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No One Told The Summit Contestants That They Have to, Uh, Summit
What exactly was in the casting call for this show?
To be fair, some of the contestants are also ex-military, a couple are former college athletes, and there’s a guy who looks like he does a lot of CrossFit and says very pretentiously that it’s his “pet peeve” when “folks are out of shape and unhealthy.” Again: That is not the same thing as knowing how to climb a mountain, an activity that requires endurance, strong calves and ankles, breath training as you reach higher altitudes, knowledge of ice-climbing tools like crampons and axes, and an intense focus and awareness of your own body. The problem with The Summit falling into a fat-thin, young-old binary is that, in reality, none of these people should be tasked with climbing through “lung-burning altitudes, a freezing alpine lake, and a dangerous glacial traverse” toward a “final icy ascent,” as Bennett puts it. But I do think The Summit is guilty of the exact flattening of a perilous experience Krakauer warned against in Into Thin Air, a first-person account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster that left numerous climbers dead and others stranded on the mountain in the middle of a devastating storm.
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