It's hard to hang on to a reliable mental image of Mount Everest these days. Is the great Himalayan peak still among the planet's foremost symbols of inaccessibility? Or is it going the way of Mount Fuji, slowly evolving in the popular mind from a lonely, forbidding, lethal fortress into a routine trekking destination for the masses?
Perhaps no one cares either way, except for sentimentalists and greenies. But people should care. Japan is understandably excited about the achievement of Takao Arayama, who earlier this month became the oldest person ever to scale the 8,850-meter peak -- he is going on 71 and deserves his accolades. But look at the bigger picture. The man whose record he edged, Yuichiro Miura, was just three days younger than Mr. Arayama when he reached the summit in May 2003.
It rather diminishes the mountain to think of it as the latest destination of choice for septuagenarians, even exceptionally fit ones. And that is a pity. The more crowded and packaged and technology-assisted our lives become, the more we need our stern, remote old icons of solitude.