Which is another point of consideration. These people aren’t skilled mountaineers, and are probably less competent with these things in general. They are less able to assess injury, risk, and rescue measures. Like me, many of them probably would look at a guy hanging upside down over a 70-foot chasm and think, “Well, that’s far beyond my capability to handle.” Many of them have never been in a situation even sort of like this. And they shouldn’t be. I think dragging inexperienced climbers up steep mountain slopes for a fee is a very bad idea. At least in part because they are more likely to get themselves killed or, as in this case, be completely fucking useless when someone else is dying.
As Aspidistra said, Just Don’t Do It
mandatory signage on the jacket (all 4 sides) of everyone going up:
“+” means, I committ to helping others and will abort summit to help - as a benefit, I will be helped by others if in trouble
“-” I will not abort summitting and I am NOT interested in being rescued if I am in trouble.
.
you get to choose before starting the “expedition”
.
If you fail to comply … no more permit for you - and the organizing expedition company will have to pay a $100.000 fine (that you had to deposit beforehand)
does not sound overly complicated
That’s the thing, tho. The subject of this controversy was not a paying member of an expedition. He was the help. He was a porter. I wonder if more effort would have been put in if he was a paying member of one of these teams. Or if he were known to be a westerner.
I found it pretty hypocritical for Flämig and Steindl to lecture everyone on what should have been done. They were on the mountain and turned back, but they could have climbed back to help if they were so worried. They make it sound like they had no idea what was happening until they reviewed drone footage the next day, but I call BS. They were stuck in the traffic jam for hours and surely heard rumors of what was happening. They sent the drone up to film for some reason.
I really think the thing that deserves criticism isn’t individuals’ actions that day, but the commercialization of mountaineering itself, and Flämig and Steindl were willing participants in that. They were happy to take advantage of poorly paid, trained, and equipped porters setting ropes for them, so don’t pretend it’s not also your fault when someone suffers consequences. Climbers need to understand and accept the risks, but there is no way a person who is doing it for money can fairly do that. "The accident on K2 has deeply ashamed many in the mountaineering industry, Arnette said. He lamented that respect for the sport was fading, if not long gone." Boo hoo, the loss of respect is deserved.
If I were king of the mountain, I’d ban the practice of paying anyone to help with a climb. Build a team where everyone has the same goal and is climbing for the same reason.
Agree.
And equip the team with material and training such that if one of the team gets into trouble, the team is able to execute a safe rescue. None of this “…we went ahead and summited because we thought someone else was taking care of business.”
As KotM, I wouldn’t require that. It’s up to each team to decide. You want the team to be every person for themself? Fine. You want to either summit as a team or turn back as a team? Also fine.
The key is that every person is on equal footing to decide what they want and are willing to do. When one person is paying another, that balance is not possible.
yeah - I have this feeling also … were the stricken person a high profile westener e.g. Reinhold Messner, the outcome would have been different … I doubt many people would have “jumped” over this legend, right?
which is a whole different tragety - on top of the original one.
As King of the Mountain I would level off the top into a nice flat platform of at least a few thousand square feet, and install an elevator. You would still be allowed to climb, but the people that took the elevator would be encouraged to point and laugh.
How far down the list of highest mountains would that take it ?
It looks like the governments or permit issuing authority shoulder (heh) a good part of the blame. The early expeditions were massive affairs, and no doubt expensive. But they had the numbers to self-rescue, generally. Now they are often shoe-string affairs, and everything has to go just right.
The amount of trash and waste left at these high altitudes is tremendous, and this even includes dead bodies. They could make a requirement that “pack it in, pack it out” same as all the other national parks and designated recreation areas. To include trash, oxygen bottles, and the occasional dead guy. I’m going to look at my prospective team members a bit differently if the potential is that I will be required to carry them off the mountain. It looks like now it’s just a bit of a circus, and it’s simply a matter of “not my clown, not my monkey”.
So in Into Thin Air they are talking about the leader of Krakaur’s expedition, Rob Hall. One of his Sherpas fell into a 150 foot crevasse before the expedition team even made it to base camp. So Hall left the paying expedition team behind in a filthy lodge to go ahead to base camp and ensure the rescue of the Sherpa. It took 35 people to save that guy.
So you can both see an expedition guide committed to taking care of his own, as well as how bloody difficult it is to rescue people - and K2 is more dangerous than Everest.
Hall would die with his expedition in the 1996 Everest disaster.
If Mount Everest were in the Alps, especially the Swiss portion, an elevator to near the peak (chalet-style hotel with restaurants and a gift shop a short walk down from the peak, with a roped trail to the actual peak) and a cog railway from the nearest large town to the base of the elevator would have been built sometime around the turn of the 19th-20th Century. 
and on the summit a green Rolex backdrop for photo-ops
My thoughts on finishing Into Thin Air. I think Bourkeev’s co-author, DeWalt, was full of shit. He’s using very selective information to exonerate Bourkeev whereas Krakaur is just putting it all out there. But I do think one of the victim’s sisters was accurate in her scathing letter to Krakaur: This is not his world, and he’s grappling for meaning when there isn’t one, which has inadvertently hurt a lot of people, Bourkeev included. The main issue with Bourkeev is that he was a very knowledgeable climber with a very different climbing philosophy than his peers. It’s probably true that he went down that mountain because he was at risk of hypothermia due to his decision not to use canned air. I suspect he has made up another story, that he truly believes, because it’s easier on his conscience.
Just based on reading this book it’s apparent that anyone attempting a climb like this is constantly on the knife-edge of death, even when things aren’t going particularly wrong. Different climbers and expedition teams had different approaches to how they handled when to mount a rescue. But you know, it’s all based on the specific context of the situation.
Expedition leader Rob Hall died trying to get a client down from the summit. It’s arguable he shouldn’t have let the client summit in the first place, and his guilt over that kept him from leaving the doomed client until it was too late. Yet the IMAX team jeopardized their planned expedition and their film to give supplies and oxygen to the rescue efforts. Meanwhile at Camp 4, one of the surviving people in charge had to make a judgement call to leave two people lost in a blizzard 1000 feet from camp to die. They were barely breathing, couldn’t move of their own accord and the most experienced people on the mountain told him he had to let them go or else risk a number of other people dying. Miraculously one of them revived, wandered into camp on his own after being left for dead, and suffered disabling injuries and amputations, but survived. Of course he was offered any help he could get once he came into Camp, but most people on Camp 4 were completely debilitated from their summit descent and couldn’t do much.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, the Japanese expedition team strolled right past a few dying people on another team. No words were spoken. There didn’t seem to be any expectation of help. One member of the Japanese team said, “We didn’t give them anything. We didn’t know them. They looked dangerous.”
So it seems to me, anyone publicly running their mouth off about what should have been done in a crisis situation when they weren’t actually there, really doesn’t have the perspective to give an informed opinion. This includes people taking pictures by drone further down the mountain.
K2 as I understand it is more dangerous than Everest and kills one out of every four people who attempt to climb it. So while that porter’s death is tragic, it’s not unusual for people to die. Anyone attempting that summit is assuming a 25% risk of death. And as soon as anyone gets to a high altitude they are basically dying, as oxygen loss exacerbates hypothermia, and the challenge is getting up and back down before you succumb and die.
Climbing a mountain at super high altitude is a situation so far outside the norm of human experience that it’s hard to guess what you would do.
Very interesting that most of the rage after the Everest disaster focused on Sandy Pittman. Very interesting that it’s focused primarily on a woman right now, despite the fact there were 50 other people on that mountain.
(Yes I am going to read Bourkeev’s book!)
Well said.
::ahem:: Then look under Boukreev.
Lol thanks. I found it. Just catching up on this thread as I jumped in late.
It will be interesting to hear about this experience from the perspective of an expert.
And it’s Krakauer (with an e).
I will be interested in your opinion after reading Bookreev’s book. I will admit I read it before Into Thin Air but I am entirely on Bookreev’s side. The undisputed fact is that there were I think seven climbers still caught in the storm and there was no extra oxygen. Nobody, including sherpas, was willing to try to rescue anybody except Bookreev. He made two trips which I was thinking were without oxygen but I may be misremembering, and brought back three of the climbers. While he may have come down from the summit too early, it is not clear what his instructions were. The problem was certainly not him climbing without oxygen since he didn’t use supplemental oxygen routinely.I also seem to remember that because of him, every client on his team survived.
Edited to correct for potentially faulty memory.