Everest is a challenge, but the bigger challenge would be to climb it and not tell anybody," says Billi
Bierling, a Kathmandu-based journalist and climber and personal assistant for Elizabeth Hawley, a
former journalist, now 91, who has been chronicling Himalayan expeditions since the 1960s.
But few would actually admit that they climb Everest only so they can boast about it later. Instead,
Everest tends to assume a symbolic importance for those who set their sights on it, who often
articulate the reason in terms of transformation, triumph over personal obstacles or the crown
jewel in a bucket list of lifelong goals. "Everyone has a different motivation," Bierling says.
"Someone wants to spread the ashes of their dead husband, another does it for their mother,
others want to kill a personal demon. In some cases, it's just ego. In fact you have to have a certain
amount of ego to get up the damn thing."
As for professional climbers, whose love of mountaineering extends well beyond Everest,
psychologists have tried to weed their motivations out for decades. Some concluded that high-risk
athletes – mountaineers included – are sensation-seekers who thrive off thrill. Yet think for a
moment about what climbing a mountain like Everest entails – weeks spent at various camps,
allowing the body to adapt to altitude; inching up the mountain, step-by-step; using sheer
willpower to push through unrelenting discomfort and exhaustion – and this explanation makes
less sense. High altitude climbing, in fact, is a slog. As Matthew Barlow, a postdoctoral researcher
in sports psychology at Bangor University, Wales, puts it: "Climbing something like Everest is
boring, toilsome and about as far from an adrenaline rush as you can get."
A climber himself, Barlow suspected that sensation-seeking theory has long been misapplied to
mountaineers. His research suggests that, compared to other athletes, mountaineers tend to
possess an exaggerated "expectancy of agency". In other words, they crave a feeling of control over
their lives. Because the complexities of modern life defy such control, they are forced to seek it
elsewhere. As Barlow explains: "To demonstrate that I have influence over my life, I might go into
an environment that is incredibly difficult to control – like the high mountains."
Flirting with mortality, in other words, is part of the appeal. "If you can escape death or dodge fatal
accidents, it allows you the illusion of heroism, even though I don't think it's truly heroic," says
David Roberts, a mountaineer, journalist and author based in Massachusetts. "It's not like playing
poker where the worst that could happen is you lose some money. The stakes are ultimate ones."
Barlow and colleagues also found that mountaineers believe that they struggle emotionally,
especially when it came to loving partner relationships. They may compensate for this by becoming
experts at dealing with emotions in another, more straightforwardly terrifying realm. "The
emotional anxiety of everyday life is confusing, ambiguous and diffuse, and you don't know the
source of it," Barlow says. "In the mountains, the emotion is fear, and the source is clear: if I fall, I
die." In her decades interviewing mountaineers, Hawley, too, has noticed this tendency. "In some
cases, climbers just want to get away from home and responsibilities," she says. "Let the mother
take care of the son that's sick, or deal with little Johnny who got in trouble at school."
Many of the climbers Barlow and his colleagues included in their study – especially professional
ones – also exhibited what psychologists refer to as counterphobia. Rather than avoid the things
they fear, they feel compelled to face-off with those elements. "It's a misnomer that climbers are
fearless," Barlow says. "Instead, as a climber, I know I will be afraid, but the key bit is that I
approach that fear and try to overcome it."
Like a junkie who's got his fix, mountaineers usually report a transfer effect from their experience
– a feeling of satiation immediately after returning from a peak. "For me, coming back from a
climb physically exhausted but mentally relaxed is the dream," says Mark Jenkins, a journalist,
author and adventurer in Wyoming. To continue to sate that desire, mountaineers thus set their