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A Couples Guide To Getting Married On Mount Everest…And Surviving

After a three-week trek, the California-based couple James Sissom (35) and Ashley Schmieder (32) eloped. On its own, that sentence does not seem interesting enough to be worth publishing. Marriage, while a significant step for any couple, is not news-worthy event in most circumstances. Even when the biggest hullabaloos are made — such as royal or presidential weddings — the fanfare relates only to the titles of the parties involved, not the intrinsic significance of the ceremony.

But Sissom and Schmieder aspired to such significance, not because their wedding vows are more special than anyone else’s, but because they wanted to be the rare couple to get married at the high altitude Base Camp of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. It’s undoubtedly small club whose members can claim having their nuptials at 17,600 feet, and with their 2017 wedding Sissom and Schmieder joined it. (One Nepalese couple can even claim the ultra-exclusive honor of having been married on the summit.) Of course, they had to put up with a challenging climb and air so thin the uninitiated usually give up before trekking any higher, but based on the stately and gorgeous wedding photography taken by Charleton Churchill, it was all worth it, for them.

More than any other natural landmark in the world, Mount Everest inspires people from around the globe to push their limits. At an unsurpassed 29,029 feet, the peak draws climbers in droves, all of whom put up with some of the most brutal weather and land conditions to simply try to reach the summit of the mountain. Storms move in an out quickly, often unpredictably. The more one pushes into the upper levels of the mountain, the thinner the air gets, making breathing — absent heavy oxygen apparatuses — near impossible. The snow coat of Everest can cause snow blindness if one looks too long into the reflective white radiating the sun’s light. With every step toward the summit, it becomes increasingly clear to any climber that, except for those native to the mountain and some truly talented and unwaveringly adventurous mountaineers, Everest is, past a certain point, not for human life.

Sissom and Schmieder represent a unique kind of Western tourism that flocks to Everest each year, seeking liberation or triumph on the mountain. But they also raise a question that’s brought about any time one looks at the trail of bodies that now litter the slopes of Everest: just how much risk is worth it to experience this mountain? When will the implicit message being sent by the mountain — “Few should tread here” — be heeded? Sissom and Schmieder may have only gone as high as Base Camp, 12,000 feet below the summit, but even that height poses challenges. Base Camp’s 17,600 foot elevation puts it well above most US peaks, save for Denali and Mt. Saint Elias in Alaska. And while all ended up well for Sissom and Schmieder, the wedding nearly didn’t happen when Sissom began experiencing the symptoms of altitude sickness, magnified by his asthma. His fate, while unfortunate, pales in comparison to the worst fates suffered by those overpowered by the mountain.

The high-elevation union of Sissom and Schmieder will amount to little more than a headline for those who don’t know the couple. “Did you hear about that couple who got married on Mount Everest?” you’ll most likely hear amidst bristlings of bar banter. Yet this one marriage also serves as synecdoche for how much of the Western world experiences Everest: a site for exploration, difficulty, and self-fulfillment. It is enough, for many, to know that the mountain is high and can be bested. But the punishing weather and paper-thin air past Base Camp, where Sissom and Schmieder tied the not, communicates to Western tourists that the existence of a summit does not demand a climber. Death tolls on Everest have dropped some in recent years; experienced climber Alan Arnette calculates that in 2016 five people died during the climbing season, in contrast to the eight deaths per year average beginning in 2002. Nevertheless, a view from the top is never guaranteed, and in the bluster that enfolds Everest life is never certain. Getting married on Everest, even at Base Camp, requires a lot of know-how about the science of the human body and its limits.

Everest: The Basic Facts
LocationMountain RangeElevationWeatherNotable SummitsDeath Rate
The summit of Mount Everest exists on the partition between the Tibetan Autonomous Region, currently controlled by China, and Nepal. As such, expeditions aiming for the top of the mountain either begin on the Chinese or Nepalese side. Currently, Chinese permits to climb Everest run slightly cheaper than Nepal’s.
Mahalangur range of the Himalayas
29,029 feet/8,848 meters
As any picture of Everest climbers will make clear, it gets cold on this permanently snow-covered mountain. The cold bites harder the more one trudges up the mountain. Storms are frequent, and if one finds herself about to walk into one on the upper slopes of the mountain, she must turn around lest she risk death.
First Recorded Summit: Sir Edmund Hillary (New Zealand) and Tenzing Norgay (Nepal), 1953
First Solo Summit: Reinhold Messner (Italy), also without supplemental oxygen, 1980
First Summit without Supplemental Oxygen: Reinhold Messner (Italy) and Peter Habeler (Austria), 1978
Youngest Person to Summit: Malavath Purna (India), age 13, 2014; Jordan Romero (USA), age 13, 2010
Oldest Person to Summit: Yuichiro Miura, age 80, 2013
According to Jon Krakauer, who summited Everest in 1996 along with a team that suffered four casualties as a result of that year’s Everest storm disaster, between 1921 and 1996 there was one death for every four successful trips to the top; since then, that ratio has become safer, with one death for every six summits.

First, a qualifier. Amazingly, even in the face of the obstacles inherent to Everest and the tourist overcrowding of the mountain in recent decades, most people who take to Everest reach the top. Climbing numbers will occasionally dip when severe storms make it impossible even for the most ardent mountaineers to best the circumstances. Zero summits were made in 2015 due to a severe earthquake — nearly an 8 on the Richter scale — an issue that also marred the 2014 climbing season. One woman did climb from the Nepalese side after the 2014 closure, but she did so by using a helicopter to skip over the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, a move that has many questioning whether or not she properly summited at all.

However, following two years of low to nonexistent climbing, officials in Nepal and China extended the permits for those climbers who purchased permits in 2014-15 only to find the mountain shut down. Everest, as ever, remains a hot ticket.

Another qualification that should be made prior to detailing all the medical risk that goes in to climbing Everest has to do with that “hot ticket.” Anyone who has set foot in an REI knows that sporting equipment is not cheap; unless you’re fashioning your own tools and gear, you’ll pay millions of pretty pennies before you set foot on any mountain you hope to climb. Everest, being the most desirous peak in the world for aspiring climbers — particularly those looking to conquer all of the Seven Summits — magnifies the financial issues that outdoorspeople face.

If you’re looking to climb Mount Everest, expect the following expenses:

Still interested in flying to Everest for the hardest climb of your life? Understandably, the money involved — not to mention the short supply of permits (with something like 300 issued per year) — turns most people away, even the most eager of climbers. But if money is no object, or at least no barrier, then there’s more to know about the dangers that come along with venturing to the top of the mountain. After all, Everest climbers frequently use the dead bodies of people who either failed to make it to the top or made it to the top but didn’t make it down as signposts in getting to the top. There are reasons why bodies guide the way.

The Science of Extreme Altitude

If thin air were not an issue for Everest climbers, the challenge of reaching the top might not have the reputation it presently does. Because of its height Everest ranks highly on the list of the world’s most difficult mountains to summit, but most experienced climbers wouldn’t list Everest as the most taxing climb. Nearby K2 and Annapurna have worse reputations when it comes to killing climbers. But 29,029 feet can bring even the most grizzled of climbers to their knees. Once you cross the threshold of 25,000 feet, the level above which is called “The Dead Zone,” even supplemental oxygen won’t fully halt the challenges of increasingly nonexistent, breathable air.

If you’ve ever wondered why, in an age of commercialized adventure tours, there isn’t a trip that people can take wherein they jet to the top of Everest by plane or helicopter. The former could reach 29,029 feet without a problem — this is well below the cruising altitude of most commercial airliners — but the latter would be forced to descend well before the summit, as the air is not thick enough to support the blades of a helicopter. More importantly, however, a human would die within minutes if she was transported from sea level, or even a few thousand feet above sea level, to the inhospitable peak of Everest. Such a shock to the system would be irrecoverable.

The higher you go, the less air you’ll get. Even a trip from, say, sea level to 10,000 feet — just over halfway to Everest’s main Base Camp — can leave a healthy person gasping for air. When it comes to mountain climbing of Everest’s caliber, that problem magnifies exponentially. In addition to feeling short of breath generally, Everest climbers must reckon with these potentially lethal illnesses:

All of this is to say: when thinking about climbing Everest, one must understand it not just as a highly difficult physical challenge — in the way that, say, one would conceptualize running a full marathon — but as a test of the limits of the human body as a whole. The only reason more people continue to summit Everest in droves (there have been cases of over 100 people summiting on a single day) is because of all that is done to thwart the natural circumstances that might otherwise undo even the best of climbers. So many scientists and adventurers have invested time and capital into researching how to overcome Everest, such that technology has advanced in ways that make it easier — though, of course, not easy — for people to climb Everest. To understand how to summit Everest, one must understand how to summit the human body.

Sissom and Schmieder were wise to marry at Base Camp, all the risks involved at even that lower elevation notwithstanding. Any higher and their nuptials might not have been able to come to fruition at all. An Everest wedding will garner publicity like no other ceremony, and certainly the newlyweds have a story to tell that will be the envy of future cocktail party attendees. But the real feat is that they got married on Everest, and lived. The death rate on Everest may have improved from one death/four summits to one death/six summits, but those are still grim odds. Everest provides a pristine view of the world; even as it is limited to the regions of Tibet and Nepal, it feels like a panorama of the globe just based on the pictures taken from the summit. To actually see from that vantage point must feel incredible. But no view is worth a human life, which is why only serious climbers — not, as it too often is, the richest climbers with the most free time — should take to the world’s tallest peak.