Mount Everest has become such an overcrowded playground that the best way to experience the mountain itself may be to go back in time. Covered in refuse, empty oxygen bottles, even human remains, the peak now sees hundreds of summit attempts each spring, paid by fees of some $50,000 per client. With crowding comes tragedy, such as an avalanche in 2014 that killed 16 Sherpas and an earthquake in 2015 that claimed as many as two dozen climbers. As Jon Krakauer wrote in “Into Thin Air,” his account of a 1996 Everest catastrophe in which eight people died, such losses have become “simply business as usual.”
In “Everest 1922,” the British mountaineering historian Mick Conefrey goes back to the beginning. The book is a nuanced, highly readable chronicle of the first attempt on the summit 100 years ago. It was an age when alpine teams made their own base camps and relied on their own surveying skills to confirm that they had the right peak in front of them. The Himalayas were an unknown frontier, and Mr. Conefrey captures the awe that adventurers felt in their mighty company. After George Mallory, remembered as the party’s most famous member, glimpsed Everest through a break in the clouds, he described “a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world.”
The expedition took place in the aftermath of World War I and in the shadow of journeys to the North and South poles. It was “BAT”—British All Through—launched under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society as well as the Alpine Club. The English flavor was partly a result of the imperial spirit of the day, characterized by a bottomless appetite for conquest. And partly it was a question of access through India, controlled by the British Empire. A key moment in the planning occurred when the Dalai Lama granted permission to travel through Tibet to reach Everest from the north. (Today, despite a new Chinese highway in the area, it is still most often approached from Nepal, in the south.)
