured were absolutely fascinating (not to mention highly educational to any student of abnormal psychology) in their depictions of lustfully erotic male sexual depravities. Among the favorite chief subjects of these magazines were our old friends, the pathologically twisted, savagely sadistic Nazi fiends, who were usually shown boiling beautiful and nearly naked women alive, torturing them, or otherwise having fun indulging their sadomasochistic proclivities in the most dramatically wicked manner possible.

Although it is benign in comparison to some of the more testosterone soaked artwork found in those magazine, I've included the image described above (of the dead climber)in the preface remarks at the top of this page, so you can get a small inkling of what I refer to.

All of this, of course, occurred well before the early modern women's consciousness movement of the 60s brought about a change in the way certain lower orders of men regard womankind. Today we look back on such puerile fantasies as the hoary old (and highly laughable) relics of an almost forgotten post-war period when men still fancied themselves to be the indisputably dominant sex.

I'm not saying that such gross breeches of 'normal' sexist regard have today been entirely eradicated, but at least most men now accept the fact that such fantastic exaggerations are no longer prudent to perpetuate and at the very least, things like this are regarded as utterly irredeemable crudities and not worth publishing, for the most part. Most people born in the 1970s and later (that is, who are less than about 37 years of age) are likely to be not even aware of this magazine genre, since their old style chauvinistic sexism more or less died out in the late 60s (like a lot of things did, thanks to the new sense of brutally sobering reality produced by America's sociopolitical trauma in the Vietnam War). Still, anyone interested in history, anthropology, sociology, and the related disciplines would find the subject absolutely fascinating for the deeply incisive look such old male fantasies provide into the core of deep-seated, traditional sexist intolerance.

But to return to the topic of death at altitude, the fact that it is overly easy to grossly sensationalise and exaggerate the face of death in that hostile region has not kept some more modern individuals from attempting to use this macabre subject to titillate others and to capitalize upon for commercial gain. The extremely schmaltzy 2000 action movie 'Vertical Limit' pushed credibility to its outermost limits with regard to the possibilities of dying adventurously at high altitude. Aside from the absolutely unbelievable story-line offered in that film (a fast-paced, high-altitude mountaineering rescue on K-2 that was pulled off like a John Wayne Green Beret mission), the one part of it that was remotely accurate involved one of the climbers coming across the body of his wife, who had been lost on a previously failed ascent, high up on the mountain. She is shown encrusted in rime-ice, huddled over into a futile warm-retaining posture, and partly buried in the surrounding snow. What was most unrealistic (on the other hand) about even this semi-realistic scene is the almost beatific sense of serenity her frozen face is imbued with, as the camera focuses in closely on her body for a few seconds. Freezing to death at altitude, while not the sort of dramatically painful, excruciating experience that media sensationalists would have us believe, is also not an esoteric experience on par with a Michaelangelo depiction of Archangel Gabriel ascendant in heaven.

Death at altitude, due to the combined effects of extreme cold and lowered oxygen content, does occur somewhat slowly as the body's temperature gradually lowers and an extreme state of terminal hypoxemia settles in, but the visual contortions seen in the face of the climber subject painted in my picture shown at the start of this piece are pure theatrics.  Most often the final stage of altitude related hypothermia resulting in death involves cessation of the cardiac circulation.

Although at 30 degrees F. the core temperature reduces normal basil metabolism to about roughly 50% of normal (and about 20% at a core temp of 20 degrees F.), as the core temperature progressively lowers to about 28 degrees F. a state of hypertonic coma occurs. This is frequently also the point where the heart becomes particularly susceptible to ventricular fibrillation, as well, and by the time core temp has lowered to 20 degrees F. an individual presents all the essential classic aspects of death to the observer. You may think of it, if it helps to visualize the scene, as simply going to sleep forever, since by the time the body's ability to tolerate extreme hypothermic effects and ultra-low oxygen content prompt such end-stage (and by that time largely irreversible) physiological effects, the usual victim is quite unconscious and completely unaware when their life ends.

When I was much younger, I was a very emotionally sensitive young man and as a result had recurrent thoughts of what the Germans picturesquely call 'selbst mort'. It was always there, lurking in the back of my mind. If I felt that the events and circumstances of my personal life were encroaching on my perceived ability to thrive emotionally, I could, I told myself, always go climb a nearby mountain in the winter and simply end it all by going to sleep near the summit in my tent. If life simply no longer seemed worthwhile (and it frequently did not in those days), it was a comforting thought to possess…sort of like having a type of reverse life insurance policy that would deliver me from whatever ultra-dramatic crisis of emotional friability I felt I was no longer emotionally capable of enduring. A figurative sort of 'last bullet in the gun' that every Wild West frontiersman reputedly kept back for his own personal use, should the redskins succeed in surrounding him and capture him alive to torture (hey…such was the typical WASP fantasy of the time, eh?).

Fortunately for me, I survived those extremely melodramatic days of youthful schadenfreude vulnerability and made it into adulthood largely intact, but even today I carry the knowledge of perhaps some day again having occasion to resort to this 'back-up' plan, as the unhappy prospects of old age now loom unpleasantly in the ever closer and not-so-distant shadows. As a medical person with a strong background in cardiopulmonary science who is well acquainted with the medical physiology of gases, I am aware of the difference between simple 'asphyxia', basic 'suffocation', and 'hypercapnic anoxia'. Use of a closed circuit breathing system equipped with a C02 scrubber such as 'barralyme' (a form of soda lime used in laboratories) would reduce most unpleasant sensate effects of respiratory arrest significantly, should such a need arise. Such a system in place on a high mountain plateau, with one comfortably snugged down inside a mountain tent, wouldn't be a half bad way to go, given the more extreme alternatives.

[Before leaving this last and delightful tangential sub-topic, I should note that although the Hemlock Society addresses many similar concerns, much useful information on the matter of euthanasia can be easily obtained via various interesting veterinary research papers prepared on the topic of gaseous 'stunning' of poultry and livestock as a humane preparation for slaughter. As I say this, I should note that the extreme irony of including the terms 'humane' and 'slaughter' in the same sentence doesn't elude me.]

But returning to the subject of 'death at altitude', Mallory's end on Everest not only seems to me to have been almost poetic in its sublimity, it leads the question of whether it is better to go out in a blaze of glory (being careful, of course, to not harm others in the process) early in life (at the height of one's youthful vigor and vitality), or endue for as long as possible, until the depredations of increased age and decreased health finally topple the best of us like giant trees being felled by a grim woodsman.

Speculation about and fascination with the circumstances of one's ultimate demise is, as can easily be seen, one of the truly nasty little aspects of being possessed of the conscious awareness of life's inevitably impending end that our cursed reasoning abilities have blessed us with. Seen in the unhappy focus of that aesthetically unsettling light, who can ever truly say that disappearing in a cloud at 27,000 feet forever is any less desirable than passing on due to the depressing effects of cumulative old age?

George Leigh Mallory's transit from the mundane world of mortal life into the glorious historical legends of mountaineering literature is always worth repeated reflection, I think, since contrary to what Fred Rogers of the Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood TV series was fond of observing, every unreflective day spent here merely wasting good oxygen and occupying space on Earth that could be put to better uses doesn't necessarily help make it another 'Nice Day in the Neighborhood' (as the daily news repeatedly reminds us).

As for Sir Edmund, he achieved what may people feel is the best end possible for a human being, passing away in bed, asleep, at an advanced age. In most cases, the 'cause of death' is such instances is a coronary occlusion or ventricular fibrillation. In common terms, a 'heart attack' while sleeping.

I myself am not fully convinced that going while asleep is the best way to pass out of this life, but there is a certain argument going for it as an alternative to falling over the edge of an icy cornice and plunging four thousand feet to a glacier below.

Regardless of all the endless academic speculations and contextual discussions over the finer aesthetics of climbing and mountaineering, the world has arguably lost one of the most noteworthy individuals in recent climbing history with Sir Edmund's passing. His most notable achievement was not summiting Everest, after all, but his subsequent lifetime of philanthropic work done on behalf of the people of Nepal, to improve their lives and provide them with healthcare and social benefits. In that effort he remains peerless, despite having been made a Peer of the Realm in the UK.