Iceman cometh: climbing Mt. Everest in shorts

Yogi Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Wim Hof; A Martinez, Alex Cohen (Take Two, scpr.org); Scott Carney (degrading gynecological guide known as Playboy porno magazine)

He can't make it! We're cold in Gortex. He'll freeze to death. Who does he think he is, a barefoot Sherpa? (Kristoffer Erickson/news.nationalgeographic.com). Hey, is that Iceman?

Yogic pranayama (chi-energy manipulation by "breath regulation") makes it possible.

 

Gird your loins and get to the top.

[Dutch Yogi Master] Dutchman Wim Hof, better known as "Iceman" for his ability to withstand seemingly impossible levels of cold, spoke at a hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2007 after successfully climbing Mt. Everest in shorts.

He didn't succeed in peaking, scaling to the top; he succeeded in not freezing to death in a place most people need oxygen tanks and layers of high tech thermal clothing to stave off frostbite.

Majestic Mt. Everest (Sagaramatha)

The "Iceman" climbed Mt. Everest wearing just shorts with the intention of making it all the way to the top. Although not reaching the summit, he vowed to have another half-naked crack at [allegedly] the world's highest peak. Hof said that next year he would try Everest again, and then with a paraglider and two French people they would fly down.

 

Huh, how?!

"Iceman" Wim Hof (scpr.org)

Wim Hof is a Dutch extremeophile, who claims he can consciously train his mind and body to withstand cold that would kill other humans.

 

He has hiked two-thirds up Mt. Everest in only shorts, run marathons barefoot in the Arctic Circle, and submerged himself below ice for 72 minutes.

Scientific study of Hof has borne out his claims. It is thought he has built up so-called "brown fat," a type of fat that can be burned easily by the body to generate heat [which we are born with but lose in favor of storing white fat around the belly and other "problem" areas].

 

It has articles? We just look at it...

All humans have brown fat when they are babies, which allows them to live without getting hypothermia, but most people lose their brown fat cells unless they are exposed to extreme cold temperatures.

 

Hof is the subject of a profile by Scott Carney, in this month's Playboy magazine. Carney visited Hof's training school in the Polish wilderness where he learned to lie in snow for extended periods and eventually climbed a mountain bare-chested in below freezing weather. LISTEN

Iceman Cometh

Scott Carney (playboy.com)

Sounds like Wim knows Indian yoga! (HuffPo)

A dilapidated farmhouse in the Polish countryside creaks and groans on its foundation as six men hyperventilate inside one of its frigid rooms.

The windows are caked with frost and snow piles up outside the front door. Wim Hof surveys his students with stern blue eyes as he counts their breaths. They are lying in sleeping bags and covered in blankets. Every breath they expel appears as a tiny puff of mist as the heat of their bodies crystallizes in the near-arctic air.

When the students are bleached white from exhaustion, Hof commands them to let all the air out of their lungs and hold their breath until their bodies shake and shudder. I exhale all my breath into the frigid air.

 

“Fainting is okay,” he says. “It just means you went deep.”

 

Hof is one of the world’s most recognized extremophiles. In 2007 he made headlines around the world when he attempted to summit Mount Everest wearing nothing but spandex shorts and hiking boots.

He has run barefoot marathons in the arctic circle and submerged his entire body beneath the ice for almost two hours. Every feat defies the boundaries of what medical science says is possible. Hof believes he is much more than a stuntman performing tricks; he thinks he has stumbled on hidden evolutionary potential locked inside every human body. More

Mt. Everest to close for the season (audio)

Seth Auberon, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; T.J. Raphael, The World (pri.org)

Dangerous Mt. Everest (Kristoffer Erickson/news.nationalgeographic.com)

  

Yeti hunters, Everest, 1954 (dailymail.co.uk)

Sherpas -- members of a Himalayan ethnic group renowned for their skill at high-altitude climbing -- are crucial to operations on Mount Everest.

They earn a mere $3,000-5,000 risking their lives helping others scale the mountain during each two-to-three-month climbing season. They do on a regular basis what others pay to accomplish just once in a lifetime, putting their lives at great risk for affluent clients due to poverty they are never able to emerge from.
 

Last Friday, an avalanche roared down a climbing route on Everest, killing 13 Sherpa guides and leaving three others missing. When it occurred the Sherpas, who have centuries of history in Nepal's alpine region, were working at 21,000 feet, fixing ropes and preparing the path ahead of peak mountaineering season.

 

Tibet's Rongbuk Buddhist monastery with Mt. Everest in background (wiki commons)

 

Who climbs Mt. Everest without a Sherpa?

As the Sherpa community mourns the loss of family members and friends, the group is considering an unprecedented move: a strike.

On Sunday, disappointed by the Nepali government’s offer of 40,000 rupees ($408) as compensation for the families of each of the dead, some Sherpas gathered at Everest’s base camp to propose a “work stoppage” that could disrupt or cancel the 334 expeditions planned for the 2014 climbing season.

Ellen Barry, South Asia Bureau Chief for The New York Times, says while Sherpas have lived with these conditions for many years, last week's accident changed things.

"I think just the magnitude of the loss of life from Friday's accident has prompted very unusual decisions," she says. More

To climb Mt. Everest, clean Mt. Everest (audio)

Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Siobhan Wornell, Jonathan Kealing, Global Scan (PRI)

Mount Everest as seen from a Drukair flight (Shrimpo1967/pri.org)

  

Mt. Everest (peterwestcarey/flickr.com)

Climbers who want to summit Mount Everest, pictured from the south, looking north, will now have to help clean up the mountain, too. 

 

The government of Nepal is taking action against the impact of tourism on Mount Everest -- [allegedly] the tallest, and probably most famous, mountain in the world.
 

Starting in April, climbers ascending beyond base camp will be required to bring back eight kilograms (more than 17 pounds) of garbage -- or officials may fine them. This rubbish does not include each climber's own personal garbage generated during the course of their climb, according to The Guardian newspaper.

 

No respect for Sherpas or mountains

Years of expeditions have left the mountain littered with refuse, such as abandoned oxygen cylinders and human waste. There are already measures in place to try and curb the environmental toll, such as a refundable $4,000 deposit that is returned when climbers prove they have carried out all of the trash they brought in -- but enforcement is proving difficult. More

• VIDEO: Tyler, 9, and Sherpa scale tallest peak (preceded by a 7-year-old Incan boy
• VIDEO: View from the Top of the World
• On drugs and lost in the mountains)
• 13-year-old tries to climb Mt. Everest

Tyler, 9, dad, and Sherpa scale tallest peak

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; KPCC FM (SCPR.org)

(BBC) No Sherpa means no success on mountain: The Sherpa's Story (2013 documentary)

Aconcagua (Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images) and Tyler Armstrong (Kevin Armstrong/AP)

  

Our hero Buddha Boy (dharmasangha.info)

A 9-year-old boy from Orange County has become the youngest person in recorded history to reach the summit of Argentina's Aconcagua mountain, which is the tallest peak in the Western and Southern hemispheres.

Tyler Armstrong of Yorba Linda reached the summit on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th) with his father Kevin and a Tibetan Buddhist Sherpa, Lhawang Dhondup, who has climbed Mt. Everest multiple times.

I challenge you to karate, Tyler!

"That really hit my heart because me and my dad [and my Sherpa] did it together," Tyler said. "Most 9-year-olds...usually play video games, so they don't expect a 9-year-old to climb a 22,841 foot mountain."

 

They were in fine spirits Friday as they left Aconcagua, whose sheer precipices and bitter cold have claimed more than 100 climbers' lives.

"You can really see the world's atmosphere up there. All the clouds are under you, and it's really cold," Tyler said, describing the summit to The Associated Press. "It doesn't look anything like a kid's drawing of a mountain. It's probably as big as a house at the summit, and then it's a sheer drop."

(Journeyman Pictures) Climbing Mt. Everest with Nepal's Sherpas

 

Palestine-Israel at peace

Only 30 percent of the 7,000 people who obtain permits to climb Aconcagua each year make the summit, said Nicolas Garcia, who handled their logistics from down below. No one under 14 is usually allowed, so the family had to persuade an Argentine judge that Tyler could safely accomplish the feat. In their case, they took the "Polish Glacier" route, which doesn't require climbing, and roped themselves together only when crossing steep ice-covered slopes.

 

"Any kid can really do this, all they have to do is try. And set their mind to the goal," said Tyler, who worked out twice a day for a year and a half to prepare for the climb. He also held fundraisers...

Aconcagua's previous record-holder was Matthew Moniz of Boulder, Colorado, who was 10 when he reached the summit in 2008.

7-y.o. Incan mummy (AcEx)

There was one younger boy who climbed the lower slopes of Aconcagua, Garcia noted: An Inca boy was sacrificed some 500 years ago at 16,400 feet on Piramide ("Pyramid"), one of the mountain's lower peaks. Scientific tests on the mummy, recovered in 1985, put his age at about 7.

Tyler had already climbed the 19,341-foot Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania at the age of 8, and with Aconcagua conquered, is determined to reach all "seven summits," the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. More

• 60 years of epic (and deadly) climbs at Mt. Everest
• Present-day hikers find a 40-year-old letter and author
• Surviving K2, one of the deadliest mountains in the world
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"The Summit" of the most dangerous mountain

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Pat Falvey and Pemba Gyalje Sherpa (thesummitk2book.com, Beyond Endurance Publishing), ImageNowFilms.ie

The film The Summit, produced and directed by Nick Ryan. In US theaters Oct. 4, 2013. (DVD and downloads available early 2014).
 

Not all Westerners respect Buddhist Sherpas

It was the deadliest day on the world's most dangerous mountain, K2. This is an early trailer for the feature book and documentary film "The Summit."

On August 1st, 2008, 18 climbers from around the world reached the summit of K2, the world's second highest (some argue the highest) and most dangerous mountain. It is a peak which claims the lives of one in every four climbers who attempt it. Over the course of 28 hours, however, K2 had exacted a deadlier toll: 11 lives were lost in a series of catastrophic accidents.
 

Beware: mountains do not exist to be climbed

Standing at 8,611 meters and attracting a climbing elite along the Pakistan-China border, K2 is known as the "Mountaineer's Mountain" (much like Denali in Alaska) because of its extreme technical challenges, its dangerously unpredictable weather, and an infamous and hazardous overhanging wall of glacial ice known as the Serac.

Snowbound at Base Camp for weeks on end and increasingly despairing of their prospects for success, an unexpected weather window finally gives the climbers the opportunity they were waiting for. In their collective desire to reach the summit, seven expeditions agreed to coordinate efforts and share equipment. Triumph, however, quickly turns to tragedy when a seemingly flawless plan unravels with lethal consequences.

Over the course of three days, a Nepalese Sherpa called Pemba Gyalje, along with five other Sherpas, was at the center of a series of attempts to rescue climbers who had become trapped in the Death Zone (above 8,000 meters), unable to escape its clutches and debilitated by oxygen-deprivation, chronic fatigue, delirium, and a terrifying hopelessness.

The tragedy becomes a controversy as survivors walk away from the catastrophe on the mountain into an international media storm. Countless stories emerge, some contradictory and many simply untrue.

More recent trailer of "The Summit" to be released in US on Oct. 4, 2013

Mahakala, Yeti, a fierce spirit, Tibet (MTP)

Based on Pemba Gyalje's eyewitness account and drawing on a series of interviews with the survivors, which were conducted for an award-winning documentary. "The Summit: How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2's Deadliest Days" is the most comprehensive interpretation of one of modern-day mountaineering's most controversial disasters.
 

Also at the heart of The Summit lies a mystery about one extraordinary man, Ger McDonnell. By all accounts, he was faced with a heartbreaking dilemma -- at the very limit of his mortal resources, he encountered a disastrous scene and a moral dilemma: Three climbers were tangled up in ropes and running out of time.

In the Death Zone, the body is literally dying every passing second. Facing one's mortality, morality is skewed 180 degrees from the rest of life off the mountain. When a climber falls or wanders off the trail, the unwritten code of the mountain is to leave them for dead. Had Ger McDonnell stuck to the code, he might still be alive.
 
"The Summit" is about the very nature of modern adventure, one that remains contentious and fiercely debated. The book "The Summit" deals with the logistics, excitement, fears, successes, rescues, and fatalities of ill fated days on the world's most dangerous mountain.