Nobody, including sherpas, was willing to try to rescue anybody except Bookreev.
To be clear, and I’m pretty sure this is what you meant, Nobody, including sherpas, was willing to try to rescue anybody stuck on the south col except Bookreev. Sherpas did attempt to save Hall and Fischer who were stranded above the south col.
it is not clear what his instructions were
When they were lower on the mountain, didn’t Fischer discuss this point with Boukreev? Argue, even? If so then from that we know at least that it was a point of contention.
I also seem to remember that because of him, every client on his team survived.
I read about that in Into Thin Air and I really didn’t detect a lot of anger from Krakauer over Boukreev, or any character assassination as is claimed…though perhaps some bewilderment. Krakauer was very much an amateur compared to that guy, so I can see how Boukreev would bristle at how he was characterized in the book, but I didn’t feel that Krakauer was trying to hide anything, just report what he observed. And he dutifully reported Boukreev’s heroic actions while he was passed out on a tent. Unfortunately Krakaur’s obvious trauma and limited experience made it difficult for him to be objective. I understand why he had to write the book, but I would have been one of those people telling him to wait.
There was one climber that Krakauer encountered who IIRC could barely see. He was told to wait at that place by his guide. Of course the guide wouldn’t come until it was too late, but Krakauer and the client didn’t know that. Krakauer asked the climber to come down with him, and had nearly persuaded him, but ultimately the client chose to stay on that rock and wait for his guide.
The widow of that man held Krakauer accountable for his death. Yet if Krakauer had pushed the issue and helped him down, they both would have perished in the storm. We know that because by the time he actually got within spitting range of Camp 4, Krakauer could barely breathe or see three feet in front of him, and was so hypoxic he mistook a stranger for a friend. As far as I can tell, Krakauer nearly died in that storm himself. He was one of its victims, wholly unequipped to render aid.
I understand loved ones needing somewhere to place their anger but it’s just indicative of people judging others’ actions with the benefit of hindsight and without understanding context.
Just to clarify, I don’t doubt that Fischer and Bookreev had some disagreements during the expedition. I also think that the language problem was a real issue. I did find it interesting that so many of those who died were the guides. To me it shows their dedication to getting their clients down. I think Bookreev may have gotten criticized more because he survived but he should get the credit for also putting himself at risk to get the clients back alive.
I also think that if you read these books it drives home just how crazy it is on the mountain and how difficult it is to try and rescue another person. And again, Everest is not nearly as technical a climb as K2. Trying to carry someone when you are on a 70 degree slope without falling off the mountain is crazy. I just see K2 starting to become a tourist climb like Everest. I really don’t get it. I don’t understand the bragging right when you hire people to go ahead and fix ropes for you.
I watched the movie Everest. It wasn’t great. There wasn’t much of a story. I think it’s hard to adapt a cast of characters that large into a movie. I was hoping it would help me solidify what I read in the book, but I couldn’t see who was who and what was going on half the time.
Though it did make me more interested in Beck Weathers’ book.
In fact now that I think about it, I think it was Weathers who couldn’t see, who didn’t go down with Krakauer, and the angry loved one was related to Krakauer thinking he’d seen Andy Harris arrive safe. It’s hard to keep it all straight.
I don’t buy the “risking their lives” argument. They are already risking their lives to try to climb the mountain. They’ve made the conscious choice that trying to summit is worth risking their lives.
But, they say they couldn’t be expected to try to save him because that would be “risking their lives”?
The “risking their lives” argument means that they value their personal goal of summiting over someone else’s life.
I thought the same way too until I did some reading on the subject. K2 might as well be Mars as far as we’re concerned.
As I said before, you’re already dying at that altitude. Every single person at that altitude is dying. How fast you die is purely the luck of the draw. The trick to surviving is to get up and down before you finish dying. Anything that interrupts that process just adds to the odds you’re going to die. To expect a dying person to engage in a futile effort to save someone closer to death than they are is pointless and easily tips the scale from “already dying” to “dead.” Some highly experienced people, like Sherpas, can pull it off sometimes, depending on the context. But they are not miracle workers and cannot save everyone.
The Bottleneck is one of the most dangerous parts of K2. It is at extremely high altitude at a sixty degree slope prone to avalanches. So its risk is relatively higher compared to other parts of the mountain. Most of the people who die on K2 die in the Bottleneck.
The reality is that the people who spent two hours blocking everyone’s path to pull that guy up into the path seriously jeapordized the lives of the dozens of people stuck in the Bottleneck, all of whom were steadily dying of hypoxia and hypothermia. The pathway was so narrow that it couldn’t accommodate more than one person at a time, so turning everyone around would be impossible. You couldn’t even get a team of six people to stand in that narrow of an area to carry the body down - and it would have to be carried down a 60 degree incline. How exactly do you envision that happening?
I’m generally in agreement that people should be saved whenever possible. But in this case they’re just lucky nobody else died in the attempt to save him (and a clear attempt was made.)
Here’s the thing. There’s climbing a mountain and “risking your life” that supposes a reasonable chance of surviving, assuming you do everything right and have some luck. That’s the mode most of these climbers operate in all the time. Then there’s attempting to rescue someone in the death zone where “risking your life” means that you and the rescuee are both highly likely to die.
I have a number of mildly risky hobbies. I ride my motorcycle inn remote areas knowing that I run a small risk of injury or death. If suddenly understood that my rides carried a significant risk of death, well I wouldn’t go. There are many levels of risk. Everyone draws a line somewhere.
You really don’t understand this at all. And you don’t even seem to be trying. Going backwards was not an option. And after at least two hours without oxygen that guy would likely not even make it to camp. Remember all those people you think would be able to reverse course? You have to wait for every single one of those people to climb back down before you got your turn. There’s no way to scoot around them. Not only the dying guy would have to wait but everyone else would have to wait in the Death Zone, slowly dying. You’re expecting dozens of people to just sacrifice their lives to a corpse.
I didn’t intend to diss you, I’m just frustrated. We’re not unfeeling automatons who would never help a soul. There’s just so much context missing in these conversations. None of us know what we’d do in such a situation until we lived it.
Look, I get that there are extreme practical impossibilities when you’re actually there, but it’s just very distasteful to me, admittedly an ignorant layman posting from the comfort of my own home, that people would step over a dead or dying man to go on and take a photo at the summit with their fist in the air or whatever, then step over that same dead or dying man again on the way down, that’s all I’m saying.
A rescue attempt is not so much “risking their lives”, which, as you pointed out, they are already doing, but "shifting the odds in favor of death. Everything on these climbs – oxygen, gear, etc is carefully calculated to maximize the chances of reaching the summit and minimize the risk of dying. So no room for error. Any accident/mistake makes the risk of dying nearly certain, and the climbers know this. They also know that a rescue attempt is likely to be futile AND decrease their own odds of survival (whether they summit or not). Are they being selfish or just practical?
To be fair, following climbers DID attempt a rescue & successfully pulled Hassan back up to the trail. Based on the article, that was the point where they realized further attempts would be likely to kill a number of other people, and fail in saving Hassan. One person could not have completed this rescue, & who decides how many additional lives you risk in the attempt?
The question of “try to rescue or not” has been coming up for years on Everest. The Wikipedia article on Green Boots touches on accusations that a Japanese climbing team failed to help him, and the death of Dave Sharp raised the same questions as that of Mohammed Hassan. But while there may be a few people who could have been saved if other climbers had tried a rescue, it’s more likely the death toll would just be higher due to dead rescuers. You can’t beat the odds.
I’m sure the climbers themselves knew it was distasteful, but it seems the reality was that turning back and/or helping were not viable options, and once you’ve summited, well, you may as well get that selfie, it’s not going to make the guy any deader. The real distaste we can reserve for the bragging about it afterwards, rather than (say) leading with a heartfelt tribute to the dead man and a explanation of why helping was impossible.
If you wanted to be really cold and analytical about it, you could view the whole situation in terms of expected values:
Option #1, you don’t attempt a rescue. You continue with your summit attempt, which incurs, say, a 20% chance of death for you and a 100% chance of death for the guy you didn’t rescue.
Option #2, you attempt a rescue, resulting in, say, a 75% chance of death for you and the person you tried to rescue.
An infinite number of trials of option #1 would, on average, result in 1.2 deaths. And an infinite number of trials of option #2 would result in an average of 1.5 deaths. The purely rational choice, then, is option #1 - regardless of whether the person in need of rescue is a member of your family or not.
The reality is that most folks aren’t so rational and analytical, and other factors come into consideration.
If you told someone they had a 95% chance of dying while trying to rescue their own kid, virtually every parent would take that risk. Love trumps all, no surprise there.
If you told someone they had a 95% chance of dying while trying to rescue a total stranger, most people (myself included), would probably say no, even though many of them would be plagued by survivor guilt later. And most folks would not fault a stranger for refusing to take such a risk to rescue someone who wasn’t their own child.
I have followed Everest and mountaineering since Krakaur’s article in Outside and Into Thin Air were published. This may be the best summation I have ever read regarding the risks inherent in mountain climbing.
When you have too many wealthy climbers such that they are thus unable to assist unprepared or unqualified impoverished workers being used to facilitate the climb, then everyone involved is at fault. Everyone. Blood on everyone’s hands.