Well said. I’m quite surprised and disappointed that you were the only one to say it. They chose summitting as more important than saving someone’s life. I hope there is a book about this and these people have to deal with more and more people knowing what types of human beings they are.
I am complete agreement with Spiny Norman.
Whenever a situation like this comes up, someone that’s read Into Thin Air always makes a point of just how dangerous a rescue on Everest can be for the rescuers.
And yet, recent history has shown multiple examples of cases where people that have been written off as “hopeless” have in some cases even walked back down under their own power, and I’m not aware of any rescue-related fatalities on Everest. So, I’m left with the conclusion that people on Everest tend to be siding slightly towards their own safety than the overall survival rate of climbers on Everest. Which is fine. I don’t expect people to put themselves in grave danger to help others. Frankly, I would never do the same and take extraordinary risks to help someone.
But to summit when one of your own party is suffering on the slopes below you? Unconscionable. If you’ve got the energy to summit, you’ve got the energy to at least make an effort to bring this woman back down.
Nobody’s tried my idea yet - to be the first person to reach the summit without climbing the mountain. How? Parachuting down from orbit.
On a serious note, I agree that it might be the difficult but correct decision to abandon somebody so that the rest of the team might survive. But abandoning somebody so that the rest of the team can keep climbing towards the summit? No, that’s wrong. Survival trumps saving others. Reaching the top doesn’t. If you have the type of personality that becomes so obsessed with a goal that you’re willing to sacrifice somebody’s life so you can reach a purely symbolic goal, you have serious psychological probelms.
Yes, if you are on the way *down *and stopping might kill all of you.
When you are on the way up, the only right choice is to stop, try to help, and blow off the summit. If then, you find that your help may kill one or all of you, then it is a tough choice, and I will accept either choice. I don’t want to second guess anyone having to make *that *choice. But when the choice is between summiting and *trying *to save someone, then you are immoral and a killer tool, IMHO.
I would like to state that my previous post does not absolve the Nepali party the woman was on.
However, from what I’ve read it seems like she was on a Nepali national climb - ie, the country sent them up there. Nepal has had some bad press recently - heirs of the throne killing the king, etc.
I’m pretty sure that in the early days of Everest, most parties would have left those less able to survive, because it was geopolitically important to get up the mountain.
That’s how it has been, and I’m glad that now people are realizing the summit is less important than saving the lives of their party members. Even as late as 1996, Krakauer writes about a Taiwanese party who were fairly unconcerned about loss of members, and then writes about a Japanese party coming up the North Face who passed an Indian party who were dying of exposure. This happening as the first Japanese woman to attempt the Seven Summits died on the other face of the mountain.
High altitude climbing is hard stuff. Krakauer talks about climbing up the mountain past corpses that were 15 years old.
At this point, though, as much as a guide wants to get his people to summit, s/he should not leave anyone. Don’t take people that can’t hack it. Westerners pay upwards of $65,000 to summit, but it’s not worth it to not bring most of the people home with you.
I’m glad that now the media is exposing people being left for dead and then rescued, because then it might bring more caring actions to that mountain. Back in the old days, where people died, people didn’t care. It was all “those climber people” and I’m glad there’s some accountability.
I don’t understand the consternation around leaving someone to die who has made an elective decision to risk death for personal glory.
The only criterion that can be brought to bear to determine if it was right or wrong is whether or not an agreement about abandoning versus rescuing was made in advance.
Everest, in particular, is a poster child for the notion that notoriety is worth taking an elective risk, but the rule applies generally to anyone who decides fame and glory are worth the purposeful risk of danger.
It should be made clear, of course, to all team members what the rules of engagement are going to be. But if they are clear, there is no particular nobility achieved by rescuing and no particular ignominy should be ascribed to abandoning someone to die–they have already weighed that risk and decided to take it. Choosing to take that personal risk is the reason for the notoriety achieved by getting to the top. You don’t get to take the notoriety if you succeed but plead damsel-in-distress if you fail, particularly if your distress is going to cheat someone else out of their glory.
In no way is this situation analagous to refusing to help someone who is in distress from an external circumstance beyond their control. This young woman placed herself in harm’s way as a freely elected choice. Other climbers on the mountain have no more duty than you or I to abandon their personal quests to save the less competent from their personally chosen pickles as long as the rules are made clear a priori.
That is silly.
One places oneself in harm’s way by driving a car.
It annoys me to have fragments of my posts taken out of context.
In the first sentence I said, “…an elective decision to risk death for personal glory.” (emphasis added to help you out)
The inability to understand the difference between activities of daily living and thrill- or glory-seeking electively-chosen activities is the source of your confusion and the reason the situation upsets you.
Thanks for explaining. I am easily confused.
You’re very, very right.
Thanks Spiny. I was a member of Colorado Mountain Search and Rescue. And I couldn’t agree with you more.
Coincidentally, at the dentist’s office the other day I was reading about the rescue of Lincoln Hall. They had to physically tie him to a stake in the ground to keep him from jumping off the mountain. He was so delusional, he thought he was on a boat, and kept trying to take his clothes off.
The group who brought him down, chose to bring him down rather than summit. A group of Itlians on their way to the top passed them by and when they were asked to help out, they answered “Sorry, no speak English” and continued on to the summit. Later, after Hall was rescued, they saw the same Italian group socializing at base camp, speaking English quite fluently. Dickheads.
I can understant that if you are coming down and you have barely enough resoures to get your team back safely, you might have to make the haunting decision to leave someone behind so that you can survive. But first thing in the morning on the way UP when you have all that gear? I can’t imagine leaving someone behind.
Well, you seem to be, because you keep equating normal, everyday activities (driving a car) and rare, unexpected catastrophes (levees breaking), with willful, mindful, premeditated, carefully planned for yet incredibly dangerous acts of thrill seeking.
For the record, I think they should have helped her. But these analogies you keep making are rediculous.
My sense is that Everest in particular has long since deteriorated into a magnet for all sorts of amateurs with an assortment of causes (“We are climbing to further the democracy of Nepal!” ((Hello?)) and silly angles (“I was the first one-legged Migraine Sufferer to make the Summit with One Hand Tied Behind My Back…”). While it may be generous to stop and help someone from a different Team, I think it’s an unreasonable expectation for me to throw away my dreams for the sake of your incompetence. Within a Team, of course, this sort of decision can and should be undertaken in advance. But in the case of the Italians, e.g., we are not talking about the Priest v. the Samaritan stopping to help the guy who was mugged while minding his own business. Everyone on Everest is there of their own volition for their own personal reasons and chose in advance to risk their own life. They shouldn’t expect to ruin someone else’s dreams.
You tried; you died. It was your life to spend. For thrill and glory seekers, this is the basic deal.
I see the day when Everest will be climbed by escalators in pressurized tubes, with coffee and oxygen available at little “base camp bistros” along the way up. Then you could treat people who collapse on the way up like traffic accident victims.
Ludicrous argument. So let’s, I dunno, just leave race car drivers to burn to death inside their wrecked cars?
No. Just because someone accepts risk does not absolve you of your obligation to be a decent human being. Her party should have abandoned the summit and attempted a rescue.
By that logic, anyone who made a mistake would not be worthy of rescue.
I don’t mind failing to achieve my goal if there is a human life at stake.
That’s admirable, but it doesn’t seem to be the consensus view of Everest expeditions. From all I’ve read, the prevailing ethics of rescue attempts on Everest just seem to be different from the accepted norms for mountain climbing pretty much anywhere else. Many climbers are much more cold-blooded (heh) about abandoning a fellow climber on Everest, even in situations where a rescue attempt wouldn’t be unacceptably risky to themselves, than you would expect them to be in a normal mountaineering situation.
I don’t know whether it’s because Everest has a higher proportion of less-skilled amateurs involved in summit attempts, because Everest expeditions tend to be quite expensive, or for some other reason.
I don’t say that this death-or-glory attitude is a good one for Everest climbers to adopt, or that Spiny Norman is wrong to be disgusted by it. But at least it should not be surprising, and anybody seriously considering an Everest ascent should take it into account. Unless, as Chief Pedant notes, a team has agreed in advance that they will sacrifice a summit attempt to look after a teammate in trouble, nobody should take it for granted that they will.
If it is personal glory one is after, I think it is far more glorious to save a person’s life than to climb to the top of a big rock. I think most people would agree. Anyone who agrees ahead of time, explicitly or implicitly, to let another person die so that they can achieve a sports victory is at best a world class asshole and at worst a psychotic.
I understand your points, but agreeing to become barbaric doesn’t make barbarism acceptable. There is nothing wrong with sport, nor with sport that risks injury, but civilized people organize their sports so that when a man or woman goes down the play stops until that person is attended to.
Oh, I know. It just seems tragic to me that The Glory Of Everest has practically made it almost routine to leave someone behind when you don’t absolutely have to. 
It is admittedly tragic. Perhaps there should be a qualification/experience requirement for Everest climbers, as there is for, say, runners in major marathon races, so that the mountaineering ethos isn’t disrupted by large numbers of wealthy climbing novices who pay large sums of money to participate in Everest expeditions. Because I would imagine that a lot of the Summit-Or-Bust attitude comes from guides who feel a certain amount of commercial pressure to get their inexperienced patrons successfully up the mountain, no matter what.