Deaths in the Himalayas expose climbing counter-culture

KATHMANDU—The deaths of four French climbers who crossed illegally from Nepal to China to attempt a 7,200 metre (23,760 foot) summit has thrown the spotlight on a high-risk mountaineering counter-culture.
Every year hundreds of young foreign adventurers circumvent Asian bureaucracy and huge fees to notch up experience in the so-called greater ranges whose spectacular summits have increasingly lured Westerners.
“I object to paying thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. I could never afford it,” said one European climber, who said he has scaled peaks from 7,000 to more than 8,000 metres in Nepal, Pakistan and India and never paid for a permit. “You’ve got rich big-heads clogging up Everest. People at the summit advertising sun tan lotion. It’s an obscene, commercial circus, so I prefer to do it illegally,” he told on condition he not be named as he could be barred from travelling to some of the countries.
A permit to climb Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak at 8,848 metres, currently costs 25,000 dollars per person for the popular South Col route. In the case of the French mountaineers, they bought a cheap permit for a relatively small Himalayan peak in Nepal before flouting international boundaries and hopping over the border to Tibet.
The search was abandoned Thursday after rescuers concluded they died in an avalanche on Ganesh Himal 7, a much higher peak along the border. “The French authorities cannot recover bodies as they are in China,” said Deebas Shah, the general secretary of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
Had the four attempted the mountain legally, it would have cost them thousands of dollars in fees and would have tied them to an official Chinese minder. They would first have needed China’s permission to travel to Tibet, many parts of which are off-limits to foreigners.
“Around 30 percent of climbers in Nepal are doing it illegally,” admitted Shah, whose association issues permits for Nepal’s peaks. “They usually take one permit and then go to another peak because the other mountains are so close by,” he said, adding that last year five groups were caught. “They have to pay a fine of the same amount of the permit they avoided getting. There is no fear of going to jail, we don’t even notify immigration about it,” he acknowledged.
He said the only real deterrent was the risk of being stuck on a mountain with no chance of raising help. But for some climbers, this disregard for safety.—Agencies