look that kindly on the British adventures in their old mountain colonies. That's not entirely surprising: mountaineering lends itself to propagandists with a message to peddle. Even the ascent of Everest, however multi-racial and collaborative Hillary and Tenzing made it, was used to gild the coronation of the young Elizabeth. To have conquered the tallest mountain on earth was obviously the herald of a Golden Age – and an affirmation of Britain's place at the head of the Commonwealth.

Nonsense, of course, but the question remains: why would anyone want to climb a big mountain like Everest? What could be a worthwhile reward for something so cold and dangerous? In 1923, when an American journalist asked George Mallory the same question, he replied enigmatically, "Because it's there." The truth is that there are as many reasons to climb a mountain as there are people who do it. They climb to impress their friends or to impress themselves, they climb because they like the thrill or because they like the peace. Some just love being in wild spaces. For a few, climbing is an escape from a tough background. It's one of those sports where you've got to be rich enough to afford it, and poor enough to cope with its hardships, which explains the rise of the uber-tough eastern European mountaineers in the last three decades.

The other curious thing about mountain climbing is that it happens in private. Hundreds of millions of people saw Lewis Hamilton clinch his world championship in Brazil; only two men witnessed the conquest of Everest, Tenzing and Hillary. It is a sport whose public profile is almost entirely mediated. You hardly ever get to watch a great mountaineering feat as it happens. You only get to read about it afterwards.

The dead bodies and piles of trash speak to a wider fear of environmental collapse

Which suits the propagandists. Mallory himself disliked the imperial subtext which the organisers of early expeditions on Everest tried to give their efforts. And in the 1930s, Nazi spinmeisters saw mountaineering as another handhold in its quest for the summit of European domination. Some German and Austrian climbers went along with this, not least because climbing in the Himalayas can be a very expensive business.

In the modern era, business tycoons and wealthy sportsmen burnishing their resumes

have paid to be led up Everest, while professional adventurers use the new media to force their images and their names on an increasingly jaded public. What is there left to say about any of it?

Actually, a great deal. Because, quietly and beyond the glib judgments of the media, a few of the very best climbers just get on with it, taking the mountains at their face value, rather than the value placed on them by those with something to sell or a point to prove. Maybe that's the biggest appeal of mountain climbing. What it tells those who do it about themselves, a kind of litmus test for what they hold most dear. Like John Hunt and his passion for the mountain, and his friends.

Ironically, despite the headlines and periodic 'killer storms', Everest has got safer. Fewer people die on it proportionally than they did 20 or even 10 years ago. But today's coverage is often one of disaster and degradation, and so the notion of an ideal Everest being corrupted is what sticks in the public imagination. The presence of dead bodies and piles of trash speaks to a wider fear of environmental collapse, of Eden despoiled. What's forgotten, of course, is that the Sherpas led lives of grinding poverty before tourism arrived. Many young men from the Everest region left home to find work in the Raj boomtown of Darjeeling. Mountaineering allowed them to return. Now other tribes work their farms, while they send their kids to the best schools. Everest and the Himalayas still have the power to change lives for the better.