I personally dislike riddles with too ‘pat’ or too mechanistic A solution- e.g. fountain pens don’t leak at a precisely predefined point. Solutions based on hard physical properties (e.g. ice or ink freeze or melt at some specific temperature) may still fall short of realism (if, for example, they depend on an entire mass of water instantaneously freezing at an external temperature of 32F/0C and don’t account for body heat, such as a pen inside a parka)
“Penniless” implies long term poverty, not using the last of his spare change to pay off a pizza delivery boy that afternoon. People who fast (or near fast) for long periods of time often encounter “refeeding syndrome”: returning instantly to a normal diet can kill them. (Of course, “penniless” doesn’t definitively prove that his larder wasn’t stocked)
Is this a better solution than smelting pennies? At first, I didn’t think so. It’s logical and the outcome is even arguably expected, but it requires specialized knowledge, and it doesn’t make use of the fact that he was a sculptor who worked in metal – but ‘zinc toxicity’ from smelting pennies also requires specialized knowledge of coin metalurgy in the 20th century and of heavy metal toxicity. Besides, the penny smelting explanation requires that the sculptor lived in (e.g.) the US after zinc wafer pennies (1983) had had time to replace the copper ones in circulation. The puzzle doesn’t necessarily imply this, even if it’s told in the US.
Further, zinc is not very toxic. Galvanized iron was used to handle drinking water for generations (most of the US pupulation, for example, was rural until WWII). Galvanized iron doesn’t rust quickly because some of the zinc ionizes into a soluble form, which reacts with rust -yet toxicity was uncommon. Zinc and galvanized iron were also in some parts of common grills, with no reported fatalities, not even for makeshift “tin can” or “trash can” grills.
I am not an expert in occupational heavy metal exposure (but I’ve diagnosed and treated heavy metal exposure in my time) Zinc smelting fumes are indeed considered quite toxic, but they almost always cause a flu-like disease called fume fever, not death. OSHA doesn’t have a maximum airborne exposure limit for Zinc, which tells you something, I think. Acute exposure from welding or brazing galvanized iron rarely reaches the acute body burden of 2g required to cause symptoms, much less the 4-5g required for full fume fever. It’d really be rather hard to actually absorb enough zinc vapor to cause death from a fairly short-term exposure.
My point is: the zinc hypothesis is plausible, but not as likely as it seems at first glance. By contrast, every hospital in the country follows a standard protocol for the refeeding of malnourished or alcoholic patients. Even administering a glucose IV without proper preparation (e.g. a thiamine injection) can cause a very serious encephalopathy, and a “good solid meal” can send a starving person to the ER.
Yet, I still don’t like that solution. It’s not real “lateral thinking” to me.
As for the climber, I think that good “lateral thinking” solutions would include a) he still had a flag/marker that he meant to leave at the apex; b) his (working) camera only had picture up to the location he was found. Reaching the peak would be a powerful hallmark experience - it’s not just another step on the journey. How many people would turn around and go home without some memento for themselves, much less expect everyone to rely on their say-so?