LEFT TO DIE AT 28,000 FEET

[The Teth]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... tory/Front

[Mountain_Marc]

Everest is only visited by rich status seekers these days. Real climbers don't bother anymore.

Helping someone would ruin their chance at higher status.

Like I tell all my friends, if I get rich i'm getting a B-52 bomber and carpet bombing Everest so it's no longer the highest mountain in the world.

[szymiec]

Here goes nothing.
His legs and arms were frozen. He had removed his jacket. he was clearly in the adv stages of hypothermia. If they would have moved him w/o warmin him his heart would have stopped.

A compotent rescuer and guide will never risk the lives of his/her team to save someone who's pupils are dialated and show no signs of life. Especially at 8700 (content moderated) meters!

No one has the right to judge these guys. Except the dead guy i suppose. So so sad that all you need to climb Everest these days is a small (content moderated) and 65 grand!

[The Mitt]

Remembering the rules in SAR. Nobody is ever cold and dead until they are warm and dead. Meaning you just don't know how badly the cold has affected someone, just a little less altitude or a little more heat and the guy may have come around when the first group saw him (as per Beck Weathers). Remember 30+ people had accounts of seeing him in varying degrees of distress not just near dead. I think the comment many people are trying to make is that it's obvious that the summit has become more important than the spirit of the climb.

Putting your life at risk to save another is one thing. These climbers decided to put their lives at risk for the summit, why not a fellow climber. I would imagine that you have energy to do one thing up there, help a climber who will probably die on the way down or bag your summit which you payed 65K for. I would hope that if I had energy to make it to the summit I would use that energy to help a fellow climber, for a futile attempt at saving his life or not.

Mitt
Sometimes the journey is worth more than the goal

[szymiec]

True enough Mittens.

I found a good quote from Anitoli Boukreev

"Money and oxygen make it possible to ascend into a zone where it is easy to die, to a place where no one can rescue you if suddenly your own strength is insufficient. The myth of saftey is a delusion for dilettantes. Its better to shatter that myth that perpetuate it with the notion that supplimental oxygen or a top guide can save you."

This from the guy who pulled off the biggest single handed rescue ever on everest in 96. The same guy who went up in the storm to save Scott Fischer and found him in a similar condition to our mate from this year.

It just feels so wrong to think he was passed on the way up. The climbers must have assumed he was dead and likely really wanted to believe it for themselves. Lets not forget, they had all been climbing for over 12 hours above 8000M at this point.

[tracstarr]

We sure do have the right to judge these people. It makes me sick to think that so many people just walked on by. Like Mit said, they thought it better to risk their lives to get to the summit, not risk it helping someone. They would have all had a different attitude if it was them laying there. If someone would have stopped to help in the early stages my guess is it would have made a hugh difference to the outcome. And in the later stages people just left him to die alone. WTF. At least sit with him, don't let him go alone like that. It seriously makes me sick to think of this.

[szymiec]

Its totally frigging sick. Everest is totally frigging sick
http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?id=2069

And this is frigging stupid and so frigging contrived:
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/423466/720300

And Sire frigging Edmund frigging Hillary with his 2 cents, frigging tool:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story ... D=10383276

And finally something i agree with:
http://www.boukreev.org/The%20Oxygen%20Illusion.htm

and what ever happened to the climbers code? I guess these guys were not climbers. frigging wankers!

man im mad this morning. I cant wait to swing my new quarks into mt victoria tomorrow! yes, stress relief, sweet stress relief.

[The Teth]

So, Sharp had made it to the top, but ran out of oxygen. He was still only 300m from the top when he stopped.

1. 300m from the top means a hell of a long way from anywhere with enough oxygen to survive.

2. Climbers would not be carrying much more oxygen than they need to get to the summit and back down, so if they forgo that last 300m to the summit and the 300m back would that really give them enough leftover oxygen to help Sharp?

3. If they did not have extra oxygen for the task, is there any chance that a climber, or climbers, could have carried Sharp back to Camp 3 before they themselves ran out of oxygen? I am no expert, but I expect you must need at least three times as much oxygen to carry someone as you need to drag yourself along.

4. If Sharp ran out of oxygen so soon after smiting, does that not suggest that he also chose the glory of the summit over saving his own life? He must have known how much oxygen he had left.

5. If a doctor speculates hypothetically that if Sharp had been given sufficient oxygen that there is a chance that he would have survived, it does not mean that in reality there was enough bottles of oxygen near the summit to do the job. Hypothetical scenarios generally neglect crucial components of reality. This fact is often conveniently forgotten by the media in the interest of making the story more dramatic.

Although I find this incident very unfortunate, it seems to me that the issue is not that 40 climbers did not try to save his life, for that does not seem to have been possible, so the issue is really that 40 climbers did not choose to risk their own lives further in a token effort which they knew would not succeed. The issue is that they did not try just for the principle of the thing, but instead left him to die alone. Sort of like how today I felt obligated to be with my wife’s cat while the vet put it down, except that I was not risking my own life to stay with the cat while it died.

I think this incident has given a lot of people, like Sir Edmond, an excuse to air the opinions they already held before Sharp died. Not that I disagree with these opinions, but this incident may only bar them out at first glance.

I am just glad that I was not one of the 40 who had to choos between a fruitless effort, and leaving a man to die alone.

Oh, and szymiec, I really liked that last article you linked to.

The Teth

[The Mitt]

I think it comes down to how you define yourself as a human being. Some people define themselves as climbers and others define themselves by the actions that they do when they climb and live.

I would like to say that I would rather try and defy the odds and save a person that has 1 in a million chance of making it, than be able to tell people that I summited the big E. People speak of the odds of this fella making it through a rescue, well when you climb everest isn't that what you are doing? Trying to defy the odds? Why not do it in a more noble way?

I think that these expressions that people are voicing are as important in our every day life and climbing as they are on a summit in Nepal.

Mitt
O.K far too many beer tonight. Going to bed now so I can laugh at my "I wanna be a hippie" post in the morning.

[ben smith]

conrad anker has some good imput on this at supertopo.com- regarding how gnarly (read impossible)- it would be to get him off of there- remember he was above several steep traversing sections at this point and immobile. also its important to remember that 30+ climbers could mean 6 or 7 guided parties- this lowers your number of potential rescuers from 30+ to between 9 and 15 plus 20 gumbies who are only going to get in the way and who you can't as a guide ethically abandon to help this dead soloist. Imagine if a guide had decided to help and endagered or killed his party- now we have 5 or 6 bodies instead of 1. This could have been a frigging nightmare. Kudos to those guides for getting their parties of the mountain safely- I think they made the best possible discision in light of the circumstances.

[thicks]

I didnt have time to read this and acutally it might be a totally different group of climbers, here is the article....

http://www.physorg.com
T

[The Teth]

Sounds like the whole 40 people walking by Sharp on their way to the summit without stopping to help was the oversimplified impression of those who were not there and thus had to fill in all the blanks in their information with conjecture. Thus develops a myth.

It seems like everyone who saw him did what they could for him and each assessed the situation balancing the chances of getting him out alive against their own survival and they all concluded that if they could not get him moving on his own then there was no chance of his survival. If we theorise enough in hindsight I am sure we might come up with ideas of things climbers might have done which might have helped, but I am inclined to respect the judgement of the experienced climbers who were there.

Things might have been different if Sharp had taken a radio or satellite phone and been able to get a distress call out earlier, but by the time anyone found him he could not walk, even with assistance, so there was little chance of saving him.

Teth

[Anonymous]

how do i set a darn avatar on this board? i'd like to put up a picture

[The Teth]

Tall Laure:

While this seems to be a legitimate question, I am made suspicions by the link in microscopic text at the bottome of your post which links to the Cruise On Budget - The Discount Cruises Resource web site.

Could you posibly be spamming us?

The Teth

[The Teth]

I watched the Discovery Channel documentary on the Everest team which included the double amputee and the guy that discovered Richard Sharp on his way back down from the summit. I had suspected before that they had done all they could for him, but after seeing the documentary I am certain of it. It’s not as good as being there, but it is close. Seeing the climber that discovered Sharp balling his eyes out when he finally got down to camp 4 because he had been forced by his own limited oxygen supply to leave the dying man, made some of the comments made by Sir Edmond seem a little crass. I think they probably wasted more time than they should have trying to revive him, potentially putting their own team members at risk.

The other interesting thing about the documentary was that, unlike other documentaries I have seen, this one showed some of the pay your way to the top climbers who might understand the realities of high altitude intellectually, but do not have enough experience to have developed an instinctual understanding of the dangers. No one can be expected to think clearly under the environmental stress of a summit attempt, so if you can’t do it all in your sleep, you should not be up there. However, although we may look down on these people for having Sherpas babysit them on their assent, this documentary also showed how a team without Sherpas can endanger the lives of everyone else on the mountain. On this subject, Edmond may have some valid points.

Interestingly, the double amputee looked like he had more business up there than many of the guys on his team. Granted he needed to make the decent from camp 4 in a makeshift sled assisted by Sherpas, but he got to the summit and back to camp 4 on his own steam with a minimum of babysitting. I think he was an experienced climber who lost his legs to frost bight. Anyway, he was able to assist with an ice axe to control his decent and it still took several Sherpas to get him down, which just helps to show how impossible it would have been to get a comatose climber down from much higher into the kill zone.

Teth

[szymiec]

Yeah i saw that as well. It was good to see an informed perspective on the whole thing.

Everest has really lost its attractiveness to me.

In Kathmandu i was talking to a Sherpa friend Nima, who has been on 11 Everest expeditions and summited 6 times, including May 10 1996. Nima has this gear shop and their was this older guy trying on Millet Everest boots. He had one on his foot, sitting down and said, "yup, these are the ones" I asked him where he was going and he said Everest 07!. Nima and I sorta looked at each other with raised eye brows. I suggested to the guy that he should try on the other one and walk around, he said he didnt have time.

Bought the 850USD boots and left the store. Wanker.

Anywho, i'll be going for my first 8000er in September, Cho Oyu. I will save Everest for the day when i am invited there for free. I figure if that happens, i deserve to be there.

[dcentral]

I read an article by the Canadian who helped the guy off -- I'm to lazy to look up names. Everest sounds like a disgusting dump.

[Scooter]

I have seen some pictures of the base camp and it does indeed look like a dump. oxygen tanks are litterd everywhere.

[The Teth]

My friend Rob from California was part of a Canadian expedition which removed a massive amount of oxygen bottles from Everest. That was in 2000. Rob only made it to camp 2 before getting sick. Actually there is a funny story there, as Rob had to hike out to the nearest village to get air lifted out. Since Rob is of Asian decent, the villagers all thought he was a sick Sherpa and gave a hero’s welcome to Rob’s white partner for “helping the Sherpa off the mountain.” Anyway, I thought it was cool that one of the expedition’s objectives was to remove spent oxygen bottles from the mountain. Granted, the Sherpa’s probably did most of the works, but without a team backing them they would not have the opportunity to clean the place up. I imagine they probably just scratched the surface of the cleanup which needs to be done, but it is nice to know that someone has made the attempt, and that it was a Canadian team.

Teth

[chossmonkey]

My friend Rob from California was part of a Canadian expedition which removed a massive amount of oxygen bottles from Everest. That was in 2000. Rob only made it to camp 2 before getting sick. Actually there is a funny story there, as Rob had to hike out to the nearest village to get air lifted out. Since Rob is of Asian decent, the villagers all thought he was a sick Sherpa and gave a hero’s welcome to Rob’s white partner for “helping the Sherpa off the mountain.” Anyway, I thought it was cool that one of the expedition’s objectives was to remove spent oxygen bottles from the mountain. Granted, the Sherpa’s probably did most of the works, but without a team backing them they would not have the opportunity to clean the place up. I imagine they probably just scratched the surface of the cleanup which needs to be done, but it is nice to know that someone has made the attempt, and that it was a Canadian team.

Teth

That is kinda a funny story about being mistaken for a sherpa. It's too bad that the place is getting so trashed that clean-ups need to be done.

[mike]

There's lots of companies guiding people up Everest- all of them place their clients in a potential personal risk assessment situation of 'do I risk my life, or do I let them die' senario. These companies do it for cash.
See you in hell my friends.

To the folks who sign up for such an adventure, knowing that such a decision is quite probable, but decide to drop the cash in spite of it all. I assure you- their minds were made up before they got off the plane in KTM as to what their decision would be.... The situation was not a surprise- it was the law of averages.
See you in hell too.

These people all suck.
Mike

[szymiec]

mike, so does this mean you are or aren't coming to Cho Oyu with me? I promise i will at least consider helping you if you go down. I do owe you one for helping me get through my hillary heart ache.

[mike]

To be honest Chris, the only thing I wanna climb right now is the stairs to my house. It's been 9 months since I left Canada and 8.5 weeks since I've been offshore in Nigeria.
Annabel and I reapplied for another Canadian Visa on Thursday.
They will give us a yay or ney within 2 weeks.
Yay=Canada
Nay= Annapurna Circuit (Nigerians don't need special permission to go to Nepal)
Cho Oyu is out for me. Right now I'm focused on stuff like- will my wife like McDonald's...will Canadian culture blow her mind, and when's the next big rave in Montreal!
We might do a coast to coaster- if we do... We'll be sure to drop on by!
Mike

[szymiec]

You Go Girl!

Good luck with the bureaucrats and red tape Mike.

C

[szymiec]

You know, although this is a dead horse i think i'll keep beating it.

If these guys are so overcome with summit fever and lack the experience to know their own reserves AND dont have a sufficiently safe auto pilot mode to get down(which only comes with experience); why then should someone who does, sacrifice their dreams of summiting Everest and risk their own lives rescuing someone who shouldn't be there in the first place?

You should never rely on anyone but yourself up there.

I know it sounds harsh but its true.

spray me
Chris

[mike]

Because we are not supernatural... We are simply human. That is all. We give away the right to a clear concience if we choose the path of selfish dreams instead of that of moral correctness.
These people sell their future peace for silly games.
By signing up with guided trips they pretty much let the world know that they arn't capable of doing it on their own. Real mountaineers climb from the North side under their own power, without oxygen. Modern mountaineers strive to climb in small groups, fast, light and smart. These folks are just shooting the dice when they sign up for these high altitude crap shoots- they don't have either the balls, experience or ability to go it alone.
If you'd like a permit for the N side, I can hook you up with one for 4 people for $10,000usd. Transport, base camp tent and kitchen, permits, liason to the mountain, and maps included.
Mike
Ps- Yay!!!! We're goin to Canada tonight!!!!! Actually, we're gonna stop in Holland and do some partying on the way. We're very, very relieved.

[szymiec]

If you'd like a permit for the N side, I can hook you up with one for 4 people for $10,000usd. Transport, base camp tent and kitchen, permits, liason to the mountain, and maps included.
Mike
Ps- Yay!!!! We're goin to Canada tonight!!!!! Actually, we're gonna stop in Holland and do some partying on the way. We're very, very relieved.

Maps? I was just planning on using the bodies as to navigate the route.

Sweet news on getting you and the lady to Canada. I'm really happy for you brother.

C