VIE EN MONTAGNE PAR/BY MOUNTAIN LIFE - Hiver | Winter 2020

77 T here can be only one highest place on Earth, a distinction for Mount Everest that has been both a source of inspiration and a curse. Rising above the border between Nepal and Tibet, the great mountain stands as a worldwide totem of the ultimate in adventurous possibility. That’s why a wave of humanity sweeps over Everest every year, climbers intent on claiming the cachet of having stood atop the world’ s highest peak. More than 5,000 people have succeeded, almost 900 in 2019 alone. By comparison, K2, the world’s second- highest peak, gets a cold shoulder, with fewer than 400 summiters in the 65 years since the first climbers reached the top. Among mountains, Everest, literally and figuratively, stands alone. The high rate of visitation, of course, has generated widespread complaints of overcrowding and environmental degradation and has spawned the rise of a whole sub-genre of journalism — Everest horror stories. If you want to sell a magazine, nothing piques the public interest like a story about misery and death on Everest. Sixty-one-year-old Bernard Franke of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts admits that, before traveling to Nepal in the fall of 2018, he too was among the many inspired by Everest. But he wasn’t driven by a desire to plant a footprint in the summit snow. He wanted simply to be in the great mountain’s muscular presence. He wanted to see it from various angles and to make a photographic record of its magical aura in precise and vivid detail. What he had in mind was a kind of photographic pas de deux between man and mountain. So, after 15 months of painstaking preparation, including repeated climbs of Mont Tremblant with a heavy pack to ready himself for the rigors of Himalayan trekking, Franke joined a 25-day expedition to the Everest region led by the Montreal-based outfitter Karavaniers. He brought with him high-definition camera gear that would allow him to produce photos of such clarity that every striation of rock and feathery pinion of snow on Everest’s flanks would be revealed. The closest he would come to the summit would be Everest base camp. The route that Franke’s trek would follow to base camp was deliberately indirect. Most of the 35,000 annual base-camp visitors start in the town of Lukla, home to what is possibly the world’s most dangerous airport. They spend two weeks hiking back and forth on a 65-kilometre trail so well-traveled that it is sometimes called “the autoroute.” Franke’s group would instead head north from Lukla to the 5,483 metre crest of Gokyo Ri, bear east toward 5,420 m Chola Pass, then turn southward toward Dughla, where they would join the “autoroute” for the final push to base camp at 5,362 m. From there it would be a straight shot back to Lukla.The longer route would entail several extra days of trekking, but that plan had at least two advantages. It would provide Franke an opportunity to photograph Everest from various vantage points, and it would allow more time to properly acclimatize to the oxygen-starved air above 5,000 m. As Franke notes, helicopters are regularly seen ferrying passengers, stricken by symptoms of pulmonary edema, from base camp to lower elevations for recovery. The primary cause of their illness: insufficient time to acclimatize. Although photography was a principal objective of the trip, the À GAUCHE ET CI-DESSUS / LEFT AND ABOVE Région népalaise entre Kathmandu et Lukla. / Nepal region between Kathmandu and Lukla.