The article quotes a 1/50 chance of dying. For perspective, only 1/20 suicide attempts are successful. That means that climbing Mt. Everest is only half as deadly as trying to actively kill yourself.
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Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
221–230 of 266 posts
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes all kinds. People with the balls to summit Everest are rare, and they provide great stories to humanity, just the same as astronauts, deep sea divers or spelunkers. I can admire that because it's unusual and inspiring, something that can not be said for people playing it safe. I won't judge you for your judgement, and I might even share it for people mountaineers who have kids, etc, but I can not agree with…
* There's more to life than staying alive.* um... what?
You heard right, think about it for a while.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes all kinds. People with the balls to summit Everest are rare, and they provide great stories to humanity, just the same as astronauts, deep sea divers or spelunkers. I can admire that because it's unusual and inspiring, something that can not be said for people playing it safe. I won't judge you for your judgement, and I might even share it for people mountaineers who have kids, etc, but I can not agree with…
I don't think the point is risking life is bad in all cases. It depends on the possible gain. A simple example is a lot of people consider freedom something worth dying for. But what is the gain here of climbing Everest after it has been climbed hundreds of times? Astronauts clearly benefit humanity with more than just great stories. I can't see much marginal benefit for society for each additional Everest climber. I…
But I just can't see much benefit for anyone else.
If the mountain climber's goal is to be a stronger person, both he and the people around him benefit from his achieving it. If he comes out of the experience a strong, unintimidatable leader who inspires others and fights hard to make the world a better place, it's even arguable that the people around him benefit from his experience more than he does.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes all kinds. People with the balls to summit Everest are rare, and they provide great stories to humanity, just the same as astronauts, deep sea divers or spelunkers. I can admire that because it's unusual and inspiring, something that can not be said for people playing it safe. I won't judge you for your judgement, and I might even share it for people mountaineers who have kids, etc, but I can not agree with…
* There's more to life than staying alive.* um... what?
"Every man dies. Not every man really lives."
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the retort: "Because it's there", which has been called "the most famous three words in mountaineering".
I love unfiltered information, but there was something pathetic about seeing Mallory's corpse in that picture -- just a frozen, eroded lump of meat. There's a reason we don't see more pictures of our dead heros.
Of course, I don't think it's bothering him any.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#226I 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…
s/Cho Oyu/Baruntse/
Oops.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#227Earlier 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…
That death total is not last year, that's all time. 216 dead people in a year would be the end of mountaineering.
The attempt numbers you quote, 4102 attempts by 2700 individuals, was for 2008. A year with one fatality.
Those odds are quite different.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#228Earlier 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…
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 investing in helping others. No, this is a hugely selfish act. I was going to create a startup, but unfortunately…
Yeah, because comparing something that, if it pays off, will put your family into the lap of luxury, and if it doesn't you can go back to your old life with something that offers no intrinsic value or reward if it pays off, and if it doesn't leaves you dead on the side of a mountain where people name the feature after the colour of your boots is an apples to apples comparison.
Good one.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#229Earlier 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.
You're right, and that's the point of it.
If you play games where one set of moves means you'll certainly survive and win, then you're going to make those moves. It's like playing chess, with a loaded gun beside the board so you could shoot yourself if you chose to. That might give you a thrill the first time, but you'd soon get bored of it, and you wouldn't learn anything worthwhile from it.
The really absorbing games are the ones where every set of moves could get you killed, and the winning ones are more likely to than the safest losing ones.
Many books have been written about this stuff. I think Joe Simpson's This Game of Ghosts is the most accessible.
Re: Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that if climbing Everest is not reckless thrill-seeking then nothing else is.
Joyriding your car and doing donuts in the middle of mainstreet on a Friday evening would probably fall into the "reckless thrill-seeking" category every time. Yes, a good number of Everest climbers may also fit that bill. But it's incorrect and not particularly insightful to attribute that characterization to the entire endeavor.There are many good reasons why someone would climb Everest or any mountain for that mat…
> not particularly insightful
what is HN with all the passive aggressive insults of other people's comments?