Interesting. I didn’t realize that EBC sits on a glacier. I thought it was all rock there.
With the warming, the sudden crevasses don’t sound very safe at all.
The 2023 climbing season is here, along with the first deaths. Three sherpas were killed when an avalanche buried them in (or they fell into) a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall. There are conflicting reports about exactly what happened.
The link below includes video from Base Camp of an avalanche, but I’m not sure that’s what killed them. Usually sherpas are out of the Icefall before sunrise, so it would be surprising if they were climbing it during daylight.
I didn’t read the article yet but it’s a little early in the season. So maybe they were fixing the ladders through the icefall. A guess.
Supposedly the route through the Icefall was already set. Some reports said they were ferrying gear to Camp 1 for clients, and others said they were on their way to prepare the route above Camp 2.
Most likely, there are sherpas currently doing both, so it’s understandable there is confusion on what these particular sherpas were doing.
Just saw this photo of a queue waiting to trudge the last stretch to the summit.
Imagine waiting at the end of that line for your turn of however many minutes you’re allotted up there, while you freeze, your toes slowly shrivel and blacken and altitude sickness and snow blindness make further inroads on what’s left of your health.
I wouldn’t tolerate a line like that for a foot-long lobster roll and the best clam chowder ever made.
That is insane.
It’s hard to see. Do they go back down a different path?
I skied down.
That’s from a previous year, there haven’t been summit attempts yet in 2023.
And no, they don’t go down a different path. This is part of what causes such massive jams. Everyone going up has to wait while one person comes down.
Rob Hall’s body is still somewhere there, and possibly in the frame of this picture. Unless someone pushed it off. I doubt it’s been brought down - that would require a tremendous effort.
Scott Fischer might be there too.
I wonder how many frozen bodies a climber has to step over or around on their way to the summit?
And here’s a gruesome concept: people who die up there, their bodies freeze solidly. And when a frozen corpse falls off the mountain, as can happen with the changing seasons and strong winds, when their falling bodies hit the mountainside they shatter and explode. Just like an ice cube thrown against the sidewalk.
From here, Dead Bodies Exposed on Mount Everest as Glaciers Melt.
“Most of the dead bodies we bring to the towns, but those we can’t bring down we respect by saying prayers for them and covering them with rock or snow,” Tenzeeng Sherpa, treasurer of the Nepal National Mountain Guides Association, told CNN.
Ang Tshering Sherpa recalled one difficult excursion in particular where his party carried a body weighing 330 pounds from a location near Everest’s peak. While it was difficult, he felt a duty to take the body off the mountain.
“But we, the operators, feel it is our duty,” he told CNN. “So whenever we find them, we bring the bodies down.”
So it’s no longer true that it’s lonely at the top?
No, they don’t. The bodies are desiccated and don’t shatter. They would have to be full of frozen water at a much colder temp to do that.
Plus humans have bones
Sounds like around 200, but I’m not really sure how many are in a direct path or near the direct path of people climbing.
Frozen Graves: The Bodies on Mount Everest
Is it even possible for someone weighing 330 to summit Everest? I mean, apparently not in this case…
You get a really big guy, someone over six feet, plus any gear they’re wearing… sure, it’s possible. Average American football player is tipping the scales at around 245 lbs these days according to a quick google (said google also informed me the heaviest was 6 foot 6 Aaron Gibson at 410 during his playing days) Shaquille O’Neal is 324. Those guys aren’t flab, they’re athletes that carry a lot of muscle mass (well, these days maybe not so much O’Neal, but anyone 7 foot is going to weigh a lot). Edmund Hillary was 6 foot 5 so I’m sure he was well over 200 lbs and probably closer to 300 than 200.
So… big, physically fit guy and dressed in a lot of cold weather gear. A bit of an outlier, but entirely plausible.
Thanks, I was familiar with the idea that someone who weighs 330 isn’t necessarily fat/unfit, but we’re talking about one of the most physically demanding challenges the human body can reasonably withstand, and my assumption is that at high altitude, muscle mass is going to become less and less effective in terms of power to weight ratio. In other words, there probably is an upper limit, and 330 could be it - an outlier, to be sure. Not disagreeing with you - I appreciate the information, thank you.
Yikes. And I thought the trail/line up Angels Landing in Zion NP was bad!
Looks fake. If not, I’m quite amazed. They should install escalators.