Notional summits

Getting to the top is sometimes a matter of interpretation ...

In her recently published Imaginary Peaks, Katie Ives finds that much of what we call mountaineering takes place in the head. Taking as her starting point a famous hoax – the faked-up Riesenstein range that appeared in a 1962 edition of a now defunct mountaineering magazine – she pursues this idea illuminatingly through the history of alpinism.

Project Hyakumeizan was particularly taken with the discussion of fact-checking in Chapter 23 – a subject that must be close to Ives's heart in her day job as editor-in-chief of Alpinist magazine. You’d think that, even if mountains themselves are hard to define, summiting them should be easy enough to pin down objectively. After all, what is hard to understand about the highest point?

For the highest summits in the world, the record-keeper was, for decades, the Kathmandu-based journalist Elizabeth Hawley (1923-2018). Such was the authority of her unofficial yet universally respected Himalayan Database that one alpinist declared “It doesn’t matter if you’re Reinhold Messner or Ed Viesturs; your summit never happened unless Elizabeth Hawley says it did.”

Yet, as Ives relates, in mid-2019 an international team of researchers “ascertained that many mountaineers didn’t actually reach the real apex of the mountains they claimed to have climbed”. Often, simply by mistake, they’d stopped instead at lower points that looked like summits.

The problem lies in the ambiguous topography of several eight-thousanders, Ives explains. On Dhaulagiri I, the summit landscape includes a metal pole stuck in the wrong place. Annapurna I’s “immense summit ridge” has numerous bumps, the lowest of which is just 26.8 metres below the tallest. And the uppermost ridge of Manaslu – “Japan’s eight-thousander” – has a right-angled bend that hides the real summit from view. Small wonder that most climbers stop short of that point.

By an exquisite irony, it now appears that Elizabeth Hawley’s successor, Billi Bierling, has fallen victim to just this topographic ambiguity. Bierling has directed the Himalayan Database since 2017, splitting her time between Kathmandu and her native Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which lies beneath what is unarguably Germany’s highest point, the Zugspitze.

Like Hawley, Bierling has a journalistic background. Unlike Hawley, though, she also practises the activities that she monitors. Besides her work with Swiss Humanitarian Aid, she leads treks and climbs big mountains. She is the first German woman to summit and safely descend Everest, and has topped out on eight-thousanders on seven occasions – including two visits to the summit ridge of Manaslu, the second of them without using bottled oxygen.

These climbs came up in an interview with Bierling that recently appeared in the quarterly customer magazine of a mountaineering goods retailer. “You stand on the ridge at Manaslu and have the feeling that you can't go any further. Up there, it's very hard to assess how far the cornice extends. And then you see the drone footage that an Australian climber took last fall, and you see that it does continue, even higher,” she commented.

To the question whether she reached the actual summit, she replied “No. As I can assess it today, both times I was not on the point reached this year by Mingma G and his team.” The Himalayan Database will adjust its parameters accordingly, she added: “Starting in 2022, we will … then accept only the main summit as the summit. In the future, anyone who turns back at the pre-summit will then be will be recorded as ‘pre-summit’.”

On a planet with much bigger problems, does any of this actually matter? Eberhard Jurgalski, who once worked with Hawley and now maintains his own mountain database, thinks that it does. For that reason, he worked with the researchers who highlighted the misleading summit claims on some Himalayan summits. As quoted by Katie Ives, he says that “This is history. Why not tell the truth to people?”. 

And, as Ives herself notes, after the 2016 US presidential election, both climbers and non-climbers have become particularly aware of fabricated stories and the dangers they pose. For as long as they remain so, the reliability of information will continue to concern people. And they will continue to value well-researched resources such as the Himalayan Database as "the reference point”, to borrow Billi Bierling's words.

References

Katie Ives, Imaginary Summits: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams, Mountaineers Books, 2021

“We are the reference point”, interview with Billi Bierling by Stephanie Geiger, published in Inspiration 2-2022, the quarterly mountain magazine published by Bächli Bergsport, Switzerland (German and French language versions)

More to read

Alpinis.com: Researchers challenge historical records for 8000-meter peaks

Annex

“We are the reference point”
Insights from the Inspiration interview with Billi Bierling

Although (or because) mountaineering is a sport without much in the way of governing bodies, mountaineers can be obsessive about records of achievement (first this, fastest that etc). Billi Bierling’s interviewer points to that paradox with an illuminating question: why is the Himalayan Database needed at all? After all, nobody keeps a list of Matterhorn and Eiger ascents…

“Really, there’s no actual need for a database, and that’s why they don’t have one on the Matterhorn or the Eiger,” Bierling admits. But the Database is the only source when it comes to information about mountaineering in Nepal, she points out. It shows, for example, exactly how many people have died descending Annapurna IV.

Above all, it lists first ascents. Expedition organisers can find out if somebody from Uruguay, for example, has ever topped out on Everest (Only one Uruguayan has succeeded, as it happens, and this was as recently as 2019.) The Database also makes it possible to see trends: the success rate on Mount Everest used to be 10 percent; today it's 60 percent.

Unfortunately, another trend – the rise of social media and the possibility of making a living from them – have added to the incentives to cheat. As Bierling remarks: “Some respect for the mountains seems to have gone missing. Everything has become so easy. (…) Books and social media have made the mountains so much more accessible. But no one can turn back this clock. Quite a few people go climbing to build up their profiles.”

This, in turn, increases the pressure on Bierling and her colleagues to verify claims. “Someone once showed me a photo of the summit of Kangchenjunga, but the summit was reflected in the background on his ski goggles. So you could clearly see that he hadn’t been on the top,” she recalls. “A year later, he went back to the mountain and unfortunately died on the summit. This was tragic and I still feel infinitely sorry for him.”