When is a mountain summit not a summit?

[Bill Ryan]

... When it looks like this.

(And/or when the climbers are exhausted, have poor visibility, are worried about their safety... or maybe just want the publicity.)



That's the summit of Manaslu, the 8th highest mountain in the world, at 8,163m/ 26,781 ft.

But it's NOT where all those prayer flags are, a great selfie spot for a photo like this. The real summit, the highest point, is the VERY scary-looking needle-sharp rock to the top right of the photo. It's just a few feet higher, and maybe 30 meters away. Almost no-one ever goes there... and one can understand why.

So all this may seem very trivial. And in the biggest picture of serious global problems, of course it is. But an issue has broken out in the climbing world about who has and who hasn't actually climbed some of these Himalayan giants.

Manaslu isn't the only example of something like this, where the actual highest point isn't that obvious. In some cases, only modern satellite GPS analysis has established which point on a huge flat-topped mountain truly IS the highest.

Often, the confusion, and often a mistaken claim, is innocent and understandable. No-one had GPS when any of these mountains were first climbed in the 1950s or 60s. But there are some interesting, rather darker, human-condition issues underlying all this.

Good climbers are often sponsored by equipment companies, so their income can depend to a large degree on successes. And with less experienced climbers, who sometimes merely have a lot of money, Sherpas acting as their guides and porters are often paid a handsome bonus for getting them there.

So the Sherpas, whose lives are always difficult and dangerous, and who often earn very little, definitely have an incentive for telling their clients at the earliest believable point: "Well done, you made it! But in 20 minutes, we have to go back down, or else the sun is setting and we'll all be in danger."

So ego, status, publicity, ambition and money can have a part to play in all this. And a couple of decades ago it never used to be that way.

Finally, as if exactly to prove that, there have been proven cases of blatant deliberate fraud. Here's when a photo was photoshopped and used to claim an ascent of Everest:



The guy, an Indian mountaineer, actually never made it to the summit. But he claimed he had, posting the fake photo everywhere. He became a celebrity, earning a LOT of $$ for his lie. THAT matters. It was only discovered and exposed several years later.

But does the Manaslu summit matter? My personal opinion is probably not. It's really hard to get even to the selfie spot, and pretty risky too. It takes days of difficult, dangerous climbing.

There have been 297 ascents of Manaslu with 53 deaths, making it the 4th most fatal 8000 meter high peak. So — in my view! — kudos to those who fought to make it to the beautiful selfie spot with all the welcoming prayer flags. I think it's cool.

I posted this under The Human Condition — just because it's a niche part of our world which is becoming a little tainted by ego, greed and ambition... sometimes. (And there's a similar niche, which is all about claimed crossings of Antarctica, but we won't go there right now!)

[Mike Gorman]

Ahh, Ego and Greed, how very familiar - 'all is Vanity' as someone observed astutely!