Vesna Vulovic was a household name to me from an early age, being a Guinness World Records buff as a kid. However, I never really understood her record of falling without a parachute, since she fell inside part of the fuselage. In this category, with whatever materials and dimensions surrounding the falling human, there could be any level of mitigating factors, in a crumble zone type of way.
There have been a handful of wartime incidents of airmen falling from planes without parachutes or any other protection, and surviving, thanks to tall conifers with horizontal layers of springy boughs, heavy snow under the trees, and incredible luck. None of these were from 10 km, but they are more worthy to me. It’s not as if a person falling from 10K would hit the ground any harder than someone falling from 1K.
Then there’s the case of a worker falling from an extremely tall industrial chimney onto rubble, and surviving. This is also more impressive than the Vulovic case (not taking anyhing away from her ordeal here).
10km altitude are irrelevant for a fall (except for the freezing part) … google tells me that you reach terminal velocity after 450m … so, the 9,550m above that do not really alter your chances…
Well, the resident here had things a bit garbled (she’s 95, after all). Her daughter is NOT a climber, but a trekker. She went with a group of ovarian cancer survivors to trek from Kathmandu to Everest base camp to bring attention to the research being done. Her slides were very interesting, and I’m impressed that someone 66 years old has that kind of conditioning.
When the woman mentioned above was sitting on the deck of their teahouse in the last town before base camp, a gentleman approached her to chat. Turns out, he was the Hungarian who later died in his summit attempt. His climbing method was to not use oxygen tanks, and this time it killed him.
Just in case anyone is wondering - it is possible to summit Everest, and other peaks in the death zone, without supplemental oxygen. Reinhold Messner was the first to do it in 1978 - of course those were the days where one would not have to stand in line for a few hours awaiting their turn at the top.
In the 1970s, Messner championed the cause for ascending Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen, saying that he would do it “by fair means” or not at all. In 1978, he reached the summit of Everest with Habeler. This was the first time anyone had been that high without supplemental oxygen and Messner and Habeler achieved what certain doctors, specialists, and mountaineers thought impossible. He repeated the feat, without Habeler, from the Tibetan side in 1980, during the monsoon season. This was Everest’s first solo summit.
I suspect that some people can summit Everest without oxygen, but that not everyone can do so. Someone like Messner might have a genetic quirk that makes them better suited for high altitude vs. most of the rest of us, just as some people are taller and have an advantage in the NBA that the rest of us do not.
Absolutely. It’s not just the Sherpas and Colombian villagers who have lived for many generations at high elevation, there’s significant genetic variation among the rest of us too. You need to be both very fit and be lucky with genetics.
Thinking also of the thread about the most famous person that knows you, Ed Viesturs comes to mind. My wife knows him and used to work with him on a number of work promotions. Ed is the only American to climb all of the 8,000 meter peaks without oxygen and only the fifth person of any nationality to do that overall.
I saw a show, probably NOVA, about him and his climb prep. The things that stood out were that his lung capacity was 40% greater than the average person and his VO2 max was something like 70-80% higher than average. So yeah, some people luck out genetically.
For genetic differences like Ed’s, ones that are not externally obvious, I wonder how many other people are similarly blessed but have never had an urge to climb a tall peak and thus have no idea?
His lung capacity and VO2 max are obviously associated with high cardio performance.
In terms of surviving at high altitude given adequate fitness, there certainly appear to be genetic factors influencing susceptibility to HAPE (the main killer) and debilitating AMS. I don’t think anyone has untangled these in any detail, so I don’t think anyone knows to what degree these are independent from good genetics for cardio performance. HAPE and AMS are secondary to hypoxia, so there’s obviously likely to be some correlation. But it’s possible you could be a couch potato with poor fitness but good innate capacity to survive at 8000m, if you can train yourself fit enough to make it to 8000m.
I lived in New Hampshire for about 7 years in the 1970s, and that mountain was just a short drive away. Mt Washington on a sunny day appears to be a pretty unchallenging climb. And during the summer you could drive to the summit, which my family did on several occasions. The danger has never been in the actual trail, it’s in the fact that the weather can change dramatically in the blink of an eye.
One fine August day a couple months after I graduated high school, my boyfriend and I decided to climb Mt. Washington. We were super sensible kids, and even though we only intended a day hike we brought a tent, propane stove, blanket, food, and water. My parents were out when we decided to go, so I left them a note telling them where we had gone.
It was a gorgeous day to begin with, and a nice hike. But when we got to the Lake of the Clouds Hut, we were advised that the temperature had dropped 50 degrees en route to the summit. So we did the smart thing and turned around.
My mother was murderously angry with me when I got home, telling me I was incredibly irresponsible to attempt the climb. I was pretty pissed at her, too, since I did it in a totally risk-averse manner that pretty much guaranteed that, barring an unpredictable freak accident, I was going to be just fine.
Yeah, you should have been praised for being smart in the first place with your planning and supplies, and also for knowing when to turn back and doing so. For many people, the idea of climbing a mountain, any mountain, is a fool’s errand. It’s “[insert any mountain]: Just Don’t Do It.”
Messner would still be laying somewhere on Mt. Everest if it weren’t for Peter Habeler … who pretty much dragged him down '78 from the summit after Messner became snow-blind from making photos for his Slideshow-Presentations that made him later world-famours.
a couple of 100.000 people who live all their lives above 4-5.000m in the Chile/Bolivia/Peru triangle … short stocky bodies with big chests …
Speaking of blessed, Brian Blessed has made three attempts to climb Everest without oxygen but did not summit. He managed to get up to 28,200 feet (8,600 m) in 1993 and 25,200 feet (7,700 m) in 1996. If ever there was a man with the lung capacity for Everest, you’d think it would be him.
