What It's Actually Like To Summit Mount Everest

No matter how much mountain climbing experience one has, reaching the summit of Mount Everest is an almost two-month process. Although it only takes climbers about five days to travel from Base Camp to the summit and back, climbers first must spend time at various heights on Everest in order to acclimate their bodies to the altitude before pushing for the summit. "If you were to go straight to the top of Everest right now, you would die within minutes because you don't have enough red blood cells to carry the oxygen that your lungs would be attempting to give it," wrote John Beede on Reddit.

From Everest Base Camp, expeditions make small trips called rotations, traveling progressively higher on each trip. This process encourages the body to produce more hemoglobin, which is necessary to help oxygen travel from the lungs to other organs via red blood cells. Beede explained, "You climb to Camp 1, then back to Base Camp. Then to Camp 2, then back to Base Camp. Then to Camp 3, then Back to Base Camp. Each time you return to Base Camp, you rest for five to eight days, waiting for your body to generate more red blood cells... Everyone, even Sherpa, undergo this process..."

Forced to waste a lot of time at Base Camp during this process, mountaineer Alan Arnette recalled:

In many ways, it is Groundhog Day where each day feels the same. It starts with breakfast of eggs, toast, and jam, then many people take a few-hour hike to continue their acclimatization. Then it is time for lunch of Spam and vegetables. The afternoons are spent checking email, perhaps a shower and shave for the men, taking a nap, or visiting the neighbors. Late afternoon, teams often gather to watch a movie on a laptop or socialize before dinner of rice, noodles, sometimes meat. Most people go directly to bed after dinner but some teams will show a movie on a screen from a laptop in the dining tent.

Although a very small amount of mountaineering purists have climbed Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, many climbers view its use as sensible to better improve the chances of surviving. However, even using oxygen, climbers will feel the effects of the altitude. "Climbing above 26,000 feet, even with bottled oxygen, is like running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. Everything tells you to turn around. Everything says: This is cold, this is impossible," said David Breashears.

Climber John Beede endured a leaking oxygen tank and spent about 30 minutes without extra oxygen during his descent. "To take one step required three to five breaths depending on steepness. Plus, my hands and feet were rapidly going cold, my vision was tunneling, and I didn't have much motivation to fix those problems," he said. He expanded on his experience on Reddit, writing, "Totally hypoxic, totally exhausted, and in a lot of ways, you can't summon the energy to even care. It's terrifying."

At least 11 people died on Mount Everest in 2019 and an estimated 295 people in years before that, giving climbers about a one in 100 chance of losing their lives on the climb. Despite modern weather prediction and outdoor gear improving the chances of summiting and living to tell the tale, it's estimated there are over 200 bodies on Everest, some visible to climbers. "It's gruesome of course, to climb past bodies. But it's something I mentally prepared for," climber John Beede recalled. "If nothing else, they are frozen sentinels, reminding others what is at stake." Due to the harsh conditions, altitude, and extreme costs of retrieving them, the bodies of many climbers stay exactly where they fell for years. "It takes six to 12 Sherpa hours to move a body just a few hundred meters," Beede wrote. "People could die moving a dead body off the hill, and the reward-to-risk ratio doesn't make sense..."

In addition to the bodies, climbers must also be prepared to witness others uncomfortably close to death. Beede remembered, "I nearly had a panic attack when I saw a man who was on his last breath, unconscious, but still alive. I stayed with him for some time, but he passed within a few minutes of my seeing him... I've had nightmares about it nearly every night since." He later added, "Most unexpected thing about the experience was thinking that the man... was a backpack or a sleeping bag from a distance. Because it was dark, I didn't recognize it to be a man until I was about 10 feet away. That was shocking."

As climbers ascend from Base Camp to Camp 1 on Mount Everest's south side, they pass over a glacier called the Khumbu Icefall. Climber John Beede described the area as "a frozen waterfall of ice that is 3,000 feet tall... Massive crevasses, 100-ton blocks of ice can fall on you at any moment, delicate snow bridges can collapse on any step, and avalanche danger is always present." Depending on a climber's acclimatization and the weather conditions, crossing the icefall can take anywhere from three to eight hours, as climbers navigate with fixed ropes and must occasionally cross deep crevasses using metal ladders as bridges.

One of Everest's deadliest disasters took place in this area in 2014 when a piece of hanging ice fell and caused an avalanche that killed 13 Sherpas. It's estimated that from 1953 to 2016, 25% of the deaths on the south side of the mountain occurred on the Khumbu Icefall. "The Khumbu is probably the most dangerous single place in the climbing world," said mountaineer Conrad Anker. "You can just sit at base camp during the day and watch avalanches roar down right over the climbing route. It scares everyone."

Not only does the route pose a danger, but in order to reach the summit and begin the descent during daylight, climbers start their journey at night in darkness. "From 7 pm until 5:48 am I climbed to the top through the darkness, only the visibility of my headlamp lighting the way in front of me and the eerie trail of headlamps of other climbers lighting a white pathway into the black heavens," remembered Beede. Once climbers reach the summit, the danger of falling off the side increases. According to Beede, "On Everest's summit, you have an 8,000-foot drop on one side and a 10,000-foot drop on the other. We joke that if you're going to fall, you want to fall onto the 10,000-foot side because you'll live longer."

Some climbers may develop Acute Mountain Sickness, which causes lethargy and headaches, but entering the Death Zone can turn this sickness into a potentially fatal health problem, despite acclimatization. In addition to the risk of stroke or heart attack due to an increased heart rate, a person's lungs and brain can swell due to edema. High altitude pulmonary edema, known as HAPE, causes the lung to fill with fluid and can lead to shortness of breath, a cough that produces fluid, fatigue, and feelings of suffocation. According to climber John Beede, "Every climber undergoes some degree of pulmonary edema, so the medics told me. In some, the symptoms are unrecognizable and in others, like me, they are audible... you can hear noises in your lungs."

Edema can also affect your brain through a condition known as high altitude cerebral edema, or HACE. This causes the brain to swell due to lack of oxygen. In addition to causing nausea, HACE can also trigger delirium. Affected climbers may talk to imaginary people, shed their clothes despite the frigid temperature, or make poor decisions. Beede remembered, "I saw one guy showing off his frostbitten fingers like, 'Hey! Check this out!' in subzero temps." While there is no way for climbers to completely safeguard themselves against developing HACE or HAPE, some Western climbers have recently begun the practice of taking the steroid dexamethasone, which has been shown to minimize the risk.

Even though climbers acclimate themselves to the lack of oxygen on Mount Everest, human life becomes unsustainable at 8,000 meters, or about 26,300 feet. The area between this point and the summit is known as the Death Zone, with air so thin and so lacking in oxygen, human bodies are unable to function normally. "You are literally at the altitude small commercial aircraft fly," noted John Beede. Although climbers carry oxygen, they can't carry very much and the flow is kept low for conservation. People can't stay in the area for very long and expect to survive; as climber Shaunna Burke explained: "Your body is breaking down and essentially dying. It becomes a race against the clock."

Hypoxia, dangerously low levels of oxygen, begins as climbers enter this area, and people become more susceptible to making mistakes or suffering potentially devastating health effects. In order to learn more about blood oxygen levels within the zone, researchers took blood samples of climbers located on a part of Everest known as the Balcony at 27,500 feet. "The results revealed that the mountaineers were surviving on just one-quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level," noted doctor and climber Jeremy Windsor. "These were comparable to figures found in patients on the verge of death."