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Returning to the safety of Everest Base Camp, trekking down to meet her team on the 17th of May 2010 make Bonita Norris become the youngest Briton ever to summit the world’s highest peak. The record of Victoria James at this age of 25 has been eclipsed by Bonita (from Berkshire, Great Britain) when she climbed Everest at the age of 22.
In the wake of her achievement, a number of newspapers have focused, rather disrespectfully, upon Bonita’s novice status as a climber, picking up on the remarkable fact that in 2008, she had never before climbed a mountain. Going from unfit to Everest’s summit within two years is quite a feat, but it belies the fact that Bonita had trained and prepared fully for the task.
Ten days prior to her summit bid, and impatient for a propitious gap in the winter weather, Bonita quit Base Camp for a few days, heading down the Everest Base Camp Trek route towards Pangboche.
On her blog she said how, by descending to “thick air,” she “felt like a super charged human” with “rugby player thighs”, demonstrating how well she had acclimatised to the reduced oxygen at altitude.
Training for Everest
There’s no denying that Bonita’s development was remarkably quick between her statement of intent in 2008 and completing her goal. In fitness training, she was clocking some fifty miles per week jogging, as well as participating in “extreme marathon” events. To practise climbing, she began by trekking up Snowdon in wintery conditions, and progressed to learning more technical climbing techniques from experienced mountaineers.
Along the way to Everest, Bonita set a world record for being the youngest woman ever to summit Nepal’s formidable Mount Manaslu (8,163m). Then came the acclimatisation effort, with further training climbs along the route of the famous Everest Base Camp Trek.
Despite Bonita’s diligence, her Everest success coincides with that of 13-year-old Jordan Romero, which has led to suggestions in the media that climbing Everest has become ‘too easy’.
Sagarmatha: Safer and Smarter
There is no avoiding the fact that with addition of climbing lines, extensive Sherpa assistance, weather prediction technology and the services at Everest Base Camp, trekking to the top of the world has become a safer than it once was. But the commentators who imply it is easy are mistaken. No one should come to Mount Everest presuming that success is guaranteed; even in a climbing season such as the one we have just seen in 2010, two mountaineers not only suffered failure but also serious injury while attempting to reach the summit.
There is no belittling the mountain, or the achievements of those who have summited. When Bonita embarked from Everest Base Camp to trek towards the summit, she crossed crevasses, avalanche fields, and made steady progress up the mountain’s storm-buffeted sides. After these difficulties, climbers will reach altitudes in excess of the infamous 8,000 metre mark where the air becomes unspeakably thin.
It Doesn’t Get Any Shorter
Rugby star, Josh Lewsey, another amateur climber hoping to reach the top this season, put things quite succinctly when he commented that Everest “doesn’t get any shorter.”
I think the ‘mountaineering purists’ have been misrepresented in reports. Any dissatisfaction the media has picked up on from veteran climbers is in fact related to Mount Everest’s popularity, rather than the ease of the climb. Contrary to one article that suggested Everest has lost “its lustre as a benchmark of adventure,” the mountaineers are reacting to some recent congestion on the trek up from Everest Base Camp to the summit.
Over the years there has been an increase in the concentration of climbing activity packed into a narrow, busy weather window. The fact that the successful summit bids are condensed into a matter of hours within a season simply shows that “the Goddess of the Sky”, Sagarmatha, doesn’t just let anyone march up and down her whenever they please.