One out every seven that go up Everest don’t return home - and that applies to Sherpas as much as anyone else.
As bad as the NFL can be, their fatality rate isn’t quite that high.
If the situation in Nepal was such that the only Sherpas working Everest were those that truly desired the work it would be one thing, but poverty is driving some people to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t. I find that a sad situation.
Wait, what? The risk of death is certainly high, but it’s not anywhere near 1 in 7 climbers. What is the context for that number?
I suspect that might be one death for every 7 that summit. But the majority of people on the mountain don’t summit.
Well, staying base camp is relatively safe, but the higher up you go the more risk. So, sure, the base camp Sherpas don’t get killed often - but they don’t get paid as much, either.
From a couple years ago.
That gives a 4% fatality rate for Everest, but even that is misleading. They are comparing the number of people who successfully summit to the number who die. If you want to talk about people who go to Everest and don’t come home, the valid comparison is number of people attempting to summit versus deaths.
And even that number can be misleading, because many of the climbing Sherpas aren’t attempting to summit and stop at one of the lower camps. But their deaths are still included.
But really, trying to assign fatality rates or your odds of returning isn’t too useful. It’s a really dangerous endeavor and Sherpas bear an outsized and unappreciated risk. The numbers distract from that main point.
I just read an article about a cancer survivor, who is at basecamp and wants to be the first mother-daughter combo to summit. Oh by the way, she has asthma.
Now I don’t really care, but I wonder at the financial aspect. She just survived intensive (and probably expensive) cancer treatments, and now they’re paying probably $200K for this adventure. I think I picked the wrong career, somewhere.
what nobody talks about is the risks the underpaid natives take alongside their selfish entitled climbers who force them to take (without insurance)
Actually, it gets talked about quite a bit.
Yes. My last several post in this thread were on that very topic.
Wong Dorchi Sherpa has died near the South col.
Ironically, of the 15 posts that preceded this one in this thread, 12 referenced Sherpas and the risks they take.
Zhang Hong is the third blind man to climb Everest.
For people who find the topic interesting, I just finished The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again by Jim Davidson. It’s very much a first-person account of climbing the mountain, not a lot of analysis of why something went wrong or the “big picture”. He was attempting to climb during the 2015 earthquake and had to be evacuated by helicopter from Camp 1, then returned to try again in 2017.
I’m not a big fan of human interest stories, so some of the passages about wrestling with the decision to climb again, his family dynamics, and dealing with past tragedies dragged a bit for me. But he is an excellent chronicler of the entire process down to the gnat’s ass. He covers the preceding year of training, how one gets from Kathmandu to Base Camp, the entire acclimatization process, what you eat, where you sleep, how you pee and poop, what gear you use. He describes going through the Khumbu ice fall step by step, what the terrain is like between each camp, and how to climb between them. I’ve heard about the camps, the South Col, the Balcony, all that stuff before, but this is the first book that gave me a good picture of them in my head.
The first Everest death of 2022 has already occurred.
Longer article with more information:
Does he cover how much it costs to have so much fun?
For those that are doing it, what is the mystery behind your climb?
Oh, nevermind!
Gilbert is rolling.