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Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

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Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#181

Post by evgen »

rdl wrote: post #25
nradov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually only about half that price or less (in the US), unless you get into the really extreme stuff. There is a lot more to diving safety than just using the correct gas mixes. The training and procedures developed by groups like the WKPP and GUE have now taken nearly all the risk out of technical diving. http://www.gue.com/

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 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.

It has been almost a decade since my Adv Nitrox course, but I am trying to figure this one out. You are not doing trimix and from what I remember of the the course spec you are mostly working around bottom mixes that are hypoxic at the surface and dealing with a ceiling on the dive profile. Even with the bottom mix in dual cylinders on my back, a descent/ascent mix on once side an a 50% mix for the last few stops on the other side I can't see how you were getting charged $800 for the mix unless you were getting completely hosed on everything that was not a standard 32 or 36 recreational nitrox mix.

OTOH you are completely correct about it being a deceptively expensive hobby, even if you take the "cheaper" route and go with semi-closed rebreathers or even OC.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#182

Post by nradov »

rdl wrote: post #68
gjm11 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm betting we'll switch to hypoxic hydrogen ("Hydrox") for deep (>40m) diving then, or use atmospheric dive suits and ROVs only. Hydrogen is a pain to deal with on the surface and in transport, but if you're putting it into something like 95/5 hydrogen/oxygen bottom gas, is not going to explode. At >30m, that's quite breathable. Some kind of hydrogen-based trimix is probably acceptable at that point. Continue to use…

Hydrox might see some limited use for deep commercial diving (there have already been limited experiments) but it will never be rated safe for sport diving. The explosion risk at tank fill stations is ridiculous.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#183

Post by kyleslattery »

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%.

This is a pretty good point. Russell Brice, the owner of one of the largest Everest companies and the main person in Discovery's Everest series, has never had a client die on one of his expeditions, and he's had something like 200 people climb with him.

He's able to be so successful because he makes sure his climbers are adequately prepared, and he doesn't allow people to climb who he doesn't think are fit enough. It seems like (at least from the Discovery series) that many of the people who die are hiking on their own, without the help of one of the successful companies, so when something goes wrong, they don't have a support network to help them.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#184

Post by antidaily »

wooster wrote: post #43
antidaily wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr This guy pooped in a 8" hole.

I'm not sure why everyone is down-modding you. Pooping in an 8" hole and climbing to 19,850 feet seems like a pretty good summary of the experience. Edit: I might actually use that as my short summary of the trip.

Thanks! I was trying to be funny but also call attention to the extremes of climbing.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#186

Post by mindcrime »

benmathes wrote: post #171
boredguy8 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Failure rate alone isn't enough to compare climbing Everest and running a startup. The cost of failure on Everest is ultimate, but the cost of failure in a startup is temporary and economic.

The cost of failure on Everest is ultimate, but the cost of failure in a startup is temporary and economic.

What about the folks who lose their life savings when their businesses fail, and decide to commit suicide? I have no stats on how often that actually happens, but it's something to consider.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#187

Post by evgen »

nradov wrote: post #179
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…

I am concerned because someone seems to have fed you a bunch of misinformation, and unfortunately we tend to believe most whatever we hear first. Technical diving is not some kind of high-risk, white-knuckle adventure. It can be safe and fun in most any reasonable environment. Having a unified team actually increases your flexibility. When all your dive buddies have similar equipment and training then they're essenti…

I agree with you that tech diving can be safe and fun, but it is also possible for things to go wrong with deadly consequences. All I can say is that when I was doing technical diving you were always told that self-rescue was the first option. If your buddy and/or team can help you out then that was great, but we never dove with the assumption that our buddy or team would be able or available to help out. This means complete redundancy and ability to isolate failed components of your life-support system. It is not about solo diving, it is about sometimes being in a place where the only person you can truly count on is yourself.

The dive computers available today are simply not useful.

This is something I strongly disagree with. Dive computers are very, very useful. They can't measure bubble or various saturation levels of different tissue types, but neither can you. The models they use may be idealized and only have a fixed number of compartments for the offgassing calculations, but they provide several other benefits that make them a key component of any deep dive. For starters they track your depth over time. Everyone drifts and bounced around within a range of depths even when you think you are staying on a fixed depth over some portion of the dive. The computer is sampling and adding the depth changes into the model. This enables the computer to be more accurate than you can ever be. If you disagree with its model then you can do some research into what it is using as its basline profile and either buy a computer that uses a model you like or adjust its calculations according to how you think you fit its model (several of the dive computers you should be looking at allow for this latter option.)

I am not talking about diving on some recreational computer, I am talking about using a dive computer designed for mixed gases and dive profiles with a ceiling. If you are doing mixed gas diving you need a computer that can be set with the mixes you will use and be switched as you switch. Maybe you are good enough or experienced enough to get away without a computer, but I have always dived with a hand-caluclated profile (with various bailout options and numbers) in a BC pocket, a mental model of where I think I am in the dive running in my head, and a dive computer that can provide both accurate and precise info based upon its own model of the dive and diver.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#188

Post by phjohnst »

nostromo wrote: post #163
ianferrel wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

Yes, K2 is is much more technically demanding climb (See the Black Pyramid, and basically any of the other less popular routes) and more unpredictable (falling seracs above the Bottleneck killed several climbers in 2008). It's usually only attempted by very skilled mountaineers. You won't find the same sort of climbing tour groups like operate on Everest - which is part of the reason why Everest, though the tallest, doesn't seem to be the pinnacle of mountaineering.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#189

Post by evgen »

nradov wrote: post #182
rdl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting we'll switch to hypoxic hydrogen ("Hydrox") for deep (>40m) diving then, or use atmospheric dive suits and ROVs only. Hydrogen is a pain to deal with on the surface and in transport, but if you're putting it into something like 95/5 hydrogen/oxygen bottom gas, is not going to explode. At >30m, that's quite breathable. Some kind of hydrogen-based trimix is probably acceptable at that point. Continue to use…

Hydrox might see some limited use for deep commercial diving (there have already been limited experiments) but it will never be rated safe for sport diving. The explosion risk at tank fill stations is ridiculous.

Definitely. There is already enough risk running high pressure oxygen given how some o-ring lubricants can react, I cannot imagine adding an additional fuel to the mix.

Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

#190

Post by spoiledtechie »

antidaily wrote: post #34
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…

tl;dr This guy pooped in a 8" hole.

We modd you down, because if you aren't here to contribute then maybe you shouldn't contribute.
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