“Serious climbers all detest Everest, because you just pay someone enough money and you can do it, it’s not a technically demanding climb compared to other major summits, and then if there’s a storm you die. It’s for dummies; it literally looks like a line of dudes waiting to use the men’s room at the Superbowl, so many people do it.”
– Nicole Cliffe on Mt. Everest
“Helicopter Jing, you’re imbued with the stench of your money-bought certificates and honors … The holy Everest has been dirtied by you, a cunning and ugly person!”
– Some guy on Weibo
First off, literally all mountaineering is expensive, pointless, and selfish. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to do it if you want to, or that other people should have to bail you out if you get yourself in trouble hauling yourself up the side of some indifferent glacier, but let’s not pretend that what Wang Jing did this May was qualitatively different from literally every other climb up Everest since the first one.
“Wait, what did Wang Jing do on Everest back in May?” you ask, because you did not check National Geographic regularly for gossip, like an idiot. Remember how earlier this year there was a terrible avalanche on Everest that killed 13 Sherpas and 3 climbers? Well, it sort of (re)highlighted the really difficult situations many Sherpa families are in, where acting as mountain guides is the most lucrative work they can find in the region, but often puts them under a lot of pressure to work in incredibly dangerous conditions, as well as the fact that climbing giant mountains can be fatal. So pretty much all of the remaining expeditions on the South Face were called off. Which is fair!
BUT THEN. Wang Jing, a 39-year-old mountaineer from China, decided to climb Mt. Everest. Which people do all the time. Often while climbing over the bodies of failed expeditioners. Using expensive equipment and oxygen and various technological accoutrements that allow them to complete the climb. Paying local workers a great deal of money to assist them in dangerous climbing conditions.
And people were furious at Wang Jing for climbing Mt. Everest, over the bodies of failed expeditioners, using expensive equipment, while paying local workers a great deal of money to assist her, in the world’s clearest-cut example of HATING THE PLAYER INSTEAD OF THE GAME.
Because Wang insisted on climbing Everest when virtually every other Nepal-side expedition had abandoned their plans, and because she used a helicopter to bypass the difficulties of the Khumbu Icefall, where three unrecoverable bodies of avalanche victims were still buried, her Everest ascent has been mired in controversy—derided as being in poor taste, the indulgence of a rich “pseudo-mountaineer” who breached basic climbing ethics and ushered in a debased new era of “helicopter mountaineering.”
Nowhere has the criticism been more vehement than in Wang’s home country, where Chinese blog sites have been inflamed with outrage, some of it misinformed.
Sure, the Everest industry is corrupt and outrageously expensive and it’s a capitalist bloodsport where the internationally wealthy hire the working poor to possibly die alongside them in an attempt to get a cool picture of some mountains. But to call out one Chinese woman for using a helicopter — which is quite possibly the closest we will ever get to seeing Inspector Gadget reach the top of the world — and not, say, everybody else who would have done the exact same thing if they had her Super-Super-Rich Money, instead of their regular old Super-Rich Money, is absurd. Wang Jing, by the way, is quite possibly the greatest multi-millionaire the world has ever known:
She had donated $30,000 to the local hospital and was feted with speeches, ceremonial kata scarves, milk tea, and cookies. She gave a brief interview to a reporter from theHimalayan Times, entertained a few of my questions, demonstrated her flexibility by putting her foot over her head, and was whisked off to Kathmandu by helicopter.
The woman loves helicopters. Can you blame her for that? She also, incidentally, paid her Sherpa teammates 3-4 times the usual rate.
Jing grew up in the rural town of Ziyang in Sichuan Province, the youngest of four children. Her father was a factory worker; her mother worked for the local village government. Her formal education ended after middle school. She later worked as a waitress and met her husband in 1993, when he came into the restaurant hoping to land a contract to print its menus.
In 1995, they bought a design patent for a tent and co-founded a tent-manufacturing company called Tianhui—Everyday Happy, in English. Wang sewed the first tent herself.
Wang Jing is not the problem. The Everest industry, the lack of regulations and coordination between various expeditionary teams, is the problem; not one Chinese lady who loves helicopters and climbing mountains.
“Mallory, would you really be this vocally supportive if it had been, say, an AMERICAN MAN in question?” Probably not! I am a hobgoblin and an imp and I lack a consistent worldview. I have also never climbed a mountain and have soft hands; this will not stop me from having opinions about mountaineering on a blog.
“The woman loves helicopters. Can you blame her for that?”
I hope this is the tagline for the upcoming Wes Anderson adaptation of this story. The man does love his rich eccentrics.
There will also be exactly one person of color in the story and they will be the appropriate Andersonian level of quirky and goofy. Everyone else will be white. So. White.
At least the Mark Mothersbaugh score will be really good!
I’m not bitter at all.
Yes, the Mark Mothersbaugh score will kill it! (Unless Wes sticks with Alexandre Desplat, whose work I enjoy, too, but Mothersbaugh is obviously the right choice for sountracking a quirk-laden trek up Everest.)
Man, now that’s all I want to listen to, a soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist.
She’s a she though so that probably disqualifies it for ol’ Wes.
Here is the problem: I love hiking, I love rock climbing, I have literally climbed up cliffs, and I know that some day I’m going to end up wanting to summit something because that’s where this path leads.
(By which I mean less “here is the problem” and more “I am the problem.”)
FUCKING DO IT, embrace loving things that are flawed, you definitely should not NOT mountaineer just because we live in an imperfect capitalist society
I’m under the impression from climber friends (not from personal experience — though I did once get stuck up a climbing frame and had to be helped down, so I feel you) that there are other summits with a much less troubling industry context.
Also, thumbs up to Mallory, completely agree! Society is unfair and unequal and that totally sucks and we should try to do something about it but ceasing from doing an activity which is *not* inherently exploitative but is actually amazing (I should know the climbing frame was pretty hardcore) shouldn’t be one of them.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that I will keep going to operas even though I’m a socialist.
DENAAAAAAALIIIIIII
Move to Colorado, work on climbing all the fourteeners? That could theoretically keep you busy for at least a little while.
CREED ARMS CLIMB A DIFFERENT MOUNTAIN PEOPLE HATING ON WANG JING THIS ONE’S BEEN DONE TO LITERAL DEATH.
I had to scroll up and make sure you hadn’t put those in as secret tags.
As an unabashed lover of in-jokes, it gladdens my heart to see the consistent use of “Creed arms” here on The Toast.
The whole Everest quest/mania/whatnot is the stupidest thing out of many stupid things. “Let’s pay a shit ton of money to climb this thing that other people have climbed before us and will climb after us! It’s stupidly dangerous and preposterously expensive and we’ll put other people’s lives at risk, but we see that big rock and we want to be on top of it, so ONWARD.” *climbs over dead bodies, using them as landmarks*
NO.
If you must go up the large rock at risk to yourself and others, though, helicopter is definitely the way to go.
If you’re blind or doing it without oxygen or you’re three years old, I guess that’s exciting, but if you are just paying a company to pay sherpas to drag you to the top, maybe pick something else for your bucket list, middle-aged male executives for whom golf isn’t cutting it any more.
(I’m happy for the sherpas who make money from it, but what happens to them when they get hurt is FUCKED UP, system requires reform.)
Man, that’s some fucked-up shit.
“middle-aged male executives for whom golf isn’t cutting it any more”
This is exactly my girlfriend’s boss. When he returned from his stupid trip he forced all the organization’s employees to spend an hour in the board room listening to him talk about it. He made the IT guy place several screens with photo slideshows around the room. The organization, of course, has nothing to do with climbing mountains and the whole thing was a massive waste of time and resources. Also, I think he may have had someone carry a portable toilet and a full kitchen up the mountain?
I did know about this story, because I am super-obsessed with Mount Everest stuff despite being so afraid of the outdoors that I walk to my car every morning wielding an umbrella like a machete to fend off spiderwebs that might cross my path.
This seems logical. It is my understanding that there are no spiders on Mount Everest.
ME TOO. I have read so many Mt Everest books and I am fascinated with it so much but I would rather eat a thousand ladybugs than step foot on it. I don’t even like regular America cold, I can’t fathom you’re-gonna-lose-a-foot-or-die cold. And don’t get me started on the pulmonary embolisms caused by altitude. Y’all, that is nature’s way of saying you do not belong in a place.
It just doesn’t work out well for a lot of people, in a lot of ways. Even Mr. George “Because It’s There” Mallory didn’t fair so well, you know? Probably wished HE had a helicopter that day, I tell you what.
Me three! I will read ANY book about mountaineering or falling in a crevasse and almost dying or whatever people are doing to entertain themselves these days. And I do hike, but nothing technical, and now that I live in Colorado, wooo-eeee … You can be pretty outdoorsy and still feel like the most enormous couch potato, because are you running an 100-mile ultramarathon at 12,000 feet? No? Oh. Okay. (My husband’s coworker is doing that this weekend.)
I’m with Mitch Hedberg – I’d like to hang out at base camp, but not interested in going any farther.
I can guarantee you that no matter where I end up on the stupid-rich ladder*, I will not step one foot within a 50 mile radius of Mt Everest.
*I will probably not set foot within 50 miles of the stupid rich ladder, but a girl can dream.
TANGENT: If someone called me “a cunning and ugly person” I would probably shrug and take it as a weird compliment.
(I get that this is probably a translation issue and yet, I don’t think I could ever be offended if somebody called me cunning, no matter what followed. You could call me cunning and a tragic misstep in evolution and I’d be all, eh, I’ll take it.)
srsly, they say “cunning and ugly” I see “fuck the patriarchy”
I agree with everything about your stance except hating the mountain. I shall love the noble mountain, even while giving scathing side-eye to the industry that occupies its bold crevasses.
oh yeah “the mountain” = “the industry” here the way sometimes newspapers say “the white house” when they mean “the current american government,” not like, the house itself talking
Splendid.
Metonymy!
The incredible stupidity of the Himalayan mountain-climbing industry was why I hated Three Cups of Tea BEFORE it was unmasked as super-fake. Screw you, Greg Whatever. Screw you.
I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS FAKE. I’m so pleased to learn it was fake.
I have climbed mountains; it takes no especial skill – just stubbornness, mostly. Everest is for poseurs.
I rather like volcanos, myself .
I had to scroll up and make sure you hadn't put those in as secret tags.
Wang Jing seems fun tho
Right?
You know what gets you higher than climbing a mountain? GOING ON LITERALLY ANY PLANE. FLY TO CHICAGO OR SOMETHING. (I forget how high Everest is. It might be higher than a plane. But whatever maybe jump off a swing when you’re at the very top, same rush.)
Sometimes when I fly from Mumbai to Shanghai*, I like to look out the window as we pass far above the tip of Mt. Everest, and wave to the invisible climbers on the summitt far below me, before returning to my glass of shitty wine and my complimentary fun-sized snack bag.
*I have never done this.
Back In the Day, before commercial jets flew higher than Everest (and before things like pressurized cabins), crossing the Himalayas by plane was a big deal. During World War II Allied pilots flying that route nicknamed it “the Hump”! Here’s an awesome newsreel segment from 1945 (‘Burma road in the sky’!): http://www.britishpathe.com/video/over-the-hump-1…
btw my husband climbed the grand teton and then SKIED DOWN IT which is actually pretty metal and didn’t litter anything or cost a fortune
the scariest part of the story for me is that he had to wake up at 1am in order to do it, because i could never do that
look at that manly sumbitch there this was taken in the month of JUNE
hunksband
That’s pretty badass. You are a team of badasses.
It is so ungodly dryly hot in London today, and all I want is to be skiing. Damn you. Damn your manly husband and his nice skis.
This fits in nicely with my better-ways-to-deal-with-mountains plan, which can be summed up as “climb up, slide down.”
I have friends who skin up and ski down the local mountain over and over again until they’ve done the height of Everest. They do it in a 24 hour period, don’t put anyone’s life at risk, and it raises money for charity rather than costing a fortune. They are more hardcore than stupid Everest climbers (also more hardcore than me).
I want a poster of her on top of the mountain for my nonexistent cube, Creed arms into a SEA of haters, she’s fine by me.
“Mallory, would you really be this vocally supportive if it had been, say, an AMERICAN MAN in question?”
And would the rest of the world be so full of vitriol if she weren’t a woman?? I doubt it.
TRUTH.
Agreed! Does anyone remember the book, Into the Thin Air, about an earlier disaster on Mount Everest? Sandy Hill Pitman, an American who was carried up some of the difficult parts of the mountain by sherpas, was vilified in the press while the other men who climbed with her, also relying on assistance of various kinds, were not.
“A Man, whose passion for exploration could not be contained, bravely mounted an expedition to the top of Everest this week, defying both danger and social opprobrium in his quest for adventure.”
Tangentially relevant – I had reason to enjoy the Wikipedia page for Miriam O’Brian Underhill recently. She was an advocate of “manless Alpine climbing” starting in the 1920s. Haven’t made it all the way through this article she wrote about climbing a Mt. Blanc peak, but I’m liking the beginning:
The essence of guideless climbing consists in taking, oneself, the entire responsibility for carrying the climb through to a successful finish. This is a lot of fun, and I saw no reason why this pleasure should be closed to women, although some of my friends among the French men mountaineers tried patiently to explain to me why it was theoretically impossible for a woman to lead a mountain climb, taking the entire responsibility herself without at least masculine “moral support.”
I am an advocate for anything that defines itself as Manless _________.
…I kinda think it’s lame to use a helicopter. Am I a terrible person?
I generally think the Everest obsession is weird and bad and mostly disrespectful (to the Earth, to the dead bodies, to the Sherpas and locals, etc. etc.) but I think if you’re gonna do it, you should DO IT. The helicopter part I find much more distasteful than the timing. It’s a huge mountain that crazy people are obsessed with, there is never going to be a time when someone hasn’t recently died.
That’s my only problem with it too – fine, say “fuck you guys” and take your sherpas and go up the mountain when everyone else canceled, but using a helicopter instead of, you know, actually climbing, is what sets off my EGO EGO EGO sirens. Even more than they get set off by wanting to climb Everest to begin with.
Agree. And it isn’t like she skipped an “easy” part, the Khumbu Icefall is supposed to be terrifying and hard.
“I have also never climbed a mountain and have soft hands; this will not stop me from having opinions about mountaineering on a blog.”
Yes. Let this never stop you from having opinions Mallory.
The happy story of Wang Jing making her millions by sewing tents in her village (if it is true, rather than a founding myth) rather obscures the fact that nobody in China gets rich without being complicit in corruption and the exploitation of workers. Anyone who runs a company in China has powerful connections to the ruling party, and has agreed to play by the rules they impose. It is possible, in theory, that her company observes western standards of environmental awareness and the rights of workers, but many things are theoretically possible.
This is not to disagree with your main point about the Everest Industry, which I agree with wholeheartedly, but the last paragraphs appear to imply that she is somehow a more moral person than everyone else on that mountain, and that is simply not true.
But do you think anyone gets rich anywhere without being complicit in corruption and the exploitation of workers? Global supply chains are sufficiently enmeshed that even if Western companies manage to be good employers within their own countries, they’re probably depending on some dodgy suppliers somewhere along the way.
I mean, Anita Roddick, I guess, but I bet the Body Shops computers aren’t conflict-mineral free.
Is it ever possible to run an ethical business? My answer would be yes-ish. Pay a decent wage, provide benefits, be compassionate to things like illness and family leave, treat your staff like human beings, limit your impact on the environment. It’s not rocket science. II agree that there is something inherently exploitative about the business owner/employee relationship, and in a perfect world we would all work for perfectly collaborative co-ops (been there, did that, have the ptsd from six hour “process meetings” and arguments over whether we should have white sugar in the break room, but I learned a lot about myself and other people, and we produced a damn good newspaper, on deadline, too), but in this world, there are better and worse ways of doing things. Just because one way is not perfect does not mean we should not criticise ways that are worse.
China’s wealth gap is mind-boggling. Even for someone who has lived in Africa for much of my adult life, seeing the difference between even the Chinese middle class and the poorest of people was shocking to me. China’s economy is growing, and people are getting richer, on average, but that is simply a way of obscuring the fact that China is increasingly a kleptocracy. The current anti-corruption drive is seen as a diversion, to allow the ruling faction to remove opposition while being seen to tackle the endemic problems.
Running a business ethically isn’t quite the same as getting rich running a business. But also, I don’t know where you are but if it’s possible to run a business ethically in your country but not possible to do it in China then holding an individual responsible for not doing so in China seems a little harsh.
I worked at the Grand Tetons this summer and I can say with authority that Mountain Shitheads are obnoxious and you will wish you never saw a mountain once they start talking
A few weeks ago I had a slow day at work and I spent the entire day researching various mountaineering disasters on Mt. Everest, K-2, and Mont Blanc, to name a few.
It was awesome.
There’s a scene in Iain M. Bank’s ‘Look to Windward’ where a character is complaining how about some people in the hyper-advanced society of the Culture insist on climbing mountains while others just fly up to have a picnic. The AI he’s talking to just shrugs and says “Well, it’s considered polite to move the [helicopter] out of view so not to spoil the feeling of achievement for the people who climbed it.”
Point is, Wang Jing didn’t take the damn mountain home with her.
I’m pretty sure anyone who gives to charity AND lifts their leg over their head, in public, while sober, can do whatever they darn well want.
I just hate the idea that mountain climbing is “conquering” the mountain. That’s why the Jungfrau in the Alps was called “the virgin,” because it was believed to be impossible to climb. It’s such a… patriarchal way of thinking about nature. The only thing being conqured on a hard climb is yourself.
In a related thought: I love hiking. I love scrambling up rocks and down rocks and over rocks (but not under rocks because I’m not stupid). But it seems like there’s not a lot culturally between being someone who does lazy “wildflower hikes”* aka easy tourist crap, and the mountaineering world where they put holes in the mountain and it can’t be done without safety harnesses.
*which I do love, but I’m doing it because I love flowers not because I think I’m getting an exciting hike in.
I think basically anything that you can do to earn the nickname “Helicopter” seems like a not-all-bad deal. And Helicopter Jing is particularly catchy.
dear anyone reading this article four days late: did you know there’s a comic book about shady shit going down on everest that you might like? allow me to direct you to this comic book, called “High Crimes” by Christopher Sebela (Writer) and Ibrahim Moustafa (Artist), if like me you would rather read about suspect mountain hijinks in graphic novel form than haul your flesh prison outside in even the most mildest conditions.
dear anyone reading this article four days late: did you know there's a comic book about shady shit going down on everest that you might like? allow me to direct you to this comic book, called "High Crimes" by Christopher Sebela (Writer) and Ibrahim Moustafa (Artist), if like me you would rather read about suspect mountain hijinks in graphic novel form than haul your flesh prison outside in even the most mildest conditions.
All mountaineering is risky and its need a lot of courage. I think its not good to compare one with other. Its a matter of pride if anyone can win the Mount Everest.