Carnage on Mt. Everest

Victorianna Writer

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I can remember way back when Chris Bonnington's various attempts to climb Everest were massive news stories. Then back in the 1990s, it seemed that people were forever climbing Everest and setting more and more improbable records -- first 60-year-old to climb Everest, and so on.

Now hoards of people are doing this?

What on earth is going on?
People want that 15 minutes of Fame I suppose.
 

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They mentioned today on the news (well yesterday, I'm having insomnia atm) that they were going to set it where you have to get a permit or license before you can climb up there and be an experienced climber. It's crazy about what's happening up there.
Nepal already works with permits to climb the mountain. The permits ain't cheap (11,000 USD per person) and Nepal granted 381 people a permit this year.
And besides that, weather wise May is the month where the chances are best to reach the summit. So when the weather was good to the end of May a lot of those 381 permit holders gave it a go, knowing this could be the last chance this season.

Unfortunately 381 persons with a permit means more then 3810 people will be on the mountain in a season. Each expedition needs at least 2 camps. Which means a lot of Sherpas on the mountains as carriers and guides.

You can't impress your friends with a trip to Borneo, Bolivia or New Zealand any more. So let's climb the Mount Everest next year.
 

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This is sad for the family members of the fallen climbers, and I extend my condolences to them.

I am traveling home at the moment from a long trip and have heard a fair amount about this on public radio. I sat in the hotel lobby this morning in a hotel in West Virgina that had the FoX "news" morning show, and this event received some attention on that show as well. I have no idea why this is receiving so much air time. While it is unfortunate, the attention paid to it is disproportionate to its relevance to anything else going on in the world. In one day more than eight times as many people died in the US due to firearm discharges.

At the same time little attention is being paid to the sherpas who risk their lives on the mountain. Also, for some of the people in that part of the world the mountain is a sacred place. Having this many people treating it like a trash heap has a nontrivial impact. Finally, some mention here was given about having to leave the bodies on the mountain due to the conditions. It should be said that the religious practices of many of the sherpas place a high value on recovering the bodies of dead family members. When a sherpa dies on the mountain a huge amount of effort is expended to retrieve their remains. What is happening on the mountain benefits many people there but it comes at a price.

Side note: what kind of person decides to wake up to all the hate being spewed on fox news?
 

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What fame is there in doing something many more people have done before? If you are setting a new record that is one thing, but the 198,213,878th thirty something to climb everest is not exactly impressive.
Depends, surely? I think most people would regard completing a marathon as quite an accomplishment in itself, regardless of how many people had previously completed it or how their times might compare.

Obviously at the higher levels of marathon running it's different, and with people presumably paying attention to their rivals' times too, and existing records, but for most people achieving the goal of completing the marathon and trying to beat their own best times will rightly be regarded, by themselves and others, as significant achievements in their own right.

I'd be impressed by someone who's climbed Everest, certainly, no matter how many times it's been done before.
 

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They mentioned today on the news (well yesterday, I'm having insomnia atm) that they were going to set it where you have to get a permit or license before you can climb up there and be an experienced climber. It's crazy about what's happening up there.
They should make the licenses free - but put the office that issues them on the top of another, less famous Nepalese mountain.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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What fame is there in doing something many more people have done before? If you are setting a new record that is one thing, but the 198,213,878th thirty something to climb everest is not exactly impressive.
I suppose that, for as long as humans exist anyway, Everest will always be the highest spot on Earth you can stand on no matter how many people have stood there.
 
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Kara Spengler

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This is sad for the family members of the fallen climbers, and I extend my condolences to them.

I am traveling home at the moment from a long trip and have heard a fair amount about this on public radio. I sat in the hotel lobby this morning in a hotel in West Virgina that had the FoX "news" morning show, and this event received some attention on that show as well. I have no idea why this is receiving so much air time. While it is unfortunate, the attention paid to it is disproportionate to its relevance to anything else going on in the world. In one day more than eight times as many people died in the US due to firearm discharges.

At the same time little attention is being paid to the sherpas who risk their lives on the mountain. Also, for some of the people in that part of the world the mountain is a sacred place. Having this many people treating it like a trash heap has a nontrivial impact. Finally, some mention here was given about having to leave the bodies on the mountain due to the conditions. It should be said that the religious practices of many of the sherpas place a high value on recovering the bodies of dead family members. When a sherpa dies on the mountain a huge amount of effort is expended to retrieve their remains. What is happening on the mountain benefits many people there but it comes at a price.

Side note: what kind of person decides to wake up to all the hate being spewed on fox news?
It is strange as the Daily Show covered it this week as well.
 

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Depends, surely? I think most people would regard completing a marathon as quite an accomplishment in itself, regardless of how many people had previously completed it or how their times might compare.

Obviously at the higher levels of marathon running it's different, and with people presumably paying attention to their rivals' times too, and existing records, but for most people achieving the goal of completing the marathon and trying to beat their own best times will rightly be regarded, by themselves and others, as significant achievements in their own right.

I'd be impressed by someone who's climbed Everest, certainly, no matter how many times it's been done before.
As was pointed out before though the feat is not that impressive, you can all but have someone carry you up the mountain. Try doing that in a marathon.

Often doing a marathon run has some emotional component to it as well. They did it in memory of someone or to raise money for xyz cause.
 
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Kara Spengler

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They should make the licenses free - but put the office that issues them on the top of another, less famous Nepalese mountain.
Nice idea but they will just pay sherpas to get them to the office.
 
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Kara Spengler

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I suppose that, for as long as humans exist anyway, Everest will always be the highest spot on Earth you can stand on no matter how many people have stood there.
Who cares how high something is? I grew up near a mountain that was the most climbed in north america (or was it the world), Mt Monadnock, yet we still climbed it. In fact there would usually be some story in the local paper about someone who had climbed it every day since whenever. It was not that it was tall or anything (unless you were a geologist and recognized the name), it was that it was part of the character of the area. The type of mountain that people even consider spiritual in a way.
 
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Who cares how high something is?
Well obviously some people do. :p Why do you think James Cameron hired a submarine to take him to the bottom of the Challenger Deep? He wasn't the first person to go there, and he accomplished nothing of any scientific import. With the money he had to spend, he could've visited the bottom of literally any trench on Earth; so he chose the deepest one because he could.

Some of the people where you grew up doubtless climbed that mountain cuz it was the tallest thing around that they could actually access. Others with the same motivation have enough money to go climb taller mountains on the other side of the world.
 

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Some of the people where you grew up doubtless climbed that mountain cuz it was the tallest thing around that they could actually access. Others with the same motivation have enough money to go climb taller mountains on the other side of the world.
I suppose some could not afford to go to, oh, Mt Washington (also in NH) or one of the other 'interesting' trails in the area up there. Not likely, but possible. My point was it is not a mountain whose claim to fame has anything to do with its height, if anything near that it is that it is so accessible.
 

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This neat video out of the series "Adam ruins everything" covering the trashed Mount Everest popped up today in my Youtube stream - by the way three months old (but it seems he gots some major facts wrong):

 
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At $11,000 just for the permit and another $35,000+ for the rest of the costs, few are going to blow that cash & chance to reach their personal achievement to help someone who is all but dead. Sad....unimaginable for most of us, but should not be surprising.
 
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At $11,000 just for the permit and another $35,000+ for the rest of the costs, few are going to blow that cash & chance to reach their personal achievement to help someone who is all but dead.
That's not a fair assessment of the majority of those fatal situations. The areas on the mountain where people are most likely to run into serious trouble are extremely perilous for all. When someone in those zones falters, for whatever reason, there's not much other climbers CAN do, even if they wanted to help. Everyone is on a knife-edge of survival and stopping only endangers both parties.
 

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A while ago, I read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s account of the 1996 storm on Everest that hit when many groups had already ascended quite high. His group leader, Rob Hall, died as did 3 group members and 4 other people. I will never forget reading about how sherpas risked their lives trying to rescue climbers, Hall’s satellite call to his pregnant wife, and my disgust when I reached the end of the book.

I understand setting physical goals and challenging yourself to the limit. But I don’t understand doing it in a way that has a significant chance of death, even with proper conditioning and training. I kept thinking about his wife, at home and pregnant with their first child, and I can’t see climbing Everest for non-sherpas as anything other than vainglorious and self-centered.
 

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At $11,000 just for the permit and another $35,000+ for the rest of the costs, few are going to blow that cash & chance to reach their personal achievement to help someone who is all but dead. Sad....unimaginable for most of us, but should not be surprising.
From what I understand they are already dead and the question is about retrieving the bodies.