Very well stated.
Yes.
And they knowingly chose to accept this, and assume the same is true of everyone else.
I think even if we accept a “we all know what we are getting into” attitude among climbers we still have the bigger issues regarding the help.
Climbing teams have a moral responsibility, it seems to me, to make sure that the porters who do most of the heavy lifting and ropework are adequately equipped and experienced for their jobs. And if a worker gets into trouble then they must be treated as well as, if not better than, the wealthy climbers.
People enduring poverty will again and again choose unsafe options if it means a possible path out of poverty. We know this. Thus there is additional responsibility from those dangling the money to ensure the danger is mitigated.
Furthermore, that number of people on K2 at one time seems foolhardy for everyone involved.
The 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (known as SOLAS) says at Ch V reg 10
“The master of a ship at sea, on receiving a signal from any source that a ship or aircraft or survival craft thereof is in distress, is bound to proceed with all speed to the assistance of the persons in distress informing them if possible that he is doing so. If he is unable or, in the special circumstances of the case, considers it unreasonable or unnecessary to proceed to their assistance, he must enter in the logbook the reason for failing to proceed to the assistance of the persons in distress”
There is more detail and there have been some amendments post 1974 but you get the gist. As to enforcement, most countries have ratified the treaty and enforce it through their own laws.
Thank you.
I wonder how many prosecutions/investigations there have been under this law, proof must be hard to come by unless a crew member testifies against their own captain.
Pervasive electronics have reached the maritime sphere. The modern electronic bridge has “black box” style recording of everything (video and audio of the bridge, data on all control settings etc) and sends its GPS position and heading to satellite constantly. The days when a ship’s master could easily have his crew conform to omerta and not be contradicted are long gone.
That’s not to say it would be impossible for a ship to turn a blind eye and get away with it, but the chances of being able to do so are increasingly slim.
interesting read (in german) from a Mountaineer, whose brother died at 8.000m on broad peack and he goes there to bring him down next year - quite some thought and perspective on the K2 event.
(prob. easy to google translate or have chat-gpt doing it)
Wouldn’t that be “again” rather than “yet”?
Conquer most of central Asia, making pyramids of the skulls of your enemies, fine, but don’t you dare leave someone behind on a mountain peak!
Well thanks for the reminder of Into Thin Air (whoever mentioned it upthread.) I recently read Into the Wild, Krakaur’s book about Chris McCandless. In that book Krakaur talks about his own experience recklessly climbing the face of The Devil’s Thumb in Alaska and it was pretty interesting stuff. So to hear about the Everest disaster from his POV is something I look forward to.
It’s an excellent read. Be sure to read the intro where he admits that it might be too soon after the event for him to write about it.
Before his climb, while Krakauer was already an accomplished climber he had little to no high altitude experience. Experience in the death zone. I’m quoting from memory from the book, which I hadn’t read in a few years, but when Rob Hall tried to talk him into it he acknowledged that Krakauer had already done some “pretty sick climbs”.
I loved the book and have read it at least 6x, and I’ve also read every other climber’s book who was on the mountain that day. Fortunately Anatoli Boukreev was able to write his book, his counterargument to Krakauer’s accusations, before he died. I also got to meet Beck Weathers several years ago. I posted that picture somewhere here before.
The Into Thing Air movie sucks but the IMAX film was pretty good. Fortunately, even after expending much of their resources for their rescue climbs and to the ailing climbers, the IMAX expedition was able to complete their summit and film. Their book, by David Breashears, is also good.
The scene where Beck Weathers says he got lost in the storm pursuing Blair, and Krakauer gets him with the flamethrower?
It would be a cool re-imagining the story with the Thing hitting high camp - who do you trust to secure your ropes and ladders? Who is attached to your safety line??
Here is a more detailed report that corroborates the story of the Norwegian team.
Thank you. That explains a lot! And yeah, it’s hard to assign blame in that context.
Correction: I can assign blame to the company that let him go up there that unprepared, and possibly to the government for allowing that many people to push the summit at once. But as for the climbers, it sounds like they were in a harrowing situation, they weren’t safe to stay there and attempt a rescue.
Once again, I disagree if we’re talking generalities. I’m with Flämig and Steindl:
“But if a rescue mission had started at this point, the people behind the traffic jam, they have to turn around and they have to go down,” he said. “Nobody would reach the summit.”
“I don’t know if you could bring him down alive. But there must have been a rescue mission,” he said. "If someone is dying, it’s quite normal to stop the expedition to bring someone down. They did not stop."
But how do you convincingly tell fifty people, all in a line behind you, that they need to turn around and go back? In order for that to work, all fifty people have to both hear and understand and agree to reversing course. And how do you assemble six people on such a narrow ridge to carry the man down, without risking the lives of everyone on that Bottleneck? My understanding is that where he was located was trapping people on the bottleneck, and everyone was nearly killed by an avalanche. Where he was hanging was a 70 degree slope into a chasm - everything those climbers did to help him were risking their own lives and the lives of those in the bottleneck. That was my read of that article.
ETA: I started Into Thin Air. Great so far.
Person in front passes it to the person behind him and down the line. Phrased as an order, no budging - basically someone has to step up and make the call. First six in decent shape stay to assist, again phrased as an order.
It might have failed. More might die, than if you didn’t make the attempt. But it is the right thing to sacrifice your life for, if any chance at all exists. Now if the guy had tumbled another quarter mile down and was essentially inaccessible, that’s a different story. But it sounds like while there was a high chance of failure, it wasn’t insanely hopeless.
I dunno - different people, different mental calculations. I might be an idiot to be stubborn about this and maybe put in the same situation I might be a shrieking coward. But I find it pretty distasteful. Hell I would have felt better if they had decided it was too risky, but everyone instead abandoned the whole expedition out of respect for the soon-to-be-dead. Summitting under such conditions is not an achievement worth celebrating.
Well, I’m a cautious person so I wouldn’t be up on that rock in the first place, but I don’t know how I would have responded. I’m amazed anyone could get him off of that slope. That, to me, looked impossible. I’m a person with a high degree of empathy and a high sense of self-preservation, so whatever I did or didn’t do, I’d probably be tormented about it for the rest of my life. We don’t really know what people were really feeling or what their mental calculus was to continue to summit. It could be just the pure idiocy caused by hypoxia making them not know what to do. Where they were standing, they were in imminent danger. My understanding is, it’s not just the physical logistics but the reduced mental capacity as well that makes things so damned dangerous.
Yeah, it’s easy for us to sit at our computers and speculate on what we would have done up there at that time. Yes, I am sure mountaineers make a deal with themselves that they can die doing this activity, but do they also make a deal with themselves that it’s okay to step over a dead or dying individual in order to achieve their goal? What other pursuit says that?
There have been miraculous advances in mountain tech and techniques that allows fit but otherwise average (wealthy) people to reach the top of these mountains and return unscathed, but when it comes to trouble where someone’s life is at stake, then it’s all “Well, there’s nothing we can do! They knew the risks! It’s everyone for themselves up there!”
I agree that’s harsh, but the effect of that might be that mountaineers are better prepared. If the attitude is that they are on their own, then they know they need to plan for every contingency. They need to make sure they have enough supplies and enough team members to be totally self sufficient. They know they can’t count on getting help from others even if those others had it to give. Maybe they will help, but that’s totally optional. If you don’t want the other climbers to step over your body, make sure your own team is skilled enough to carry your body back down. If instead the attitude was every climber helps out, then climbers might skimp on supplies and team members knowing they could count on others to help out if needed.