Sorry to rez this thread, but John Oliver recently had a show about this very topic.
The “easiest” is generally reckoned to Cho Oyu, about 20 km west of Mount Everest - summit is about 2165’ lower than Everest’s.
Googling suggests that of the 14 mountains over 8000 m, Everest is the 3rd or 4th easiest (without allowing for possible crowding).
I used his https://www.thetopofmounteverest.com tool to create a picture - the one with a dog. I did a good job of fitting my dogs face and using a picture where I actually was climbing and had the appropriate glasses and head gear on so the two images fit in well. The caption on the photo is “we are the first Human-Canine duo to the summit”. I posted it to social media with the intro “made it to the top of Everest…love crossing things off the bucket list” I got so many “congrats”, “great accomplishment”, etc. I don’t know if I have really dumb friends or they mega-wooshed me. I hope the latter.
How is it possible to build a cable up the mountain when humanity can not even get the last hundred years of corpses off the mountain?
Really this is the first problem to grapple with. It will provide insight into the next challenge and help determine the feasibility. For one thing I have never heard of death zone technicians and repairmen.
We certainly could remove the corpses.
It’s just that nobody wants it done badly enough to pay for it. The government there can’t afford to do it, and no other philanthropists or charities have thought this important enough* to invest the money. So we don’t do it.
- And that’s a very arguable position. Those people are already dead, and don’t care that their bodies are lying on the mountain. There are lots more living people who desperately need help that we could spend this money on. Fore example, about 1,000 children die of starvation every hour (21,000 per day, in 2018). We could spend that money to buy food for them instead. [Personally, I’d think that was a better option.]
Here’s a BBC article that calls this seriously into question.
TL;DR: A figure around 8000 per day is supportable provided you replace “starvation” with “pathologies linked to inadequate nutrition”.
some of the bodies are pushed off the mountain so they are not visible or block paths.
In 1999 they found a body from 1924 ,he may have made the summit . They were specifically looking for his body and the body of his partner to see if there was evidence they made the summit.
Right. My point is we are not doing it so why speculate on things that are at least 15 steps into the future, in cost and feasibility. We can’t build a railway because we haven’t yet tried to get the bodies off the mountain.
The discussion is mainly about what would be theoretically possible with an unlimited budget and a desire to do so, not whether it’s something the governments of Nepal or China are able to take on right now. No one (except a few severe outliers) expects anything like this to actually get built.
I think the answer has to be yes, and the budget need not be unlimited - something on the order of $100 million should suffice. I base this on the fact that a production helicopter (yes, with careful preparation) has landed on the summit, and that heavy-lift helicopters can comfortably operate at the altitudes of base camp (17,600’).
Indeed.
I think you’re off by an order of magnitude, if not more. And I doubt that it would work for any significant period of time before it failed catastrophically. But something could be built.
Why do you think would it tend to do this?
Because of the incredibly harsh conditions and zero margin of error.
There’s ice and rockfalls on a regular basis. The routes cross glaciers which move unevenly and form cracks. New snow will cover some parts. Etc.
Everest is a hellish place even ignoring the lack of oxygen and the cold.
The cable route would certainly avoid glaciers, heavy snow accumulations, and areas receiving rockfall. Possible options would be along the west or northeast ridge.
I agree that cable car routes seldom follow footpaths. Also, cable car routes are normally shut in high wind, and require continous maintenance.
There’s little question that for a cable system on Everest (and indeed on much lower mountains) weather-related closures would be common.
And certainly a sensible design would need to be robust and emphasize ease of maintenance.
It was difficult to view that video in Canada (I had to go through several Youtube downloader sites) but it was illuminating.
Forty times!?
Considering the environment it would be intended to operate in, I don’t think anything we can build today would last for long.
I ran across this piece of information the other day:
from the Nepal side, base camp to the summit is 12.5 mile hike.
from the Tibet side, base camp to the summit is a 22 mile hike.