Every Friday afternoon starting in May, a policeman, two influencers, a government minister and a banker will be sitting at their desks in London with half an eye on their pagers,. If the pagers bleep, they will be ready to jump up and put their trousers on (well, the influencers and the government minister anyway).
This is not because they are worried that the pagers might be sabotaged; they are waiting for a message that could take them on the trip of a lifetime.
Meanwhile, up at Everest Base Camp Ruritanian mountain guide Ludacris Fortinbras will be monitoring the snow conditions and weather forecast. If conditions are favourable, he will send the five ordinary people sitting at home a coded message that could change their lives – or their weekend plans at the very least.
If the message says All well! then they will breathe a sigh and continue with their day jobs, because all of them except the policeman are extremely busy people.
But if the message should say Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement then they will spring into action.
The policeman will jump into his Fiat Panda. With sirens wailing, he will pick up each of his four companions before speeding them to the airport to catch a plane. The matchbox car will easily be big enough for the five of them because, apart from selfie sticks, their essential equipment for the expedition will already be at Camp 3 on the South Col.
They will, however, be glued to the Flightstats app on their phones, praying that British Airways doesn’t cancel their flight to Kathmandu like they did the previous weekend.
At Kathmandu Airport, a tuk-tuk will be waiting to whiz them not to their hotel, but to the health clinic. They will spend the next five hours inhaling helium, the lightest of the six noble gases.
Now, which of us hasn’t spent at least one night of our lives at a party sucking helium from a balloon in the hope of talking like Mickey Mouse? I know I have. And how we marvelled at the way those balloons, which contained a gas that is lighter than air, rose to the ceiling and stuck there.
What we probably didn’t realise was that what works for a balloon also works for people. In the rarefied air of Everest Base Camp, the pressure is so low that a human stuffed full of helium will actually float. After inhaling a special blend of helium – formulated by a German doctor who was a client of Fortinbras’s on a previous expedition – the men will fly to base camp in a hot air balloon and immediately begin their ascent.
The helium treatment is part of a novel approach devised by Fortinbras, who is known to be one of Mount Everest’s great innovators. If he can pull off his bodacious plan, his clients will be back at their desks in London on Monday morning having bagged the world’s highest peak (unless, of course, British Airways have other ideas).
‘I’m jolly excited to be climbing Everest without having to take a single day off work,’ said James Blond, the banker and leader of the group. ‘I will be able to miss all the vibrant cultural highlights, breathtaking mountain scenery and entertaining banter with my Sherpa companions, that make Everest expeditions so tedious.’
The idea of using helium to assist an ascent first came to Fortinbras in base camp at Plaza Argentinas on Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America.
‘It was a client’s birthday and we’d brought some helium balloons to celebrate the occasion. It was a Saturday night; we’d had a few drinks in the dining tent and were singing Stayin’ Alive from the film Saturday Night Fever. One of the team thought it would be funny to suck on the helium and make himself sound more like the Bee Gees. Well, he was laughing on the other side of his face when he started levitating from his chair. We had to fetch his climbing harness from the tent and tie him to a tent pole for the rest of the evening.’
‘When I returned from the expedition, I recalled the incident, and it occurred to me that if helium has that effect at base camp, what must it be like higher up the mountain where the air is much thinner? The following year, I returned to Aconcagua with an extra cylinder of helium, which I took to Camp 3. I inhaled half a cylinder and began to float up the Polish Glacier. It took some practice. I got a bit nervous when I drifted over a crevasse, but gradually I was able to guide myself in the right direction by swimming through the air. I discovered that breaststroke was the most precise method, but if I felt myself sinking and needed to move more quickly to a position from where I could suck more helium then butterfly worked best.’
Fortinbras said that he first started experimenting with helium in 2018, and was making good progress developing the right mix when COVID struck. Everyone went into lockdown and mountaineering expeditions were banned. For most of 2020, progress was put on hold. Although the physical distancing rules didn’t specifically prohibit people from floating in the sky, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Besides, his home in the Ruritanian Alps is only 1,000m above sea level where helium is less effective.
He resumed his experiments with helium in 2022. Then, last year, he had a major breakthrough. He took a team that included the banker James Blond to Mount Manaslu, a mountain in the west of Nepal that is considered one of the easier 8,000m peaks. It has attracted controversy because many of the people who climb it for the bragging rights don’t actually reach the summit. They stop at a point known as the fore-summit, take their ‘summit’ selfies and descend. It was the perfect place for Fortinbras to complete his research.
‘As we ascended the summit ridge I could see a traffic jam up ahead. Gina G’s team were rappelling down from the fore-summit and traversing across to the main summit, which was hidden behind. “We don’t have to join this queue,” I told James. I attached him to my harness with a short rope, pulled a small bottle of helium from my backpack and we each inhaled about half. We started floating off the ground almost immediately. The other climbers were so busy taking selfies that they didn’t even notice as I swum the pair of us over their heads to the main summit.’
After the expedition, Blond became Fortinbras’s secret recruiter. He was charged with finding a group of clients for a clandestine project the following spring. Blond and his companions will be paying Fortinbras an undisclosed sum – believed to be in the region of $200,000 per day – for the privilege of making the first helium-powered ascent of Mount Everest.
But the prospect of a two-day Everest package using a method that many climbers would consider cheating, has raised ethical questions about the pull of the world’s highest peak, which traditionally required several months to climb.
According to the Financial Times, climbing Mount Everest has now become so easy that most people do a Conga up the Lhotse Face before being carried to the summit on Sherpaback. In recent years, operators have even started erecting speakers in the Western Cwm so that clients can dance up the face to popular tunes like the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil and of course Conga! by the Miami Sound Machine. Demand for luxury means that the vast majority of clients now have access to saunas, Turkish baths, massage parlours, beauty salons, pedicures, casinos and en suite bathrooms complete with bidets and waterfall showers. The only amenities missing are flushing toilets and recycling facilities; as a result Everest has become the world’s highest garbage dump and is awash with human excrement.
Fortinbras believes that helium will make Everest safer by enabling his clients to bypass all the main hazards. But in spite of this, he is facing a backlash from other climbers, who feel that his clients are not given a chance to appreciate the true experience.
The British mountaineer, Sir Crispin Boddingtons, 90, said ‘Everest doesn’t give a flying fuck about these ordinary people shooting up and down it. But I am sad about what climbing Everest has become. Back in 1975, our strongman Doug McDougal rowed us from London to Bombay in a tiny coracle with only one oar. We then had to cycle to Kathmandu in rickshaws, carrying our expedition equipment in baskets at the front, before hiking all the way to base camp. Just getting to the mountain took the best part of 18 months.’
The fashion for ever-shorter trips and ever-bizarre firsts using unconventional methods is not confined to mountaineering expeditions. In 2023, the American cyclist Holden McGroin, who has 12 billion followers on YouTube, cycled around the world in four days on a bike with a jet engine. Last year, TikToker Anita Bath became the first trans-Californian to cross the Amazon in a bulldozer without having a wash.
Canadian tour operator Ice Magic told me that their 10-hour Top-of-the-World trips sell out faster than a Liz Truss premiership. For $250,000, clients can fly to the North Pole, have a glass of champagne on an iceberg and be back in time for dinner. Anne Teater of South African tour operator Safari Skedaddle told me: ‘Our clients, who are mostly bankers, love speed over everything else. They will seal a deal in the afternoon and say “Right on, let’s see some lions”. They will join up with us that afternoon and be back in the office to make more money the following morning,’ Safari Skedaddle’s Big-Five-in-a-Day trip enables clients to fly around Kruger National Park in a helicopter trying to spot a lion, a leopard, an elephant, a buffalo and a rhino for the bargain price of 6 million rand.
We asked Anthony Ballacher of rival expedition operator Alpenhorn Expeditions what he thought of Fortinbras’s latest innovation to race up Mount Everest using helium.
‘Helium is so yesterday’s technology,’ he told us. ‘At Alpenhorn, we’re already looking at giving our clients krypton so that they can fly to the summit like Superman. Our equipment partner Mountain Hardcore is designing a special down suit that includes a built-in cape with underpants that can be worn over the top. We will also be dispensing with human guides and using AI to help our clients up the mountain.’
We asked if AI guides would actually send his clients the right way or simply spout gibberish while providing a disclaimer that results might not be accurate. Ballacher was adamant it would not be a problem.
‘We’re implementing a special community notes feature. This will give our clients the peace of mind of being able to crowdsource directions from various far-right actors on the internet.’
We live in interesting times. We wish the helium-powered climbers good luck with their ascent, and we hope they know how to swim.
I’m surprised they are not attempting Rum Doodle first.
Three thumbs up for this 🙂
Mark – You made my day! Absolutely hilarious! We need more such commentary.
From a scientific point of view, using xenon to benefit high-altitude tourists is untested, and it is hard to understand why it would help. On the other hand, hypoxic pre-acclimatizing and liberal use of oxygen on the mountain, which are also part of the plan, will undoubtedly help. I am waiting for the day, not long off, when an unacclimatized or partially acclimatized person will chopper into Everest basecamp, put on oxygen, and go straight to the top in 2 days or even less. As long as oxygen flow is maintained, this will work. What could possibly go wrong?
Addendum:
Ludicras Fortinbras will in fact try any gimmick to lure high paying wannabes to Everest. But his novel helium scam will surely be outdone by the Chinese Mountaineering Association which is now testing hydrogen, a lighter and less expensive gas. They were recently spotted in Tibet using the new DeepSeek app to ensure their success. Unfortunately, the DeepPockets app used by Fortinbras is beginning to show its age and thus his use of helium which is twice as heavy and quite a bit more expensive – or so he says.
Fortinbras has also been seen at basecamp wearing a red MEGA cap. The Make Everest Greedy Again movement has seen a renewed interest in mountaineering. Customers will not require crampons anymore. A system has been devised where the higher paying customers will be guaranteed a retrieval and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot.
We wish both the MEGA followers and their Chinese competitors safe floating during the 2025 season.
Wow, I guess April 1 comes in January when one has imbibed in too many questionable drugs in last night’s party. For a minute, I thought I was simply hallucinating or having a flash-back!
Hi mark thanks for telling us that balloons contain gas lighters.
Your too late it’s already been tried in fell racing, the record for the 3 Peaks is down to 53 minutes and that included a stop for a dump !!.