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You Wouldn’t Believe These 7 Craziest Things Top Mountaineers Have Done!
High-altitude mountaineering is a dangerous game seemingly played by some serious-looking ice-cool hotshots. Most of us have this image of the mountaineers, who knowingly and willingly risk their lives. But hey! It’s not really true! Mountaineering has a funny face too where all sorts of weird things happen and get frozen in time.
Here are the top craziest and wildest things climbers have done that you probably didn’t know about and wouldn’t even believe so easily.
1. Peeing down from the highest point on Earth
The first man to climb the highest mountain had done something so shocking on the summit of the Mount Everest that fearing public outcry he had kept it a secret for the next 50 years! Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit at 11.30 am on May 29, 1953 and spent the next 18 minutes on the summit, taking pictures, burying mementos in the snow and taking in the view. And then Hillary did the unthinkable.
Having gulped down too many fluids, Hillary couldn’t hold it on for too long and he unzipped his fly and urinated. Ya, from the top. Hillary kept it a secret (and even Tenzing) and didn’t mention it till he wrote his third and last autobiography ‘View From the Summit’ in 2000, almost 50 years after the first ascent of the Everest.
2. Climbing highest mountains, in skirts
Who would like to climb a mountain in freezing temperature, thinning air and in a skirt? Well sir, in the Victorian era when mountaineering was meant for elites only and it was a taboo for women to wear trousers, the ladies had no other option but go climbing in skirts.
They would not only go up in skirts but also take their maids whenever and wherever they go climbing. Take for example Elizabeth Le Blond, who was the first woman to make ‘manless’ ascent in the Alps and who founded the Ladies Alpine Club. Elizabeth would always be accompanied by her maids during climbing and oh yes, she would always wear a skirt. Lucy Walker, another Victorian climber, also refused to wear anything but skirts during climbing.
But that didn’t stop her from summiting the Matterhorn in 1871. And by the way, the Matterhorn’s ‘Col Felicité’ has been named after Felicité Carrel, an Italian mountaineer, who could not reach the summit of Matterhorn in 1867 as her skirt ballooned in the high wind and the climb was cancelled.
3. Smoking as an aid to climbing
Smoking may be a taboo these days especially in mountaineering but there was a time when cigarettes were considered not only cool but an aid to climbing! Some of the top-notch climbers, who puffed away at their cigarettes and pipes while on the mountains, included George Mallory, Eric Shipton, Herbert Tichy, Bill Tilman, Michel Croz, Mick Burke, Joe Brown and many others.
But no one can beat Captain George Finch, who took part in the Mount Everest expedition of 1922 and who at that time was the first person known to have climbed a height exceeding 8,000 meters. After his return, Finch made a jaw-dropping claim that cigarettes can help you climb on Everest!
British newspaper The Guardian had reported at that time that “speaking at a meeting of the royal Geographical Society, Finch had testified to the comfort of cigarette smoking at very high altitude. He and two other members of the expedition had camped at 25,000 feet for over 26 hours and all that time they used no Oxygen.”
According to Finch, “he had 30 cigarettes with him and as a measure of desperation he lit one. After deeply inhaling the smoke he and his companions found they could take their mind off the question of breathing altogether. The effect of a cigarette lasted at least three hours and when the supply of cigarettes was exhausted they had recourse to Oxygen, which allowed them to have their first sleep at this great altitude.” It’s not clear how seriously Finch’s claims were taken but they sure did make great headlines.
4. Chasing Yetis & returning empty-handed
The existence of Yetis may just be a legend but many climbers took the ‘abominable snowman’ a little too seriously and went chasing them in the Himalayas, some at the cost being labelled as crackpots.
These mountaineers fired the popular imagination with their Yeti accounts and further strengthened the legend as they went exploring and climbing the Himalayas in the early Twentieth century.
British mountaineer and explorer Eric Shipton while on a reconnaissance mission on the Mount Everest in 1951 clicked pictures of what he believed to be Yeti footprints. These photographs created a storm of sorts upon publication. Two years later Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay also stated to have had seen large footprints while scaling Mount Everest.
Tenzing claimed that though he never saw a Yeti but his father had. Hillary, however, would later express disbelief in the existence of a Yeti but then led an expedition in 1960 to collect evidence of Yeti.
The legend of Yeti has not even spared legendry mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who claimed to have seen a Yeti but was never able to provide evidence for the same. Messner also wrote a book chronicling his years of research on the Yetis and believed that he has solved the mystery.
But soon after the book was printed, Messner was criticized and many labeled him a crackpot while accusing him of trying to gain publicity out of Yeti legend.
5. No pictures please, I am on Mount Everest
Just imagine becoming the first person to stand on the summit of Mount Everest and then not letting your picture get clicked! Wouldn’t that be crazy?
But this is exactly what Edmund Hillary did when he along with Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. When Hillary, who is known to be one of the most grounded mountaineers ever and who climbed Everest for the hack of it and not for fame, money or anything else, was later asked about why he did it, he quipped, “Tenzing had never used a camera in his entire life and this was not a good moment to start.”
And this is why we only have the picture of Tenzing standing on the top and not of Hillary.
6. Holding a Chinese Communist Party meeting right below the Everest summit
Climbers struggling and gasping high on a mountain is normal but what about holding a party meeting in a mind-freezing weather just below the summit of Mount Everest? Well, this is what the Chinese communist expedition members claimed to have done at an altitude of 8700 meters when the condition of a fellow climber deteriorated.
This and a number of other gems from the 1960 Chinese expedition like climbers not having experience of more than two years or reaching the top crawling on all fours and then not clicking pictures as it was already dark made it look highly unlikely at that time that the Chinese actually summitted the Everest.
The four climbers were members of the Chinese Communist Party and part of the 214-member expedition the success of which was looked at with skepticism for more than a decade. But new evidence emerged in later years to suggest that Chinese actually did reach the Everest top. One of the solid proofs was a surveying instrument that was left by the Chinese on the top and dug up by a British expedition in 1975.
7. Naked and loving it on the Mount Everest
In 2006, Lakpa Tharke, a Sherpa guide, shocked everybody by taking off his clothes on the summit of the Mount Everest. He stood there naked for three minutes in freezing temperature and set one of the weirdest world records.
But the Nepal Mountaineering Association was hardly amused. It asked the Nepalese government to ban nudity and ‘obscene records’ on the Everest. The very next year, Wim Hof aka the Iceman, a Dutch extreme athlete, attempted to scale the Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes.
The Iceman couldn’t go beyond 6,700 meters and had to return to the base camp. In recent years, many nude hiking clubs have come up and climbers have been setting records in nude ascents in the Alps but guess who is the pioneer of this field? Well, it’s none other than the great George Mallory! Just check the picture (above) taken during the 1922 British expedition on the Everest in which Mallory can be seen with his climbing partners in just a hat and a rucksack.
