Summit fever is a strange phenomenon, a strong feeling or compulsion that comes over those scaling a difficult or high summit. It makes them act irrationally and make unwise decisions. Sometimes summit fever can result in a loss of lives. Here are some strange tales of summit fever that you may not have heard before.
It isn’t an actual psychological condition, but rather a term used to reference a range of characteristic behaviors that mountaineers display when they are close to the summit. It could be the result of acute desire for the achievement of a set goal, perhaps some amount of oxygen deprivation that results in a dangerous mental state. It blinds climbers to real dangers and leads them to make poor decisions.
It’s a case of something being tantalizingly within reach that blinds one to facts; making that person foolhardy in the extreme. This mental state also sometimes makes a person act out of character so that they sacrifice basic good sense; in many cases even decency, compassion and humanity.
Many climbers encounter a pair of green boots on their way up to the highest summit, Mt Everest. They belong to a dead climber named Tsewang Paljor and have served as kind of macabre milestone for over 20 years. The story goes that Green Boots was left behind by his fellow climbers in their single-minded desire to reach the top. They ignored the distress of Paljor and his climbing partners Tsewang Smanla and Dorje Morup and all three died in one of the most famous cases of Summit Fever. This was the story told in the film Everest.
Peter Hillary, son of Edmund Hillary, also narrates a tale of summit fever that he experienced in an attempt to scale K2, the world’s second highest peak and arguably the most treacherous of mountains. While Hillary and some others of his team decided to turn back because of bad weather, others ploughed on only to perish because of gusty winds. The doomed climbers decided that they would continue no matter what. Their personalities changed, they developed tunnel vision in a sense and became obsessed only with reaching the top recalled Hillary. They decided to continue even with the light fading and the weather deteriorating.
Mountaineers tell other stories of summit fever: such as the man who hid the fact that he was ill from his guide and perished trying to climb Mt Kilimanjaro. Some tell the tale of how they have themselves been in the grip of summit fever; how they have extracted themselves with great difficulty to make the prudent decision only to experience a crushing sense of defeat and regret.
There could be several reasons why people choose not to turn back against their better judgement. They’ve invested a lot of time, effort and resources into the climb and don’t want that to go to waste. They have something to prove to themselves or someone else. They don’t want to experience the sense of failure that they would from turning back. Some climbers perhaps misread the situation and are more optimistic than they should be. Then there were probably those who overestimated their own abilities. Others probably think that they just want to take their chances; that they would get lucky - only to experience acute fear and regret just before life ended precipitously for them.
Do you have something interesting you would like to share? Write to us at [email protected]
