Many have lost their lives on Everest, and like Paljor, the vast majority of them remain on the mountain. Scant information is available about the man behind the nickname, however. Paljor, Wikipedia tells you, was a member of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and was just 28 years old when he lost his life. View image of Tsewang Paljor, in younger days. Photographs by Rachel Nuwer. I admit to feeling a certain morbid curiosity at the thought of Paljor and all the other fallen climbers on the mountain, stranded far from loved ones and frozen in time, forever displaying the moment of their death.
But more than a fixation on the macabre, I wished to know the story of the handsome young man in the green boots — especially the circumstances that could allow him to remain on the mountain for so many years. I was also intrigued by what extreme altitude can do to the human body and mind, and the unexpected impact it can have on the decisions — and even ethics — of a person.
But ultimately, I wanted answers to another, more pressing query; one that has been raised countless times but seems to evade explanation: Why gamble your life on its unforgiving slopes? How is it that so many people still see this endeavour as worthwhile?
My desire to answer these questions — in a two-part in-depth series for BBC Future — led me down a rabbit hole of psychology, ethics and climbing culture; to the doorsteps of mountaineering legends and broken-hearted parents alike; to sources spanning Fukuoka, California and Kathmandu. This is my attempt to make sense of what I found. The landscape, however, has only begun to grow in scale and splendour. Hills climb to ever-greater heights, shaking themselves free of villages, fields and vegetation — and then, any remnants of life.
Jagged, snow-kissed mountain peaks stretch ever higher, as though trying to pluck our tiny vessel from the sky. Here and there, a valley river punctuates the monochrome landscape with a ribbon of green, a lifeline in an otherwise impossibly inhospitable environment. It was here, in this high altitude desert at 3,m 12,ft , that Tsewang Paljor was born on April 10, We set out for Sakti early on a Wednesday, following the course of the brilliant blue Indus River, passing breathtaking mountainside monasteries, dusty roadside diners and otherworldly plains of rock and barren earth.
I travelled with Tsultim Dorjey , a sociologist and guide, who is serving as my local lifeline. Now, I was plagued by doubt. Would they refuse to speak with us? Would they be offended? Would anyone even be home? View image of On the road to Sakti. View image of We passed dusty, otherworldly plains on our journey. View image of Credit: About an hour after leaving Leh, we were getting close.
Tsultim jumped out of the car, approaching an old man fingering some Buddhist prayer beads on the side of the road. In a place like Sakti, populated by just or so households, everyone knows everyone else. View image of Getting directions in Ladakh. Minutes later, we arrived at a brown gate, in front of an attractive two-storey home with large windows and fluttering Tibetan prayer flags adorning the roof.
My stomach churned as we approached the front door, past a garden brimming with petunias, marigolds and daisies and a yellow dog, who gazed lazily at us from a sunny spot. View image of Arriving at the home of Paljor's mother, unsure what to expect. At 73, her twinkling eyes and smiling face appeared a decade younger. We made our way into the sitting room, lined with couches, ornately carved tables and poster-size photos of her grandchildren.
After fetching a pot of steaming tea and a plate of biscuits, she and Tsultim exchanged niceties for several minutes. Yet when Tsultim asked if we could proceed with the interview, she said yes.
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A quiet middle child with five siblings, Paljor was known in the village for his polite, compassionate manner. He had a big heart and natural kindness. Though good-looking, even as a teen Paljor never had a girlfriend — he was simply too shy. He once told his brother that he was more interested in dedicating his life to something bigger than himself than in getting married.
As the eldest son, Paljor no doubt felt pressured to provide for his family, which was struggling to make ends meet at their modest farm. View image of Tashi Angmo, with her son's possessions.
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So when he was selected to join an elite group of climbers who would undertake a risky but grandiose mission — to become the first Indians ever to summit Everest from its north side — he chose not to reveal his true destination to her. She implored her son not to go, but he told her he had to.
View image of A certificate marking Paljor's ascent. But younger brother Thinley Namgyal was not worried.
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His brother was the strongest person he knew. Thinley, who is a monk, met Paljor in Delhi days before he was due to leave; he gave his brother a blessing before telling him goodbye. He was really happy about all of this. Paljor was young, strong and experienced, but Everest presents multitudes of ways to take the life of even the most well prepared climber — falls, avalanches, exposure and more. The body also baulks at the insults it endures on the mountain. Sudden death — from heart attacks, strokes, irregular heart beat, asthma or exacerbation of other pre-existing conditions — is not uncommon, and lack of oxygen can trigger acute pulmonary or cerebral edema: View image of Documentation for Paljor: Not everyone on the mountain shares the same odds of dying under any given circumstance, however.
In a retrospective study of climbing deaths on Everest from to , Paul Firth , an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues found that most Sherpa deaths occur at lower altitudes, reflecting the unavoidable risk of traversing the Khumbu icefall — an unstable glacier field laden with house-sized ice blocks and gaping crevasses.
View image of A medal awarded after Paljor's death.
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When Mark Jenkins , a journalist, author and adventurer in Wyoming, was on Everest in , five people died on a single day. Sherpas he interviewed told him that most of the fatalities belonged to clients who had refused to turn around. Viesturs, who once ended a climb on Everest within m ft of the summit because conditions did not look good, credits his survival to always listening to the mountain and knowing when to turn back.
View image of Kathmandu, where many Everest journeys begin.
Jenkins estimates that half the climbers on Everest today do not belong there. View image of Files of expeditions, kept by Elizabeth Hawley. On Everest, things were proceeding without a hitch for Paljor and his comrades. The Indian expedition was well connected on the mountain, with a luxurious communal tent that all climbers, regardless of nationality, were welcome to visit. Commandant Mohinder Singh, who led the team, told me about the expedition at his home outside of San Francisco, where he now manages an apartment complex: Her areas of expertise include leadership, teams, innovation, and organizational learning.
I think those are all pretty well appropriate for the conversation we're going to have today. We designed the simulation to create conditions whereby participants have to share information and share it extremely, thoughtfully, and systematically, while requiring them to listen intently to each other in order to solve a series of challenges along the way in a pseudo climb of Everest. We used Everest as the backdrop because it's engaging, it's exciting, it's exhilarating.
BBC - Future - The tragic tale of Mt Everest’s most famous dead body
The simulation is not really about Everest, it just uses that context. What it's about is the very real challenges of people in diverse teams, meaning teams with diverse expertise trying to make decisions, trying to solve problems, trying to forge new territory. That's a challenging interpersonal and technical activity. We created the simulation to give students an experience of just how challenging that can be. Why did you choose to do a simulation rather than just write a case about it? One of the reasons that a simulation is appropriate is that it puts people in a situation where, at first glance, they think it should be relatively easy.
We do the simulation each year with all of the MBA students, and most of them will take one look at it and they'll see what information they have, and they'll see what the task ahead is, and they won't be daunted by it. They think it looks pretty straightforward, and it is—but only if you listen deeply to what each other have to say. The first and most powerful reason to use a simulation is that a great number of the teams will not do as well as they thought Whereas in some other case studies you sometimes can sit back and think, "Oh yeah, I would have done fine in that situation if I were really in it.
This isn't really being in the situation, but it's one step closer to being in an actual situation, having to take action, having to sort through ambiguous data, make decisions, and see how well you do. Another big difference here with cases is that there are right answers in this simulation and you can come to them if, again, if you manage the process well. It gives students an opportunity to realize they may not be as good team members as they thought they were.
Explain what the team looks like. One of the things I enjoyed about this, and I think probably the participants did too, there's a bit of gamification to this. You sort of feel like you're playing a game or play acting in some ways. Who were the members of the team? You are playing a game and you are play acting in a very real way. There are five members of each team, and the participants are usually randomly assigned. All of those folks have their own distinct backgrounds or back stories, if you will, and they also have access because of their expertise and because of their life stories, to different data, different information.
Only by sharing that different information can the teams do well, make good decisions. How much do the students know? As they are sitting down have they been given a briefing document or do they just sit down and told, "This is your role"? They sit down and are told, "This is your role. Many teams take a round or two of the simulation to suddenly have that recognition that they have access to different information. They know they have five different roles but they don't assume that each may have different information about the contextual conditions.
I should also say that this is a multimedia case, meaning that there are videos components. One of the videos that the students watch before they begin the simulation is an interview with somebody who actually scaled Mount Everest and what he describes is a pretty daunting experience. Jim Clarke, who's one of our wonderful alumni, did an actual Everest climb and he describes in just a terrific interview some of the features of that climb, the preparation you need, the training, the tools, the equipment. One of my favorite parts of the interview with Jim Clarke is when he says once you get above the Hillary Step, basically it takes maybe five breaths to take one step.
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I think in a way the video makes students over cautious, which doesn't always help them. It's a great dietary aid too because I think he said he burned 16, calories a day…. And you're not hungry. I think it probably does put some fear in the participants but that's important, right? Because as they go through this process they need to be factoring in all of these different physical elements of the climb.
They do need to be careful, they need to be systematic, they need to be disciplined. They don't need to be superstitiously risk averse. In other words, what is not helpful is saying, "Oh, the weather doesn't look good, we'll just stay here" or, "Oh, you look like your health is faltering a little, we'll just stay here. The goal is to climb the mountain, and the goal is to get everybody up the mountain. That's the way you get the most points.