Extraordinary places often come with their own extraordinary emotions.
So it is with the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, the setting for what has become known as summit fever.
The path to the peak of Mount Everest is frequently crowded with climbers to the point of making the ascent unsafe, even beyond the usual risks. In spite of the danger, almost none of the climbers turn back. They cram together in a desperate line, shuffling forward inch by inch as they wait for their own turn to walk up the last hundred feet to the peak, look around for a moment, and then march back down, hoping that they won’t be one of the unlucky ones to die on the way.
They’ve been advised that the conditions aren’t right, but they push on anyway. It’s just not worth it, they think, to come all the way to Mount Everest only to stop short of the very top. Nothing else will do. They become so attached to the idea of reaching the peak that anything less than that feels like a complete failure to them. Rational judgment leaves them. Even when deadly conditions are made plain to them, they ignore the facts, and push on without care for the consequences.
There is no literal fever to summit fever. It’s a cold place to be, after all, on the top of a tall mountain. Nonetheless, the feeling makes climbers’ thoughts feverish, hotly seeking out opportunities to gain new heights in spite of the danger. Those with summit fever make decisions that are plainly unreasonable, such as walking into a raging storm, climbing higher in spite of a low oxygen supply, or making a dash for the peak even when there is no time left to make a descent before night falls.
If the same unsafe conditions were present at a spot lower down the mountain, climbers would wait, or turn back. Something about having the summit within view, however, leads them to suspend their caution. They’ve become invested in making it all the way, as if nothing in the climb but reaching the very top of the mountain matters. However, it shouldn’t be surprising that the propensity to dismiss danger emerges upon the final approach to the mountaintop. There is something reckless from the very beginning in those who abandon their everyday lives to seek out rocky and remote mountains to climb.
Could oxygen deprivation at the high altitude contribute to these climbers’ lack of restraint? Physical exhaustion probably doesn’t help, but summit fever is primarily an emotional problem, rather than a physiological one. It comes from an excessive attachment to concrete measures of peak success, a quantified self with unyielding metrics that demand impulsive choices. These climbers embody a binary division between success and failure so stark that even when they make it 99 percent of the way to their goal before being forced to turn back by life-threatening conditions, they feel like failures.
When achievement is all or nothing at all, there is no choice left but to push forward, even into death.
