#Sagarmatha

[kiaryn-ledgem]

[vexwerewolf]

[lookninjas]

According to the justices, the government can only issue climbing permits after specifying how many climbers will be allowed, according to available capacity. Helicopter flights above base camp will also be banned, except for rescues. Finally, climbing teams must submit a list of the gear and supplies they are carrying up the mountain and must leave a deposit. They receive back the deposit only after proving that they brought everything down.

Good news from Nepal, although obviously nothing's going to be regulated right away. Hopefully there's some real changes soon.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

(CNN) — George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s — until the mountain claimed his life.

Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest, leading up to the last days before he disappeared while heading for its peak.

On 8 June 1924, Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine departed from their expedition team in a push for the summit; they were never seen alive again.

Mallory’s words, however, are now available to read online in their entirety for the first time.

Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Mallory studied as an undergraduate from 1905 to 1908, recently digitized hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by him.

Over the past 18 months, archivists scanned the documents in preparation for the centennial of Mallory’s disappearance.

The college will display a selection of Mallory’s letters and possessions in the exhibit “George Mallory: Magdalene to the Mountain,” opening June 20.

The Everest letters outline Mallory’s meticulous preparations and equipment tests, and his optimism about their prospects.

But the letters also show the darker side of mountaineering: bad weather, health issues, setbacks, and doubts.

Days before his disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were “50 to 1 against us” in the last letter to his wife Ruth dated 27 May 1924.

“This has been a bad time altogether,” Mallory wrote. “I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes.”

He went on to describe a harrowing brush with death during a recent climb, when the ground beneath his feet collapsed, leaving him suspended “half-blind & breathless.”

His weight supported only by his ice axe wedged across a crevasse as he dangled over “a very unpleasant black hole.”

Other letters Mallory exchanged with Ruth were written at the time of their courtship, while he was serving in Britain’s artillery regiment during World War I.

Throughout his travels, correspondence from Ruth provided him with much-needed stability during the most challenging times, said project lead Katy Green, a college archivist at Magdalene College.

“She was the ‘rock’ at home, he says himself in his letters,” Green said.

The archivist recounted one note in which Mallory told Ruth: “I’m so glad that you never wobble, because I would wobble without you.”

Yet while Mallory was clearly devoted to his wife, he nonetheless repeatedly returned to the Himalayas despite her mounting fears for his safety.

“There’s something in him that drove him,” Green said. “It might have been his wartime experience, or it might have just been the sort of person that he was.”

‘Documents of his character’

In total, the collection includes around 840 letters spanning from 1914 to 1924.

Ruth wrote about 440 of those to Mallory, offering an unprecedented and highly detailed view of daily life for women in the early 20th century, Green told CNN.

Together, the letters offer readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the legend, said Jochen Hemmleb, an author and alpinist who was part of the Everest expedition that found Mallory’s body in 1999.

“They are really personal. They are documents of his character. They provide unique insights into his life, and especially into the 1924 expedition — his state of mind, his accurate planning, his ambitions,” said Hemmleb, who was not involved in the scanning project.

“It’s such a treasure that these are now digitized and available for everyone to read.”

Frozen in place

Three of the digitized letters — written to Mallory by his brother, his sister and a family friend — were recovered from Mallory’s body by the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, which ascended Everest seeking the remains of Mallory and Irvine.

On 1 May 1999, expedition member and mountaineer Conrad Anker found a frozen corpse at an altitude of around 26,700 feet (8,138 meters) and identified it as Mallory’s from a name tag that was sewn into his clothes.

Mallory’s body was interred where it lay at the family’s request, said Anker, who was not involved in the letter digitizing project.

“Having done body recoveries in other places, it’s very laborious, and it’s very dangerous at that altitude,” he told CNN.

“We collected some of his personal effects that went back to the Royal Geographical Society,” including the three letters that were later scanned at Magdalene College.

Mount Everest, the highest peak in the Himalayan mountain range, is also the tallest mountain on Earth, rising 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) above sea level on the border between Nepal and Tibet — an autonomous region in China.

Its Tibetan name is Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of the World,” and its Nepali name is Sagarmatha, meaning “Goddess of the Sky.”

However, these names were unknown to 19th-century British surveyors who mapped the region.

In 1865, the Royal Geographical Society named the peak Mount Everest after British surveyor Sir George Everest, a former surveyor general of India.

Mallory participated in all three of Britain’s first forays onto Everest’s slopes: in 1921, 1922 and 1924.

When he vanished in 1924, he was less than two weeks shy of his 38th birthday.

Many have speculated about whether Mallory and Irvine managed to reach Everest’s summit.

The climbers were last seen in the early afternoon of June 8 by expedition member and geologist Noel Odell, who was following behind and glimpsed them from a distance.

Odell later found some of their equipment at a campsite, but there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine.

“(Mallory) risked a lot despite the fact that he had a family back home and three small children,” Hemmleb said.

“We don’t know whether it was really irresponsible to make that final attempt, because we don’t really know what happened. It could be that in the end, he simply had bad luck.”

So close, yet so far

Decades after Mallory’s death, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary became the first to reach Everest’s peak, summiting on 29 May 1953.

In the years that followed, thousands attempted to climb Everest, with nearly 4,000 people reaching its summit.

More than 330 climbers have died trying since modern records were kept, according to the Himalayan Database, which compiles records of all expeditions in the Himalayas.

Some of those bodies remain on the mountain, frozen where they fell and visible to climbers who pass them by.

“If you’re out in this environment, you make peace with your own mortality and the deaths of others,” Anker said.

“You’re above 8,000 meters, and when there are weather changes or your own systems cease to function due to the lack of oxygen, it gets serious really quickly.”

When mountaineers are close to a mountain’s summit, they sometimes proceed even under dangerous conditions due to so-called summit fever, a compulsion to reach the peak even at the cost of their own safety.

It’s unknown whether Mallory was in the grip of summit fever when he died, but he might have thought that his reputation depended on summiting.

“That was going to be the defining moment in his life,” Anker said.

By comparison, Mallory’s team member Edward Norton had attempted to summit four days earlier but turned back at roughly the same altitude where Mallory and Irvine were seen for the last time.

“I had a conversation with one of Edward Norton’s sons a couple of years ago,” Hemmleb said.

“When I asked him, do you think it was mere luck that your father survived and Mallory died?"

He said, ‘No, I think there was one difference: My father, Edward Norton, didn’t need the mountain.’”

As a climber himself, Hemmleb took that message to heart.

“That is something I personally learned from Mallory,” he said. “You need to be very careful not to make yourself dependent on that summit success.”

A century has elapsed since Mallory’s death, but the digitizing of these letters assures that his story will keep being told, Hemmleb said.

“This will continue beyond my own lifetime, I’m certain of that,” he added. “In a sense, it’s the expedition that never ends.”

George Herbert Leigh-Mallory (18 June 1886 – 8 or 9 June 1924) was an English mountaineer who participated in the first three British Mount Everest expeditions from the early to mid-1920s.

[peace-over-clarification]

Mt everest, a dream destination.

Pic credit: Pinterest

[totallynotagentphilcoulson]

Oh dang they found Sandy Irvine’s foot

[nobylu]

I'm running a Sagarmatha in Lancer so we're starting with concept thumbnails and then we'll move to Live2D when I feel more warmed up!

🟢Live at 4:15PM ET

[eatstraighttylenol]

Explain this shit

[sedusadrakaina]

Everest wears a halo, view from Kala Pattar, Nepal

[travelnew]

A short film of 10 minutes about Mount Everest and impact of life around it.

Please watch and let's protect the fragile environment of this beautiful Earth.

You will enjoy the mesmerizing shots and powerful storytelling.

[marveltreks1998]

Tilicho Lake 

Tilicho Lake is a high-altitude lake located in the Manang district of Nepal, in the Annapurna range. It is situated at an altitude of 4,919 meters (16,138 feet) and is considered to be the highest lake in the world.Tilicho Lake is a popular destination for trekkers, who usually trek to the lake as a side trip during the Annapurna Circuit Trek, which is one of the most popular trekking routes in Nepal. The trek to Tilicho Lake involves a challenging and strenuous journey, passing through remote and rugged terrain.

The trek to Tilicho lake starts from either Manang or Thorong Phedi, and it is typically a 5-7 days journey. Along the way, trekkers will pass through lush forests, high-altitude deserts, and traditional Tibetan villages, and enjoy breathtaking views of the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountain ranges.The trek to Tilicho Lake is considered to be more challenging than the Annapurna Circuit trek and requires a good level of physical fitness and acclimatization, as well as proper equipment and support. It is highly recommended to hire a guide and porter to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience.

The lake itself is a beautiful and serene spot, surrounded by high peaks and glaciers. It is also considered to be a sacred site by the locals and some Hindu pilgrims trek to the lake to pay their respects.

[bethanyactually]

What's in a name: Everest, Chomolungma, Sagarmatha?

Let’s be honest - Everest should be cut off from climbers, and the only people that should be allowed up there are ppl who volunteer to clean up all the garbage and human excrement adrenaline junkies have left up there over the decades, and anyone who volunteers to attempt to bring down any bodies of those who died.

The ascent is too dangerous, too many ill-equipped and unprepared climbers try to make the climb, and too much garbage is piling up and poisoning the run off that communities around Everest rely on to live.

[yesthatsatumbler]

How the renaming of Chomolungma went down (oversimplified)

(pre-emptive note: this is an approximate summary and wasn't what literally happened)

Sir Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India: This mountain is very tall, likely the tallest in the Himalayas. I propose to name it after my predecessor as Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest.

Sir George Everest: This is a very bad idea. Firstly, I have absolutely nothing to do with this mountain. Secondly, it probably has its own local name. Thirdly, with all due respect, no native Indian would be able to pronounce my surname correctly.

Sir Andrew Waugh: Firstly, you have done quite a lot for the study of India. Secondly, we weren't actually able to find out its local name, since the locals still wouldn’t let us get sufficiently close. Thirdly, why are you assuming that your surname would be pronounced correctly?

(For those not getting the final reference: Sir George Everest's surname is correctly pronounced /ˈiːvrɪst/, i.e. "EEV-rist". AFAIK approximately nobody pronounces the mountain name that way.)

(Today, October 5th, is the birthday of Radhanath Sikdar (1813-1870), whose calculations in 1852 had originally established that Peak XV, the future Mount Everest, was the tallest known mountain in the Himalayas. The renaming discussion had occurred in 1856, after Radhanath's calculations were repeatedly rechecked and found to be correct.)

[EDIT 2024-10-06: apparently Tumblr cries at putting linebreaks into titles - and/or possibly at putting titles at all - and now my post shows up with a doubled-up title on the themed version of my blog. I have not been able to figure out how to fix that.]

[UPD: changing the title's size to be smaller worked. It was too big anyway.]

[amanitacz]

Model of the Mt Everest.

Link to see more about this model on Turbosquid.com:

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/mt-everest-2028208?referral=amanitacz

Link to the whole gallery:

https://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Artists/AmanitaCZ?referral=amanitacz

Link to the software:

http://www.cazaba.cz/

[karmaecoadventure]

Mount Everest is the Earth's highest peak situated on the international border between Nepal and Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is a prominent feature of the Mahalangur Himal sub-range within the Himalayas.