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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
High-wired Mountain Act
High-altitude climbing is a challenging spectator sport, but thanks to technology it's gaining popularity. That may not be good news
By DAFFYD RODERICK
When veteran expedition leader Eric Simonson first started mountain guiding in 1973, webcasting was something spiders might do. News of climbing success—or failure—reached the outside world at roughly the speed of yak. Knocking off a big peak might be lauded in an obscure climbing journal, but as far as mainstream audiences were concerned, who cared? These days, however, Simonson sends e-mail from the Rongbuk Glacier in the shadow of Everest's north face and talks as eagerly about dual ISDN lines and transmission rates as he does about rope and backpacks. "Ten years ago we were in the Dark Ages from a technology standpoint," he writes in response to an e-mail from TIME. "Multimedia meant you had more than one cassette tape to listen to on your Walkman for the next three months. That's all changed."
The global fascination with mountaineering—fueled by news of the death of eight climbers on Everest on a single day in May 1996—has fused with the broadcasting power of the Internet to bring the world of rock and ice into the living room, via the Web browser. When Simonson's party set off in 1999 to find the remains of Everest pioneers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, and then found Mallory's body, the world learned about it online. The website (the now dot-bombed mountainzone.com) that hosted the dramatic pictures and first-person storytelling clocked more than 5 million hits a day.
Expedition climbing had become a spectator sport. The faraway world of life-or-death decisions and dramatic rescues now unfolds on our desktops.
Large-scale excursions, like Simonson's current 2001 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition (they are searching for further evidence of exploits of the men in tweed), take along laptops, satellite phones and solar-power generators. And a technology specialist: it's his job to handle video and stills editing and encoding with a Panasonic Toughbook (a bomb-resistant little unit with a waterproof keyboard, a magnesium-alloy case and a shock-mounted hard drive). When that's done, he transmits the content via the group's satellite phones to the website team in Seattle that posts it on the site. Going live would be possible, but with the time difference between Nepal and the U.S., the size of the audience wouldn't be worth the effort. Not that it's worth the effort now—financially. Mountainzone's demise proved yet again that free content can be a leaky business model. But being connected gives a profile boost, making sponsorship easier to get and improving the personal life of mountain men and women.
Money and mates aside, it's debatable whether all this voyeurism is a good thing. Increased coverage and public awareness risks minimizing the difficulty of the sport. When Simonson's team didn't bring back Mallory's remains, opting instead to bury him with rocks, there was an outcry from some members of the audience at the team's perceived inhumanity. "These people have absolutely no concept of the difficulty of even physically getting to the place we found Mallory, let alone the precariousness of that location for a climber merely trying to keep himself from hurtling into the abyss," Simonson says. "It's not until people die on the mountains that audiences wake up and realize how dangerous the sport is."
In this age of ever more competitive game shows, is it just a matter of time until we're glued to Everest Survivor? Simonson thinks not. "Everest is real danger and real adversity, not a bunch of artificially created hardships meant to bring out the tensions in group dynamics," he says. "I don't think reality TV is really ready for this reality. It's too real."
Related Sites
International Mountain Guides (2001 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition)
Alpine Ascents International
Ed Viesturs
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External sites are not endorsed by Time Inc.
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High-wired Mountain Act
High-altitude climbing is a challenging spectator sport, but thanks to technology it's gaining popularity. That may not be good news 
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