Peaks, perils, and pioneers: the deadly history of mountaineering

Summary

Peaks, Perils, and Pioneers: The Deadly History of Mountaineering

History Extra Podcast
Host: Rachel Dinning
Guest: Daniel Light, Author of White Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering
Release Date: May 13, 2025

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Introduction to Mountaineering's Allure

Timestamp: 02:04

Rachel Dinning opens the episode by posing a fundamental question about human motivation: "What compels people through history to want to climb mountains?" Daniel Light responds by highlighting a blend of personal and practical motivations that have driven mountaineers throughout the ages. He explains that early mountaineering was often tied to religion, science, and exploration before evolving into a sport and pastime.

Quote:
“There are lots of different reasons why people climb mountains, some of them very personal... but there are also some very practical and, to me, very interesting reasons which go back hundreds of years in our history.”
— Daniel Light (02:49)

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The Perils of Mountaineering

Timestamp: 04:28

Dinning seeks to contextualize the inherent dangers of mountaineering. Light elaborates on various threats, from environmental hazards like unstable ground and extreme altitudes to logistical challenges faced by early climbers, such as remote access and unfamiliar terrains.

Quote:
“There are dangers all the way through the process, even before you find yourself high on a thin ridge, running out of daylight.”
— Daniel Light (04:28)

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Defining the Dawn of Mountaineering

Timestamp: 05:52

The discussion shifts to pinpointing the origins of modern mountaineering. Light references ancient practices, including Emperor of China’s mountain climbs and Native American vision quests, but posits that the true spirit of mountaineering emerged with European expeditions in the early 16th century under Hernán Cortés.

Quote:
“What he saw was an opportunity really to impress the locals by sending some of his men up a mountain that they had always resisted going any higher on than they needed to.”
— Daniel Light (06:01)

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Transition to Sport and Hobby

Timestamp: 07:40

Dinning inquires about the shift from mountaineering driven by exploration and necessity to one pursued for sport. Light identifies the mid-19th century’s golden age of alpinism as the pivotal period when mountaineering became a recognized sport, primarily among British upper-middle-class men.

Quote:
“Around the middle of the 19th century, what we would call the golden age of alpinism stands out as the time that mountaineering... emerged as a sport.”
— Daniel Light (07:54)

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Historical Mountaineering Celebrities

Timestamp: 08:37

Addressing the modern fascination with celebrity mountaineers, Dinning asks if historical figures received similar acclaim. Light cites Baron Alexander von Humboldt and Martin Conway as early examples of mountaineers who captivated public interest through their expeditions and writings.

Quote:
“He had come back... feeling like it had been a huge failure that he hadn't succeeded in summiting Chimborazo. But... people were turning out queuing around the block to come and see the man who had gone higher on the backs of mountains than any other.”
— Daniel Light (09:29)

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Unsung Heroes of Mountaineering

Timestamp: 12:34

Light introduces lesser-known mountaineers deserving of recognition. He highlights Oscar Ekenstein and Kabir Buratoki, emphasizing their technical contributions and the often-overlooked roles of indigenous guides.

Quote:
“He was fascinated with the physics of the body, the physical relationship between the body and the rock... he saw where mountaineering was going in so many ways long before others did.”
— Daniel Light (13:05)

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The Role and Treatment of Indigenous Guides

Timestamp: 17:46

Dinning raises an important aspect of mountaineering history: the treatment and recognition of local guides and porters. Light acknowledges their indispensable role but laments the lack of historical records from their perspectives. He mentions individuals like Charlie Bruce and highlights moments where European climbers recognized and esteemed the skills of their indigenous counterparts.

Quote:
“My sense is that actually a lot of these expeditions would have failed... if it wasn't for the local knowledge and instincts of the indigenous expedition members.”
— Daniel Light (17:46)

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Proving Summits: Honor and Evidence

Timestamp: 21:03

The conversation delves into the methods climbers have used to verify their ascents. Light discusses historical practices such as leaving markers and the introduction of photographic evidence, while also touching on contemporary debates questioning the validity of certain claims.

Quote:
“They'd bury something, they'd leave an ice axe, they'd build a cairn, they would do something in order to try and leave some kind of evidence that they had done what they claimed.”
— Daniel Light (21:16)

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Notable Anecdotes: Fanny Bullock Workman

Timestamp: 23:58

Highlighting individual stories, Light recounts Fanny Bullock Workman's impressive but fiercely competitive endeavors. He notes her significant achievements in Himalayan summits and the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field.

Quote:
“For that year, nobody had reached a higher Himalayan summit than she had... she was the first to do it.”
— Daniel Light (24:43)

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Mount Everest: Discovery and Ascents

Timestamp: 26:53

Dinning shifts focus to Mount Everest, exploring its designation as the world’s tallest mountain. Light provides a historical account of Everest’s measurement, the debates over its status, and the cultural implications of its naming. He also traces the early British obsessions with climbing Everest, leading up to the landmark 1953 summit by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Quote:
“Everest Obsessed the British... but nonetheless, Everest is the mountain that has captured the world's imagination.”
— Daniel Light (27:22)

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Beyond Everest: A Call for Diverse Alpine Pursuits

Timestamp: 30:01

Concluding the discussion, Light reflects on the contemporary obsession with Everest, advocating for climbers to explore and appreciate the myriad other formidable peaks within the Himalayas. He suggests that embracing diverse mountaineering experiences can lead to more personal and meaningful achievements.

Quote:
“There's an absurdity to it when I think about how many other incredible mountains there are... you could have the mountain to yourself.”
— Daniel Light (34:49)

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Conclusion

Daniel Light wraps up the conversation by emphasizing the rich and complex history of mountaineering, acknowledging both its triumphs and tragedies. He invites listeners to delve deeper into his work for a comprehensive understanding of mountaineering’s evolution.

Closing Remarks:
“You can find out more about his work @daniellight.co.uk. Thanks for listening.”
— Daniel Light (34:49)

---

This episode of the History Extra Podcast offers a comprehensive exploration of mountaineering’s perilous history, the motivations driving climbers, the often-overlooked contributions of indigenous guides, and the enduring legacy of iconic peaks like Mount Everest. Through engaging dialogue and insightful anecdotes, Daniel Light sheds light on the human spirit's quest to conquer the world's highest summits.

Transcript

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[Daniel Light]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. What has prompted humans throughout history to risk life and limb to conquer some of the world's highest mountains? In this episode, we're joined by climber Dan Light, the author of the White Triumph and Tragedy at the dawn of Mountaineering. He's here to discuss the fascinating and deadly history of mountain climbing. Dan caught up with Rachel Dinning to discuss the evolution of mountaineering as a sport and the stories of the individuals who risked everything to make it to the top of nature's most formidable peaks.

[Rachel Dinning]

My first question to you, a question that's at the core of your book, and you open the book with it, is what compels people through history to want to climb mountains.

[Daniel Light]

There are lots of different reasons why people climb mountains, some of them very personal. I think for everyone, there's something personal about the decision to go out and put yourself in harm's way, take on the challenge of a particular ascent. But there are also some very practical and, to me, very interesting reasons which go back hundreds of years in our history. And it was that that sort of pulled me back into the era that I ended up writing about, as the title says, the dawn of mountaineering. A time when people were climbing mountains in the name of religion, in the name of science, and that then gradually evolved into climbing and mountaineering as a pastime and a pursuit.

[Rachel Dinning]

Absolutely. We'll get into some of the individual different stories and different motivations a bit more later. I thought it might be useful as well, just as we start this podcast, to put into context just how difficult and dangerous mountaineering is, because I know before I learned more about it, I had a loose concept. People, you know, they go up Everest, they do these crazy endeavors, But I don't think I fully had a concept of just what mountaineering entails, and perhaps some of our listeners won't either. So could you explain a bit about how dangerous it is and the practicalities of mountaineering?

[Daniel Light]

Well, I think there are dangers in many different forms. Some of them are probably more obvious from the pictures people might have seen of climbers waiting to summit Everest. You know, standing on ridges where the ground is very steep, very unstable, at an altitude where they're getting a fraction of the oxygen that they would be accustomed to at sea level and are suffering all that sort of adverse physical effects of that, that anyone ought to be able to look at that and see for themselves some of the dangers that implies. But there are other dangers, and certainly going back to the 19th century and the era that I was interested in, those dangers started pretty early in the process. The mountains I write, mainly the Himalayas, but also some in South America, were very remote, very difficult to reach. Involved journeys through country where westerns Europeans would be dealing with all kinds of animals, diseases, sort of local challenges that they'd be completely unaccustomed to even before they got onto the slopes of a mountain, where they would then be dealing with glaciers, crevasses, conditions that were totally unfamiliar to them. So, yes, I think there are dangers all the way through the process, even before you find yourself high on a thin ridge, running out of daylight.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, your book's called Triumph and Tragedy at the dawn of Mountaineering. But what is the dawn? Where does the story of mountaineering begin?

[Daniel Light]

So that's a great question, and again, one that I had to answer for myself. The earliest account I could find is of an emperor of China climbing a Mountain about 4,000 years ago. I found examples of Native American tribes who would send young warriors to climb mountains. They would send them on what they called vision quests to commune with their ancestral spirits. And a warrior's worth might be judged based on how high on a mountain he climbed. And at around the same time, this is 12th century, there were Buddhist monks in Japan who were climbing as an act of ritual worship. But for me, the moment I first saw what I understand as mountaineering and the spirit of mountaineering as we know it today, was men in the army of Don Hernan Cortez, who, when he was crossing Aztec Mexico around the beginning of the 16th century, he and his armies came within sight of a volcano. And one of his captains asked Lee from Cortes to climb it, which Cortes agreed to because one of the things he'd done very successfully was in that campaign was to gain the allegiance of the different tribes, local tribes, and then to turn them against one another. So what he saw was an opportunity really to impress the locals by sending some of his men up a mountain that they had always resisted going any higher on than they needed to. And that cavalier spirit that was running through that expedition, that felt to me like the natural starting point for the story.

[Rachel Dinning]

And when would you say that we really started climbing mountains simply for the pleasure or the hobby of it? Obviously the scientific, geographic reasons or religious reasons, but the pure sport of it. When did that sort of thing begin?

[Daniel Light]

So after Cortez, there are some interesting examples of scientists who clearly had that competitive sort of zeal, and also soldiers, surveyors who were tasked with climbing the mountains for geographical imperatives. But it feels to me as though around the middle of the 19th century, what we would call the golden age of alpinism stands out as the time that mountaineering or alpinism, you know, as we also know it, emerged as a sport. People, predominantly British, sort of upper middle class men, really honed in on the idea of climbing for sort of sporting merit and as a hobby or a pastime.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, I wanted to talk about notable mountaineers specifically. I feel like in the past 20 years or so, we've had so many climbing documentaries and mountaineering documentaries come out, and there's been a real public interest in stories about climbers. So we've got things like the 2021 documentary the Alpinist about Marc Andre Leclerc. And then in the climbing world people at home listening might know about Alex Honnold. He's not necessarily a mountaineer but free soloing El Capitan in Yosemite but basically like the sort of a celebrity cultural interest now in these extreme sporting endeavors. Was there a similar thing historically? Sort of the celebrity mountaineer who would come back and be celebrated back home and if so, who was that?

[Daniel Light]

That's a great question and I can think of two or three examples certainly one, a very early one, is a man called Baron Alexander von Humboldt who was a naturalist, an aristocrat who made a five year expedition to Latin America around the turn of the 19th century. He While he was there made an attempt to climb a mountain called Chimborazo in Ecuador, had a really good go at it and didn't make it to the top and came back to Europe after the expedition feeling like it had been a huge failure that he hadn't succeeded in summiting Chimborazo. But when he came back and started to give talks and lectures around Europe, he'd been there for five years, he'd done an amazing body of sort of scientific research but he found that people were turning out queuing around the block to come and see the man who had gone higher on the backs of mountains than any other. He had come back having claimed a world altitude record and people were responding to that. It was a box office hit. So already then we can see people coming out and buying a ticket and sitting rap listening to someone describe that sort of climbing mountaineering experience. Another figure who comes to mind for me is a man called Martin Conway who led a hugely influential expedition to the Himalaya in 1892 with a really significant group of fellow expedition members, each of whom went on to have very interesting sort of climbing careers and stories of their own. Conway though, if he was a visionary, he was a visionary self publicist. What he achieved on that expedition in pure climbing terms didn't really set him sort of apart, particularly from others who'd gone before and would come after. But what he was brilliant at was spinning that into the story that people wanted to hear. So he came back, he was a strong writer, so he wrote a book that really caught people's imaginations. He was happy to report the sort of upward end of his estimate for how high he had climbed. Be a little sort of generous to himself in that respect. To exaggerate I suppose is what I'm saying his accomplishments and people were happy to go with that. One of the things about climbing mountains is there were relatively few people around to say whether you did what you claim or not. So, yes, Conway definitely knew that there was a sort of public interest and appetite and he really milked that. But then there were some people who were much more sort of reticent about promoting themselves in that way. There's a climber called Dr. Tom Longstaff who did some extraordinary things in the Himalaya and wrote a wonderful book, but didn't really make a big song and dance about himself and what he'd done. I definitely like, I appreciate the Longstaffs, people who were happy knowing what they'd done and letting the world sort of find out in their own way.

[Rachel Dinning]

Well, on that note, so I imagine a lot of our listeners at home, if they're unfamiliar with mountaineering, would at least know, you know, Edmund Hillary Tensing Norgate, the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Most people know that story, but your book covers so many more than that. It does cover that one, but so much more beyond that. You've got figures from varying from like Incan priests. You've got Victorian adventurers for you. Who's a lesser known mountaineer whose story is really worth telling the world about.

[Daniel Light]

So there's one that sticks out for me in terms of unsung heroes. A man named Oscar Ekenstein, who was with conway on the 1892 expedition until the two of them fell out and Ekenstein made his own way back to in Inverted speech marks civilization. But Ekenstein went back to the Himalaya 10 years later at the head of an expedition of his own, one that included his young friend and Alpine apprentice, Aleister Crowley. The occultist much better known today for his interest in the dark arts. But Crowley was a very enthusiastic and able young mountaineer. Anyway, he and Ekenstein were at the forefront of that expedition in 1902. Ekenstein was this really intriguing character. He was a railway engineer by profession, which is interesting in itself in that it was the railways that brought mountains within reach of climbers in the UK and brought the Alps within reach of the British around the middle of the 19th century. So Ekenstein was involved in actually laying down some of the fabric of what made the sport develop in the way that it did. He also brought that engineering mind to the instruments of climbing. He made changes to the designs of ice axes, climbing irons, or crampons, as they're known today. And the changes he made are still in evidence in the design of when we see those items as they exist today. And he was fascinated with the physics of the body, the physical relationship between the body and the rock. In climbing, he had a very sort of technical view of that. Now, he was also very opinionated, very dogmatic. You know, he could be extremely disagreeable. He would have been a difficult person to be on a mountain with or to be on an expedition with for that reason. But he was a visionary. He saw where mountaineering was going in so many ways long before others did. And even though his expedition in 1902 was a bit of a disaster, it was hamstrung by terrible weather and it was culminated with Crowley pulling a gun on his tent mate at 20,000ft. The way he ran that expedition, the system he came up with for managing the porters and making sure all the loads arrived, the network of camps, he created this sort of supply line running deep into the heart of the mountains. Even at that level, he was thinking decades ahead in terms of how he was doing that siege mentality in terms of trying to climb K2, which second highest mountain on Earth. And they were the first expedition to have a serious crack at it. So, yeah, I've loved meeting him and getting to know him and Crowley, although he's a difficult character and I was really happy for the book to just bring him more into prominence than I think he would be otherwise.

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[Daniel Light]

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[Rachel Dinning]

Yeah, great choice. And something you mentioned there was that they were often relying on guides or porters, and we haven't really talked about about those people yet. And obviously a lot of mountaineers, especially from the Victorian age, were these wealthy Westerners who had quite a lot of money or resource to go out and do these expeditions and things like that. But what about the people who were local to these mountains who often served as guides or porters? What's their story in the history of mountaineering?

[Daniel Light]

They were very badly treated in most cases. This immediately brings up maybe the biggest challenge for me of writing this book, which is that their stories have largely been lost. Most of the source material I had to work with was the accounts of the white European members of the different expeditions. But based on the information available, it's clear that, yeah, it was hard. And in most cases, the European members of the expedition, those who were ostensibly leading it, were very unsympathetic in the way that they treated the indigenous people. However, you know, there are some promising moments and signs and individuals along the way who were willing to challenge assumptions about the supposed superiority of the European members of the expeditions and brought a greater measure of equanimity to their handling of the indigenous people on whom they completely relied. I think that's one of the. My sense is that actually a lot of these expeditions would have failed and founded completely if it wasn't for the local knowledge and instincts of the indigenous expedition members. But it's hard to demonstrate that when the account that you're reading is written by the Europeans. There was one thing I was very happy to find. It's actually Ekenstein writing about he and a man called Charlie Bruce and some local men crossing a pass called the Nushik La. And Ekenstein describes seeing the local men crossing a particularly treacherous piece of mountainside. And he describes observing them using climbing techniques of their own. That's the only example I found, really, where a European describes seeing those sort of local to the Himalaya using technique in that way. And it was. It was great to find that. I think another figure that came through for me is a man called Kabir Buratoki, a Gurkha who had an amazing climbing career, really. He was on the Conway expedition. He was with Longstaff on a mountain. He really distinguished himself as a climber and he's been, as far as I can tell, forgotten to history. Everything I found out about him came from primary sources. I'm not really aware that he's been written about at all otherwise. But actually, when you look at what he accomplished as an indigenous member of these expeditions, he should be more famous to us in the sort of pantheon of Himalayan mountaineers. He especially now that we are finally starting to reconsider our view of Himalaya mountaineering and reconfigure it to allow for the fact that actually the Himalaya has produced plenty of its own great mountaineers. It has not relied on Europe to import them in quite the way that people might have thought in the past.

[Rachel Dinning]

One thing I'm fascinated about is how do you prove when you've gone up a mountain that you've actually, you've summited it? How did they prove that people had done the things that they were coming back and saying?

[Daniel Light]

That's. Yeah, it's a good question. That sort of changes as the book plays out. In the case of the men in the army of Cortez, they came back with sulfur, which Cortes was delighted about because he was running out of gunpowder and suddenly realized they might actually be able to manufacture some for themselves. And they claimed that they got that from the crater of the volcano, which sort of implied that they'd gone to the top and into the crater. But actually, someone pointed out later on that they could quite conceivably have collected that lower down. So it wasn't quite the smoking gun that they thought it was moving forward. You know, there was a long period where it was a question of honor, really. If someone came down claiming that that's what they'd done and people chose to believe them, there were instruments that they could use to measure the altitude they'd reached. But ultimately, the great thing about a summit is, you know, it's there. You've either reached it or you haven't. Now, by the early 20th century, cameras had come into the equation. And so there are some ascents that I write about where we have the pictures to prove it. And that ought to have sort of closed the book on it. But even today, Abby and I talked about Uli Steck. Even today, there are people who question whether he achieved things that he claimed to have achieved, you know, 10, 15 years ago. I think they're one of the members of the Annapurna expedition, the first summiting of an 8,000 meter Mountain Maurice expedition in, I think, 1852. Even that there's been a book written, questioning whether they reach the summit, which is sort of, you know, sacrilege, really, to suggest that that didn't happen. In climbing law, I think there are probably examples where climbers thought they'd reached the summit of a mountain themselves and they hadn't, because it can be quite an ambiguous environment to be operating in. So it's far from simple or straightforward. One thing that I would say is there's a climber, William Graham, who claimed to have reached near enough the summit of a Mountain in 1883, 1884, years before anyone had gone. This was 24,000ft, years before anyone else would claim to have gone that high. He said he'd buried a bottle up there, which has never, as I assume, certainly not as far as I'm aware, been found. But often people would. They'd bury something, they'd leave an ice axe, they'd build a cairn, they would do something in order to try and leave some kind of evidence that they had done what they claimed.

[Rachel Dinning]

Sure. I like to think you mentioned the honour thing. I imagine the types of personalities who are going on these expeditions, they're not the kind of person who wants to claim that they've done something if they haven't. They're the person who wants to do it next time if they've not done it the first time. And again, as you said, some of them might have believed they'd reached a certain point. Fanny Bullock Workman, she made me laugh in your book when she spent $13,000. Now, this is back in the 19th century, so that's a huge amount of money today. But even more so then she spent $13,000 to prove that her rival, Annie Smith Peck, hadn't achieved a certain record. I thought that was an amazing anecdote.

[Daniel Light]

Yeah. No, I mean, they had a fierce rivalry, but not actually that competitive A1 in the sense that Fanny Bullet Workman, almost as soon as she arrived in the Himalaya, was setting women's altitude records and climbing mountains that would be out of reach of Annie Smith Peck, more or less, until she too, went out to India, which I'm not sure she ever did. She did her climbing in Mexico. But Fanny Billet Workman just sort of left the other women mountaineers of her day for dead in terms of the heights that she reached, climbing, often in some really treacherous circumstances, from my reading of it. And I was really. I was delighted to realize, based on everything that I've read and all the research that I've done, that for a year she held the Himalayan Summit record. So there was a period of a year from 1906 to 1907, when, based on everything I've read and all the disputed climbs and all the contentious claims that there are, but for that year, nobody had reached a higher Himalayan summit than she had. And because she was with two guides when she did it, two Italian guides, but they stopped and formed a guard of honor to allow her, their client, to be the first to the top. You know, the record is hers. She was the first to do it. The fact that they arrived there a minute or two later is sort of immaterial. And I think she, she deserved that record. She worked incredibly hard to reach the heights that she did. At the same time, you know, she was a very strong, as you'd expect, very strong, opinionated individual. And she had to argue that her way to the top of some mountains, whether it was with their indigenous guides and porters or the European guides that they had with them. And I think as a woman at the time, that would have meant that she faced a whole plethora of other challenges on a day to day basis leading these expeditions. So I think that makes her achievement even more striking.

[Rachel Dinning]

We're getting towards the end of the podcast now, and I did want to talk about Mount Everest specifically, or. Well, actually, I think we should call it Everest, if we were going to pronounce it the way, because it's named for George Everest, and I think that's how he pronounced his surname, or it's obviously got its Tibetan name, Chomo Lungma. So perhaps you could talk me through how it was discovered that Everest was the tallest mountain, the tallest point above sea level.

[Daniel Light]

I might sort of butcher the date slightly on this, but it goes back to the Survey of India. It was an Indian surveyor who had brought the measurements back to the offices of the surveyor vendor in Calcutta, I think. So they then had to distill down the measurements, make the calculations. And the Surveyor General at the time, I'm gonna say, was a man called Andrew Waugh, George Everest's successor. And he did the calculations and concluded that, yes, they had discovered the highest mountain on Earth. However, based on his calculations, it was exactly 29,000ft. So he got this measurement of 29,000ft and knew that if he published that as the height of the mountain, everybody would assume that he had rounded it off. So the height he gave was 29,002ft, just to avoid that which has led to him being called the first man to put two feet on top of the highest mountain in the world. But There was still, again, it wasn't cut and dried. There was a lot of contested claims around the world's highest mountain. You know, before that it was K2. Before that it was a mountain called Kanchinjunga. For a time, Chimborazo in Ecuador was thought to be the highest mountain on Earth and arguably still is in the sense that owing to equatorial bulge, the top of Chimborazo is the furthest point on the Earth's surface from its center. So, you know, there will be those, maybe some of them in Ecuador who will probably still claim that. And Everest, as you rightly pronounce, he wasn't all too enamored with the idea of a mountain being named after him. From what we know, he really wasn't sort of sure of whether that was appropriate or not and was much more aligned with using local names where they could be found. But I think, you know, that naming of mountains was a part of the sort of wider colonial mindset, and people like Martin Conway would go to very little trouble to find out a local name before they started dishing out names of their own. It was part of that sort of act of appropriating the landscape for the British.

[Rachel Dinning]

And then, can you tell me a bit more about the quest to summit Everest from early attempts through to, obviously, the successful attempt in 1953? The first successful attempt.

[Daniel Light]

Well, the first time the idea of attempting Everest was discussed was back, I believe, in 1893 by a young army officer called Charlie Bruce and a man called Francis Young Husband. They were standing on a polo field in a place called Chitral, and they were within sight of the mountain and they had a conversation where they talked about how one even might go about trying to climb it. But at the time it was still inaccessible to the British. It was deep inside Nepal, a kingdom that was closed off to foreigners, the British in particular. So whilst the British had designs on it and it was intermittently talked about whether it would be possible to get permission even to approach, wasn't until the expeditions of the 1920s that the way was cleared and it actually, it was possible to mount what ended up being three expeditions in 21, 22 and 24. I sort of knew with a book that I didn't want to write about those expeditions in any great detail. So much has been written about Mallory, George Mallory in particular, who's this talismanic figure in the history of British mountaineering and, you know, including one wonderful book that I want to name check, which is called into the Silence by Wade Davis. You know, anyone with an interest in those expeditions, I think can do, can do much worse than to go and get stuck into that. One of the last figures I write about is a man called Alec Kelas, who was this very influential figure in Himalayan mountaineering and who was the first man to die attempting Everest in the sense that he passed away on the way to the mountain in 1921. So yes, that obsession with Everest really begins in the twenties with the Mallory expeditions, as we call them. There are also three expeditions in the 30s, British expeditions that are much less well known. And the key figure in those was a man called Frank Smyth, who is a wonderful writer, someone who really inspired me to start writing about mountain history and was also a great mountaineering, someone who should be better known. You know, if he died on one of those expeditions, I think we'd remember him in the same sort of breath as Malory. But thankfully he didn't. But that sort of brings us Forward to the 50s. You know, the British did develop this fixation with Everest and it's interesting the way that happened because for the Germans it was a mountain called Nangapaba that they became obsessed with. For the Italians it was K2 different sort of European countries seem to sort of settle on particular mountains in the Himalaya and link their national identities to them. And it's a theme later in the book of how mountain climbing became this sort of exercise in national identity and the assertion of sort of national pride. But yeah, Everest obsessed the British. We very nearly got beaten to the summit by the Swiss who got very close the year before. Hillary and Tenzing. And it's worth pointing out Hillary, you know, a New Zealander, Tenzing, Norgay, Sherpa, Nepalese, you know, but it was a British run expedition, so I think the British were pretty quick to claim it. But yes, it's as I say, there is so much written about Everest and those expeditions. And I guess one of the things that I realized writing this book, you know, while I was writing it, I talked about those pictures earlier of queues on the summit of Everest, you know, over recent summers, I was seeing those pictures and then at the same time I was reading about all these other mountains, all these other amazing mountains in the biggest sort of greatest mountain range on earth. It just seemed absurd to me that I understand, you know, it's the biggest. I understand why for some people only Everest will do, but I can't really relate to that myself personally. And there's an absurdity to it when I think about how many other incredible mountains There are, you know, in that range alone, mountains that present every bit the challenge of climbing Everest, some of them more dangerous, and mountains where on any day of the year, if you were standing at the summit, you would have, you know, hundreds of square miles in any direction, not necessarily to yourself, but you certainly wouldn't have someone there telling you to hurry up so that they could have their summit moment as well. You could have the mountain to yourself. So I guess my hope for Everest is that maybe in years to come, people will start to look beyond it and think a bit more individually and maybe a bit more creatively about how they want to to answer whatever personal need it is that is compelling them to set their sights on that particular summit.

That was Daniel Light speaking to Rachel Dinning. Daniel is a climber and the author of the White Triumph and Tragedy at the dawn of Mountaineering. You can find out more about his [e-mail]. thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.