All 28 Uses of
Tibet
in
Into Thin Air
- Eric Shipton, in 1938 Upon That Mountain Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.†
Chpt 1
- The Western Cum, pronounced koom, was named by George Leigh Mallory, who first saw it during the initial Everest expedition of 1921 from the Lho La, a high pass on the border between Nepal and Tibet.†
Chpt 1
- Demarcating the Nepal-Tibet border, towering more than 12,000 feet above the valleys at its base, Everest looms as a three-sided pyramid of gleaming ice and dark, striated rock.†
Chpt 2
- In 1949, after centuries of inaccessibility, Nepal opened it borders to the outside world, and a year later the new Communist regime in China closed Tibet to foreigners.†
Chpt 2
- I cut around the back of another bump and saw that the ridge ahead dropped away and we could see far into Tibet.†
Chpt 2
- Tenzing became a national hero throughout India, Nepal, and Tibet, each of which claimed him as one of their own.†
Chpt 2
- What the Nepalese ministers didn't take into consideration, however, was that China charged only $15,000 to allow a team of any size to climb the mountain from Tibet and placed no limit on the number of expeditions each season.†
Chpt 3
- The flood of Everesters therefore shifted from Nepal to Tibet, leaving hundreds of Sherpas out of work.
Chpt 3 *Tibet = an autonomous region of China; located in the Himalayas
- Sherpas are a mountain people, devoutly Buddhist whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago.†
Chpt 4
- Farming is difficult in the high, cold, steep-walled valleys, so the traditional Sherpa economy revolved around trading between Tibet and India, and herding yaks.†
Chpt 4
- Because the Kingdom of Nepal kept its borders closed until 1949, the initial Everest reconnaissance, and the next eight expeditions to follow, were forced to approach the mountain from the north, through Tibet, and never passed anywhere near the Khumbu.†
Chpt 4
- But those first nine expeditions embarked for Tibet from Darjeeling, where many Sherpas had emigrated, and where they had developed a reputation among the resident colonialists for being hardworking, affable, and intelligent.†
Chpt 4
- But, said Litch-who had climbed Everest from Tibet the previous spring-"Rob's feeling was that it wouldn't be him; he was just worried about 'having to save another team's ass,' and that when the unavoidable calamity struck, he was 'sure it would occur on the more dangerous north side' " of the peak-the Tibetan side.†
Chpt 4
- In March 1947, a poverty-stricken Canadian engineer named Earl Denman arrived in Darjeeling and announced his intention to climb Everest, despite the fact that he had little mountaineering experience and lacked official permission to enter Tibet.†
Chpt 8
- First, we would probably not even get into Tibet.†
Chpt 8
- "Well," I told Den "man, we must try" As the small expedition marched across Tibet toward Everest, the two Sherpas increasingly came to like and respect the Canadian.†
Chpt 8
- He hatched a scheme to fly a small airplane to Tibet, crash -land it on the flanks of Everest, and proceed to the summit from there.†
Chpt 8
- He flew to Purtabpore, India, but having not received permission from the Nepalese government to fly over Nepal, he sold the airplane for five hundred pounds and traveled overland to Darjeeling, where he learned that he had been denied permission to enter Tibet.†
Chpt 8
- Sandy Pittman had noted this superstition in a diary entry from her 1994 expedition posted on the Internet in 1996: April 29, 1994 Everest Base camp (17,800 feet), The xangshung Face, Tibet a mail runner had arrived that afternoon and a with letters from home for everyone girlie magazine which had been sent by a carback home as a joke… climber buddy Half of the Sherpa had taken it to a tent for closer inspection, while the others fretted over the disaster they were certain that any…†
Chpt 9
- But in early May, we hoped, the approach of the monsoon from the Bay of Bengal would force the jet stream north into Tibet.†
Chpt 11
- Roughly rect angular in shape, about four football fields long by two across, the Col's eastern margin drops 7,000 feet down the Kangshung Face into Tibet; the other side plunges 4,000 feet to the Western Cum. just back from the lip of this chasm, at the Col's westernmost edge, the tents of Camp Four squatted on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters.†
Chpt 12
- The nearly constant hurricane blowing through the Col in early spring explains why it remains as naked rock and ice even when deep snow blankets adjacent slopes: everything not frozen in place here has been blasted into Tibet.†
Chpt 12
- When Groom looked in the other direction, however-down the north side of the ridgethrough the billowing snow and faltering light he noticed a lone climber badly off route: it was Martin Adams, who'd become disoriented in the storm and mistakenly started to descend the Kangshung Face into Tibet.†
Chpt 15
- He is saying many times, acting like crazy man, so I tie him on rope, quickly, otherwise he is jumping down into Tibet.†
Chpt 17
- Leaving their high camp at 27,230 feet as a party of six, the Ladakhis did not get away from their tents until 5:45 A.M.* By midafternoon, still more than a thousand vertical feet below the top, they To avoid confusion, all times quoted in this chapter have been converted to Nepal time, even though the events I describe occurred in Tibet.†
Chpt 18
- Clocks in Tibet are set to reflect the Beijing time zone, which is two hours and fifteen minutes ahead of the Nepal time zone e. g 6:00 A.M. in Nepal is 8:15 in Tibet.†
Chpt 18
- g 6:00 A.M. in Nepal is 8:15 in Tibet.†
Chpt 18
- Continuing his quest to ascend all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, in September Boukreev traveled to Tibet and climbed both Clio Oyu and 26,291-foot Shisha Pangma.†
Chpt Epil.
Definition:
-
(Tibet) an autonomous region of China; located in the Himalayas
or (when the Government of Tibet in Exile and the Tibetan refugee community abroad refer to Tibet): a much larger area consisting of three traditional provinces