A Man Who Raced to Tell the World That Mount Everest Had Been Climbed (opens in new tab)

One thing I always think about with these kinds of codes: what would they have said if the snow conditions were actually bad and they had to abandon their base?

Even though Canadian citizenship first appeared in 1947, athletes were recognised as Canadian as soon as the country was created in 1867.

The first Canadians to win a anything were the "Paris crew" who won a regatta days after the constitution. Canada started to be represented in the Olympic Games in 1900.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/paris-crew

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_at_the_1900_Summer_Olym...

1931. Not 1940s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster_1931

>>Most of the remaining colonies in North America – everything north of the United States with the exception of Newfoundland – were merged into a federal polity known as "Canada" in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Canada was termed a "dominion", a term previously used in slightly different contexts in English history, and granted a broad array of powers between the federal government and the provincial governments. Australia was similarly deemed a dominion when it federated in 1901, as were Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Irish Free State in the first decades of the 20th century.

>> No Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom passed after the commencement of this Act shall extend, or be deemed to extend, to a Dominion as part of the law of that Dominion, unless it is expressly declared in that Act that that Dominion has requested, and consented to, the enactment thereof.

In that language was/is Canadian independence from britain.

I've replied to a few comments here pointing out why NZ and Canada would be considered both on the same footing as part of the Empire but also not at the same time.

Unlike, say the US, independence for the former Dominions isn't something you can pin point to one event. It is mostly a slow evolution of the legal environment and cultural separation over the course of more than a century. (In NZ's case you could argue that it took 163 years, or is not done yet because reasons.)

The actual difference between the Canadian "expedition" and the one that included Hillary is that the Canadian one was just some dude. One guy that wanted to try his luck, whereas the British one was organised (and I believe paid for) in Britain. It just happened to have a Kiwi on it.

I was waiting for the article to acknowledge that Hillary was from New Zealand, but it's never mentioned.

Nah, you're wrong. There was a reason they waited a day to declare war on Germany in WWII, where as in WWI they were automagically at war.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Despite being British subjects Canadians still had their own sense of identity, as did Kiwis.

I'd bet a substantial amount that nobody is learning that Everest exists from this article.

I agree that the current state of Everest is an embarrassment. But that doesn't change the fact that it's the tallest mountain in the world, and the efforts (both successful and failed) to be the first to summit were audacious and inspiring to many people. Stories like the one in the OP should not be suppressed just because decades later the mountain has turned into a pile of shit.

Why should I care if there is a bunch of garbage and feces in a place that no one can even access without paying $70k? There's beaches where normal people actually go that are covered in trash and have raw sewage pumped into the nearby waters...surely that is a more important aspect of the environment to clean up or care about than a mountain in the middle of no where that only rich people visit.

It'll only get worse.

Management of Mt Everest falls under the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation, and each Minister lasts barely a year because Nepali politics is extremely unstable because Ministries are given to critical MPs who can make or break a government.

Expect more permits to be issued and way less support and cleaning especially because Nepal has some systemic economic issues right now.

So, just as a fun exercise - what would it take to remove the top 250m from Mount Everest, making it only the second highest mountain?

So we should just ignore previous accomplishments I guess...

The amount of virtue signalling going on to turn this article into some kind of moral issue is just wild