Although not actually trademarked, “Because it is there” is, of course, the official longstanding excuse mountaineers have offered for risking life and digits in order to enjoy a Power Bar upon the narrowest point of an upward-reaching rock.
But in recent years, the trail-worn phrase, originally uttered by Sir Edmund Hillary as to why he conquered Mt. Everest, has come to apply to Everest in a different way, as well: The story of Mt. Everest as a killer peak Is There, and television and other media are doing their utmost, straining with every breathtaking vista and gamely placing one camera tripod in front of another, to climb new faces of the Mt. Everest saga.
Being Earth’s tallest, the Himalayan mountain always has held interest to climbers out of proportion to its technical difficulty and perhaps even more interest among people who wouldn’t know a crampon from a wolf-leg trap.
But the real run on the peak seems to have started, more or less, with the 1996 tragedy that took place on Everest expeditions where Outside Magazine writer Jon Krakauer happened to be a member of one of the affected teams.
Eight of his fellow climbers did not survive, but Krakauer did, barely, and wrote a haunting, self-questioning article on the disaster that captured the attention of the nation in the way few print pieces any longer do. He followed that with the even more haunting, and more honest, “Into Thin Air,” a book so popular you can find it at any airport.
Commercial success breeds commercial imitation, however, and “Into Thin Air” can now be described as the book that seems to have inspired, on the computer terminal of every TV newsmagazine or documentary producer, a “must do Everest story” Post-it note.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a superb retelling of his tale by ABC’s “Turning Point”; a reportedly dissatisfying TV movie of the book made for ABC; an Everest-based “Nova” show on altitude and its effects; the big and disappointingly simplistic Omnimax documentary currently playing at the Museum of Science and Industry; and the latest, a superb new hourlong edition of CBS’ “Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel” (8 p.m. Wednesday, WBBM-Ch. 2) that documents the Everest challenge this past spring of a man with an artifical foot.
An irony to all the traffic is that Krakauer’s original purpose was to reveal the overcommercialization of the mountain, where nearly anybody with a mittenful of dollars and a garment of Gore-Tex could purchase a guided trip up Everest. The almost bazaar-like quality of Everest base camp during the spring climbing season, he believed, signified serious threats to the mountain’s ecology and danger to the climbers with bona fide high-altitude credentials.
Krakauer’s work was off-putting to the extreme, quite literally chilling. His stories of lives lost to hubris, greed and altitude- and storm-provoked disorientation will leave sensible people like you and me relieved that in the Prairie State we do not reach cloud level without aid of an elevator or ailerons, never mind a team full of humping Sherpa guides.
But a dangerous thread in much of the work since his is that, in typical newsmagazine style, the stories will get reduced to the question of whether a certain climber will reach the summit or not.
Somewhere in the back of the producers’ minds has to be the thought that they might have the same grim, good fortune as Krakauer, to witness fatality. When that doesn’t happen, the quest, achieved or not, is often glorified and its danger diminished, and the end result is that the back pages of Outside seem as abloom with ads for Everest guides as ever, if not more so.
Especially disappointing is the Omnimax documentary “Everest,” also shot during the fateful 1996 climbing season. The filmmakers were heroes in the rescue efforts, yet their work creates and seems to believe in such hokey storylines as whether one of its climbers will become the first Spanish woman to reach the summit. Meanwhile, it fails to impress upon its audience just how severe high altitude is, and it virtually ignores the greatest lesson of Krakauer: that getting back down is the hard part.
The CBS documentary shares a few of its sins, although it is perhaps vivid enough in documenting the mountain’s brutality to tilt it more toward the Krakauer side of the responsibility scale. And, amazingly, the footage, shot on film by CBS cameraman and climber Jeff Rhoads, is nearly as spectacular and illustrative as that in the gargantuan-screen Omnimax format.
Its focus is on one man, the Englishman Tom Whittaker, who lost his right foot to a drunk driver two decades ago and is making his third stab at being the first disabled climber to arrive at the summit.
There is real emotional pull in Whittaker wanting the top so desperately, and in how much those around him want it for him. He becomes a vivid character, funny and reflective, in a way that the automatons in the Omnimax film are not.
Whittaker has to overcome not just his handicap, but a nasty virus and the moments of questionable judgment that cloud seemingly everyone who gets within reach of the peak. The tension builds through a series of disappointments and triumphs, including the moment when a motley crew of disabled trekkers, compadres of Whittaker’s, reach base camp, their own personal summit.
“Public Eye” is guilty of reducing the Sherpas to their religious rituals, and it should have detailed who paid for the Whittaker expedition. But all told, “Public Eye’s” particular Everest story is inspiring and unsaccharine in a way stories of the disabled often are not. More to the point, it is one of the peaks in the growing mound of tallest-place journalism.
