So I’m confused. “Alpine Divorce” is a deliberate attempt by the man to kill his wife/girlfriend, by abandoning her on a mountain? Or it’s the result of depraved indifference to her plight?
This.
The point isn’t that he plans to murder his partner, but that he simply doesn’t care about her when she can’t go any further due to exhaustion. The OP and the attached link describe how the man himself turns away the emergency services and turns off his cell phone because he still wants to reach the summit of the Großglockner late at night in sub-freezing temperatures and strong winds. He then leaves her to get help, but simply leaves her lying there without covering her or finding a sheltered spot. The woman subsequently froze to death. Of course, no one knows whether he intended this. He was convicted in court, but the sentence was very lenient—only probation.
In other words, an “Alpine divorce” means leaving someone behind at the risk that they will suffer so much that they die.
I’d heard of that case and a few other cases of “summit fever” (some of which might have involved women). But I don’t know how to go from a few isolated cases to saying it “isn’t all that rare” and “quite a few women have had this experience”.
Appears that this term took on legs just last month, mostly from reddit.. Haven’t yet been able to push it back past February, but I wouldn’t think it would be much further back. Interesting that (much like the OP), there are posts asking for anecdotes about it. Probably just coincidence.
For people who have a morbid fascination for such stories, I recommend the YouTube channel “Kyle Hates Hiking.” The titles of each episode can be click-baity, which I don’t blame him for as he’s trying to get more viewers, but his actual content is quite good and he is very thoughtful and fair in his assessments of how people screwed up.
As for me, my “almost an alpine divorce” story is a three-way in the tropics. After typing it out, I see it is long and not too suspenseful - the TLDR version is: three of us were stupid on a hike but in the end we were fine, and I really should have known better. Full story below for fast readers/bored people:
I went hiking with a married couple. The wife was going through that period of extended exhaustion that can happen after a bout with Covid, but she really wanted to do the hike up a cinder cone (Pu’u wa’a wa’a, for those who might be interested in doing it themselves when visiting the Big Island - I highly recommend it. About 2000 feet elevation, 8 miles round trip.)
She was determined to do it, just slowly, and half way up when she was needing constant rest stops, she insisted that her husband and I leave her behind and she would catch up to us at the top. So we left her behind. A while later, he and I decided to take different routes off the beaten path to the summit.
We both managed to get lost. Boy did I feel like an idiot - I’ve only done that hike about a thousand times, though never straying off the path before. The husband and I were able to stay in intermittent contact by phone, but his wife was unreachable.
As for me, I knew that there was only so much elevation to be had, so I’d arrive at the top eventually if I kept going up. It was frustrating, though: every time I crested a hill, thinking “aha! This is it!,” I’d see another dip and a hill going a little higher than the last one.
All three of us eventually made it to the top, the wife being the only one of us who stuck to the trail.
Throughout, none of us were ever in real danger of anything except possible embarrassment and the cost of a search & rescue. We were well beyond the one dangerous falling spot (which is well marked), and the temperature was never going to drop to unsafe levels.
Still, I am kicking myself for that episode. A while back, I completed a trek leader training course taught by an experienced professional. We covered risk management, behavioral issues, danger signs in the environment and humans, food strategies, and more. Theoretically, that taught me how to safely lead others on a multi-day trek through challenging conditions. (Not that I’d ever actually want to be a trek leader; I just took the course for fun.)
So I know much better than to let the three of us get separated and lost. Yeesh. I’ll never do THAT again.
The reason could be that the man was recently convicted in Austria and this was widely reported in the press.
It’s just a term used to describe a situation where one partner, usually a male, often more experienced, abandons his partner, typically a female, often less experienced, in a potentially dangerous situation while hiking, camping, or doing some other outdoor activity. Is it a deliberate attempt to kill someone? In most cases, probably not. It’s probably best to think of it as a form of abuse.
Then there are situations like @CairoCarol’s where one or more people just make a boneheaded decision. (No shade. We’ve all made boneheaded mistakes but not everybody has the guts to admit it.)
Marmots are everyfreakingwhere. When I hiked to the Mt. Whitney summit, I got altitude sickness. Not super horrible, but I had a killer headache, and I was barfing my guts ou.t No gender issues, because I was in a group of four women. I made it up the switchbacks to the western side when I got really bad. The strongest one in our group went ahead, and the other two stayed with me. When she’d made it to the summit, the plan was for her to return to assist me back to our campsite at Lake Consolation, and the other two would go on to the summit.
Well, I didn’t want to give up, so I kept going step by shaky step and made the summit just as the first woman was starting back to get me. She was surprised. Fortunately, on our return trip, I felt better almost literally with every step down. So, I know it was just the altitude.
But this was not alpine. No snow. And it’s a very well travelled route, and lots of people to help. Including a whole passel of boy scouts.
My dad and brother were boy scouts, I was a girl scout. In addition, my dad was stationed for his twilight tour at Fort Drum, and he ran my brother and I thorugh winter survival. If you can dig out a saami tunnel, and find boughs to put under you, body heat can make it survivable, even better if you have one of those survival candles in a can [packed with a box of weatherproof matches]
He also had my brother and I go through Outward Bound camps and take Red Cross swimming classes [though with those I think he just wanted a couple hours giggity time with my mom on saturday mornings =)]
The problem isn’t (necessarily) leaving an exhausted travelling companion behind, it’s (definitely) refusing rescue when a travelling companion is in dire straits.
But leaving an exhausted companion behind? Might be the sensible thing to do assuming the intent is to seek help. Dragging someone down off the mountain with you, clawing your way to the point of exhaustion, though? That’s a good way for both people to wind up disappeared and dead. It’s important to separate out those two things.
It’s like the oxygen mask on planes: see to yourself first, then help others. If you go with your instinct to focus on others first and to the exclusion of your own safety, then you may well end up depriving others of their best chance to survive (you).
Did he have anything to cover her with? Was there a sheltered spot, and was she in a position to reach it without having to be physically carried? Could she be physically carried under the circumstances?
Again. The crime, to my mind, was refusing rescue when any reasonable person would have recognized it was necessary or at least prudent. But once you get to the point where another climber/hiker can’t move on their own, the best option might well be to leave them as they are.
There might be a serious amount of callousness in these cases, but other possibilities would be the abandoning person not thinking straight due to their own exhaustion, also grave misunderstandings due to differing communication styles.
Personal experience, not involving mountains but rather hiking in warm weather:
- my wife, not callous at all but tenderly mindful of my welfare, twice in the last decade did not take serious that I was very exhausted, until I collapsed from mild heatstroke/dehydration, because I only said it once, and what I said only once could not be that serious. (When I am in distress, stopping talk is my first item of saving energy)
- I on the other hand, am in danger of not taking serious signs of exhaustion from my wife (she has not collapsed in that manner yet), because she said several times she was exhausted, and in my mind someone who says more than once that they are exhausted, is self-evidently not exhausted.
Somehow, I expected them to figure more prominently in the story you told following that sentence. 
“When Marmots Attack” a novel by Dan Brown
Well, they did…somewhat, but I was getting a bit long-winded.
The passel of boy scouts were camped at Lake Consolation, as we were. We had to walk through their camp the morning we started towards the summit. We kept hearing scout leaders yelling “Don’t feed your oatmeal to the marmots, boys!”
I first saw this term about two weeks ago, on some FB link. I don’t personally know anyone who ever did this, and got the distinct feeling that a couple of freak incidents were being used as evidence of the callous evil of men in general.
I’m surprised this case hasn’t been mentioned. Not an alpine divorce, though. More of an “alpine child abuse to get back at the mother” case.
Maybe read the thread and be surprised no more:
Especially on Mount Washington; that mountain exacts a deadly tribute from those who attempt to conquer it.
Fatalities in this area are dominated by those that occur on Mount Washington, the highest peak in the range. It is notorious for its unpredictable and inclement weather, making it one of the deadliest mountains in the continental United States.
…
Mt. Washington itself has been listed among the ten deadliest mountains in the world.
Attempting an Alpine divorce on Mount Washington could easily backfire into a murder/suicide.
The OP is European. Perhaps the term is historically common over there and has recently jumped into US usage via Reddit et al with news of this Austrian case.
That’s a go-to explanation for a lot of people, but I don’t buy it.
This is based on personal observation, your personal observations may vary.
People who experience loss of control, loss of agency, humiliation, powerlessness, attribute that powerlessness to the intent of the other party, when the actual intent of the other party is orthogonal to what is being experienced.
I saw this repeatedly at two universities, and I generalize to other situations. People in positions of relative power had very clear incentives, which were completely unrelated to sadism or humiliation, and often a complete absence of clear signals or agreed direction indicating that someone would or had experienced powerlessness, humiliation, loss of agency or loss of control.
I generalize this observation to the world at large: loss of control is not a reliable or even common intention. People have their own motives, which mostly aren’t concerned with how their actions affect you.
Anyway (orthogonal to that), I’ve experienced Hypothermia. I guess I consider myself lucky that I always wound up somewhere warm and safe at the end point, it certainly never occurred to me that I was acting stupidly at the time.
I don’t expect any kind of rational action from some person in life-threatening weather, as indicated by situations in which one person dies.
Consistent with what I wrote above, I can certainly see someone pushing on, disregarding the safety and welfare of their companion, and I can certainly see someone pushing on, disregarding their own safety and welfare, and as to which it is in any given situation, I wouldn’t like to say without knowing the people involved.