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Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

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Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#161

Post by mason55 »

rdl wrote: post #9

Deep wreck and cave diving is similarly dangerous (and was much more so before the adoption of Trimix by the technical diving community). There have been numerous fatalities among rescuers trying to recover corpses of other dead divers, too. I decided after reading a fair bit about this that even if I can afford to dive like this ($20k+ for equipment, $10-20k+ for training, and $500+ per dive for helium-based gas fil…

http://outsideonline.com/outside/features/200508/dave-shaw-1...

A wonderful article about the attempted recovery of a body in a deep cave

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#162

Post by jedbrown »

aplusbi wrote: post #133
jedbrown wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> futile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_Weathers

At least choose a better example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Hall_(climber) . Beck Weathers wasn't suffering from altitude sickness and made it back to camp IV on his own. I didn't say it was futile to attempt a rescue, I said it was comparatively more futile to attempt a rescue. You have to make an assessment - is it likely that we can save this person and is it worth the risk? Then there is the psychologi…

Beck was left by people who were perfectly capably of helping, despite evidently still being capable of getting himself down. Your example is good too, but there are many, many examples of people in radio contact with a camp only a few hours of non-technical terrain away, but where the people in camp don't actually do anything in time. Also, being physically present next to the person who needs help seems like a bit closer psychological connection than a radio, but there are still cases of people being left behind due to incorrect evaluation of "futility".

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#163

Post by nostromo »

ianferrel wrote: post #157
webwright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go ahead and judge. 1 in 10. Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? How much pain is your untimely death going to cause if it happens? How many everest orphans and widows are there? Include in that the considerable cost and time investment to do this when you could be creating something, exploring something that has a conceivable chance of helping humanity, or just plain investin…

10% is the wrong statistic. According to the article, for every 10 people who reach the summit, 1 person dies in the attempt. So, already, that's somewhat less than 1/10, because not every person who dies does so after reaching the summit. But it also doesn't count the many people who start climbing the mountain but turn around before the summit and make it down alive. The true statistic is likely much less than 10%.

This page (http://www.8000ers.com/cms/everest-general-info-185.html) shows 4102 attempts to reach the top with 216 deaths last year. That puts it at about 5% of climbs end in death.

However, only about 2700 individuals climbed -- which puts the deaths / "uniques" back up to 8%. And if you assume that the sherpas die less frequently than do the tourists, 10% doesn't seem too far off.

Interestingly, K2 seems to be much more difficult with a much higher fatality rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#164

Post by lkjhgfvhjk »

ianferrel wrote: post #157
webwright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go ahead and judge. 1 in 10. Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? How much pain is your untimely death going to cause if it happens? How many everest orphans and widows are there? Include in that the considerable cost and time investment to do this when you could be creating something, exploring something that has a conceivable chance of helping humanity, or just plain investin…

10% is the wrong statistic. According to the article, for every 10 people who reach the summit, 1 person dies in the attempt. So, already, that's somewhat less than 1/10, because not every person who dies does so after reaching the summit. But it also doesn't count the many people who start climbing the mountain but turn around before the summit and make it down alive. The true statistic is likely much less than 10%.

Although those who don't climb Everest have a 100% mortality rate

(Perhaps 99.9999% if you include the Dalai Lama)

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#165

Post by boredguy8 »

webwright wrote: post #138
wooster wrote: post #27

I recently got back (almost exactly a month ago) from a month long climbing trip in Nepal with some friends. We had three guides, all three of whom have climbed Everest multiple times. One of our guides, who has summited 5 times, described Everest as his "bad habit". As a relative newbie to high altitude mountaineering (the highest I got was ~19,850 feet), climbing in Nepal was really, really hard. You are never warm…

I'm going to go ahead and judge. 1 in 10. Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? How much pain is your untimely death going to cause if it happens? How many everest orphans and widows are there? Include in that the considerable cost and time investment to do this when you could be creating something, exploring something that has a conceivable chance of helping humanity, or just plain investin…

10% failure rate is bad on a website about startups?

Now, we're talking life instead of life savings, but I find it hard to say that their decision is wrong in any ethical or moral sense, and I'm curious what moral framework would justify your viewpoint. Additionally, burning through your life savings (and that of friends/family) can easily cause more long-term harm than having a mom or dad that died while climbing Everest. You just think that one risk is acceptable because it doesn't terminate in death. But there are greater things to fear than dying.

Additionally, suppose there were some not-to-distant dystopia in which reading non-approved books were a capital offense, and the state/corporate/whatever apparatus caught 10% of all offenders and had a 100% conviction rate for that 10%. Would that suddenly make reading wrong? I think most people have the intuition that the law is wrong, not the reading.

Similarly, I have a hard time seeing why 10% of people dying while doing something somehow makes it wrong per se.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#166

Post by joezydeco »

gjm11 wrote: post #64
rdl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes for caves. Caves are easy and safe compared to deep open ocean wrecks. Caves may actually be within the "reasonable to do recreationally" level, and WKPP is or was actually doing worthwhile environmental science too. Outside of the US, helium is seriously expensive. I was figuring dual rebreathers, or rebreather + OC bailout. $800 in gas alone for a 100m training dive for TDI Adv Nitrox, open circuit. WKPP and GU…

> Outside the US, helium is seriously expensive. OT, but: That would be because it's rare and hard to extract and running out. It's only cheap in the US because in 1996 some genius passed a law requiring it to be sold cheaply to use up the US's helium reserves. The likely result is that the world will be basically completely out of helium by about 2050. Too bad for anyone not-very-rich who needs an MRI scan at that p…

Unless we advance high-temperature superconductors by then. The market adapts.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#167

Post by edanm »

neilc wrote: post #153
webwright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go ahead and judge. 1 in 10. Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? How much pain is your untimely death going to cause if it happens? How many everest orphans and widows are there? Include in that the considerable cost and time investment to do this when you could be creating something, exploring something that has a conceivable chance of helping humanity, or just plain investin…

Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? 10% of people who attempt a summit die, but that does not mean that attempting a summit necessarily has a 10% chance of death. That 10% figure is not conditioned on your individual preparation, your guides, and your fellow climbers. I would guess that with the right preparation, the chance of death is much less than 10%.

How many attempt a summit without proper preparation? (Or what they consider proper preparation, which amounts to the same thing)?

I honestly don't know, but I would guess that people attempting to climb Everest are not just random climbers, but people who train specifically for this.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#168

Post by webwright »

jodrellblank wrote: post #144
webwright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go ahead and judge. 1 in 10. Your have a 10% chance of dying if you attempt a summit, right? How much pain is your untimely death going to cause if it happens? How many everest orphans and widows are there? Include in that the considerable cost and time investment to do this when you could be creating something, exploring something that has a conceivable chance of helping humanity, or just plain investin…

No, this is a hugely selfish act You say that like being selfish is automatically and unquestionably a bad thing.

No, I said that like there's a recklessly selfish spectrum and this is pegged near one end with driving while extremely intoxicated, habitually using heroin, etc. At the other end are mildly selfish acts.

Playing an X-box is a mildly selfish act. It's fun, but probably isn't a real big win for family, friends, society, etc. Not too damaging to them, though, unless done in excess.

Getting massively drunk and then driving your sports car around risks bystanders (sherpas), your life (causing sorrow and hardship for friends and family), and society (cleaning you and your victims off of the road cost money and time).

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#169

Post by kore »

mason55 wrote: post #160
kore wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are never warm, the food sucks, camping for long periods at high altitude sucks rather a lot, you are never clean, altitude sickness sucks, pooping in an 8" hole in the ground sucks, not eating much protein sucks, but… the views are spectacular, the people you meet are amazing, the place itself is awe-inspiring, the wildlife is interesting and diverse, the peace of the place is fantastic, and the mountains… wel…

Do you have any links or just perhaps some Google terms to search for? This is pretty interesting.

Googling "everest base camp trek" will dig up all sorts of information. There are several adventure travel companies that offer treks of this sort - typically you'll go in a group of around 10 other travelers plus your local guides. If you're on a tight budget, flying into Kathmandu and booking the trip yourself with a local company can be much cheaper, it'll just require a bit more effort. Depending on the time of year you go, it can either be busy with many other trekking/mountaineering groups, or it could just be yourselves. You don't need to be superhuman to finish the trek, but you do need determination and a relatively good level of fitness.

One drawback with booking a set itinerary is that if your body doesn't take to the altitude well and you need more time to acclimatize, it could jeopardize your trip. Within a group of 10, a couple people likely will not make it all of the way to base camp and will need to stop. If that worries you, finding a more flexible itinerary will let you travel at a slower pace if need be.

This is the sort of scenery you can expect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ZPYwlj4bc

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#170

Post by jedbrown »

johnyzee wrote: post #159
jedbrown wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not in the sense that it will save your life There are countless counter-examples to this claim. For example, Jerzy Kukuczka's spent three nights out above 8000m on K2 without food, water, tent, or sleeping bag. During this time, he covered substantial technical ground to summit their new route (the South Face) and descended safely without assistance and even without frostbite. His partner, Tadeusz Piotrowski, was…

I have tremendous respect for the abilities of the climbers, they are obviously among the best in the world in several categories of physical prowess, but it still seems that mountain climbing is one of very few disciplines where you can do everything right and still , with a reasonable probability, get killed due to some random circumstance.

There are a lot of decisions that affect the risk level. This is the same with any activity. Cutting edge climbs generally involve enough "risky" decisions to be considered dangerous, I have lost too many friends to claim otherwise. But there is a lot of "serious looking" climbing, including quite a lot at high altitude as well as very technical routes that can be done at a risk level similar to non-"extreme" activities.

Accidents on hard routes are either because of objective hazard (e.g. climbing underneath a serac, an obvious hazard that the climbers chose to accept because they thought the route was "worth it") or human error (e.g. rappelling accident). You choose where to climb and you assess conditions. Some hazards are hard to assess (avalanches from slopes that you cannot evaluate), but most accidents related to objective hazard involve a specific decision that was known by the participants to be risky.

It is not the case that choosing to attempt a big objective involves an especially large risk. But if you never make risky decisions, then you are likely to fail at your objective (maybe climb something less impressive). The trick the prolific climbers who make it to old age have mastered is evaluating risk sufficiently accurately to get the big lines without dying. There are a couple who were just lucky, but by and large, luck runs out eventually so you have to be good at assessing risk.

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