They stood there prone. Single file. A line of bright reds. Yellows. Fancy climbing clothes worn by figures with no faces. All of them breathing oxygen from bottles on their backs, queued up in a line on the ridge leading to the summit of Mount Everest. 

The wind was blowing from one side of the mountain. It had cleared the rock bare, and whipped up a little cloud of snow on the other side of the ridge. In one sense it was glorious. Magnificent. Climbers on top of the World. In another, it said so much about our species. Always seeking to conquer. 

I haven’t seen a photo like that in a long time. It might be the single most memorable photo I’ve seen since the photo of that little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned whilst fleeing the Syrian civil war and was scooped up by a Turkish Police officer. Remember that? That was four years ago. But strangely, the Everest photo affected me in a similar way. It was not distressing in the same way, even though 11 people died up there in the last two weeks, but it was just... amazing.

In the 66 years since Tenzing and Hillary climbed Mt Everest for the first time, fewer than five thousand people have stood at the top. Climbing has become the folly of the rich. People will pay more than a hundred thousand dollars for the best guides and the best gear. But for all our advances, all our technology, all our down jackets and goretex, all of our helicopters and nutritional guidance, it’s still really really hard to get to the highest point on Earth. 

I went adventuring in the Andes a couple of years ago. It wasn’t anything near an Everest expedition, but it was stunning to note the affects that altitude had on my body. I got up to the high fives... almost six thousand metres above sea level, more than a mile higher than Aoraki Mt Cook, but about three vertical kilometres lower than the summit of Mt Everest. Climbing was gruelling. I was fit as, and yet i could only climb for 20 seconds or so without stopping and gasping for air. My head throbbed. I sucked back water. It was exhausting. 

That photo on Everest said so much. It said we humans love a trophy. People who have comfortable lives in good parts of the World - doctors from Alabama and lawyers France - will risk it all for a certificate and a photo. It said that even when human beings think they can conquer Mother Nature, they can’t conquer the flaws in their own species. After all.. there’s only a very small window every year in which people can summit that mountain but because so many people tried to summit at once, eleven people died on Everest.

Once upon a time I would have looked at that photo and been drawn in only by the adventure. The queue of people, the freezing conditions. The breathing equipment. The glory and death. 

Now I look at that photo and can’t help but think how ugly it all is.