This is a question that High Adventure Expeditions are continually asked. There’re so many distinct aspects to an Everest expedition, it would be hard to do justice to them all in a single article. Individual articles could be written on each specific topic such as:
- Trek to Base Camp
- Base Camp life
- Climbing the Icefall
- Logistics
- Climbing techniques
- Ropes
- Equipment
- Acclimatisation
- Nutrition
- Climbing at night
- Team dynamics
- Life in the death-zone
- Living on oxygen tanks
- Interaction with Sherpas
- Costs
- Motivations
- Mental fortitude, and so forth.
One of the most revealing and honest accounts ever written of a modern-era Everest expedition is Ascent Into Hell (Fergus White, 2017). The book is a Mountaineering Bestseller on Amazon UK, and it details day-by-day the climb to the top of the world. In doing so, it reveals the inner workings of an Everest expedition, and the demands it places on the climbers. Base Camp and the world above it are brought to life in a true novel. Above all, it makes clear that the actual climbing is only a small component of a 2 month Everest expedition. If you want to get an understanding of what’s involved in an Everest climb, you could do a lot worse that read it. The link to the book is below. But don’t be put off by the title … if it were easy, there’d be no point in doing it!
