You stop, you try to help. People recover from “deadly” incidents every day. You just never know.
Otherwise, how can you sleep at night? “I climbed Mount Everest, and left some poor guy to die alone to do it! Yay, me!”
Yeah, I can’t see much celebration in that.
[nitpick]
He is properly referred to as either Sir Edmund Hillary, or Sir Edmund, but not Sir Hillary.
[/nitpick]
While I respect Sir Edmand’s opinion, he doesn’t speak for the mountaineering community. A lot of folks who are equally respected have opined on this case and agree that no only was there little to be done, it would have been dangerous to attempt anything.
In the Death Zone, you either move or you die. Stopping means you get cold very quickly. It’s not like any of these climbers could have done anything to help a hypothermic climber at 26,000’, they can barely do enough to move themselves. Stopping to help, giving up any of their gear (which they cannot spare) would put more people at risk. It’s pretty much impossible to rescue someone up there, they can be assisted, but not moved. If the climber couldn’t walk himself out, no one could help him.
It’s harsh, it’s cruel, but frankly, it’s 8000 meter climbing. When Sir Edmand was up there, there was only one climbing party on the mountain, everyone was focused on them. Today there are dozens of parties, some areas allow only one person to pass. You end up with someone tangled on a fixed rope, everyone above them has to wait. You could cause a bottleneck that puts dozens of others at risk.
I’m no fan of the zoo that has formed on Everest, but the fact is that people going up there know what they’re getting into. It’s not enough to pay a big fee and expect guides to haul your ass up the mountain. These people, even the “tourist climbers” are hard as nails and well motivated. I would never choose to put myself up there, but these folks do. I can’t blame the other climbers for walking past a lost cause.
So what happens then? Do you cut the rope?
Reinhold Meissner climbed Everest without oxygen.
Sharp was a dumbass to do it by himself. Because he was a dumbass he put himself at risk that required other people to give up their chance at the peak or to handicap themselves to help him.
I think I’m leaning towards the TS rule on this one. You put yourself in the situation by being a dumbass, then it’s not cut and dried that others should either give up their summit bid or increase their risk of not getting off the mountain alive.
Like to see what Into Thin Air author has to say. He ran out of oxygen on the descent. Their survivors got down in large part with a lot of help from others including the IMAX team.
It’s not the mountain that we conquer, but ourselves.
-Sir Edmund Hilary.
I sure as hell don’t climb rocks for bragging rights. I do it because It’s the manifestation of my drive to improve myself.
So are you.
I agree that PunditLisa’s post was far overstated. However, I can definitely see that she has a point in relation to the way Everest is regarded today.
Would you (as some others in this thread would) have left the injured climber to die and continued on your ascent? How do you believe your drive to improve yourself would have manifested in that situation?
Anyone who would leave a human being to die like that because it interfered with their vacation plans is a … I don’t even know a word demeaning enough. Even if there was a 100% chance of death for the man, leaving him there is an act totally devoid of any humanity. I wouldn’t do that to a stray cat.
Stumpy and his band of explorers better never walk into my watering hole lest they wish beer poured over their achievments.
I’ll agree with that, but the way she said it was incredibly insulting and disrespectful, especially for Sharp.
Every moral fiber in my body tells me I would have stopped my ascent and helped Sharp. That said, there is often a difference between my actions and my feelings. I am not a mountaineer, i’m a rock climber. I climb much smaller rocks. I don’t any idea what kind of risk-assessments I would have needed to make 8000 meters up.
My drive for personal improvement has nothing to do with that. I made the comment specifically because PunditLisa was attacking Sharp’s motives.
Thank you for the honest answer.
I wonder if there is anyone on the board who has performed that type of climbing.
I’ve done some much less challenging climbing in North and South America, up to around 21,000 feet. I’ve never been to the Himalayas, and never really wanted to with the atmosphere there. 6,500 meter climbs are awfully difficult; I can’t imagine trying to go 2,000+ meters more straight up.
The problem I see with that situation isn’t in the decision to help the guy or not - it’s whether you’re even capable of helping him. Nobody on a climb like that has extra gear, and anything people are carrying is something they think they’ll need to survive. If you can get along without it for the time you expect to be up, you don’t bring it. It’s difficult to do anything involving physical exertion at that altitude, but it’s also difficult to think clearly and make good decisions.
Simple tasks that you wouldn’t think twice about at sea level are increasingly difficult the higher up you get. At extreme elevations, tasks like tying knots or putting on gloves aren’t even taken for granted; helping an incapacitated climber descend would be a lot more likely to kill you both than it would be to help him. Even if you could figure out some way to help him, I doubt you’d be able to actually do the things you’d need to do in order to rescue the guy. In Sharp’s case, he had begun his climb the previous day, run out of oxygen, and been at that spot overnight without oxygen. Almost certainly hypothermic and suffering from incapacitating altitude sickness, I would guess that he was in no condition to assist in his own rescue. It sounds incredibly heartless, but I really can’t fault other climbers for passing him by.
According to the article cited in the OP, Sharp ran out of oxygen and wasn’t wearing proper gloves. If somebody stopped to help him and shared their oxygen with him, then the good samaritan likely won’t have enough oxygen to get himself down. There’s no margin for error on climbs like that. If Sharp didn’t bring enough oxygen or the proper gloves for the climb, then he’s put himself at a lot of unnecessary risk (climbing Everest strikes me as quite enough unnecessary risk, even with adequate preparation). Anyone trying to help him would have been more likely to end up like he did than to successfully get him off the mountain.
See, maybe I’m missing something here, but I keep coming back to the fact that all these people were on the way up. Since the major problem appears to have been oxygen, and surely these people had enough oxygen to get themselves to the top and back down, I’m not impressed by the implicit argument that they did not have enough to share. But of course, if they shared, they would not be able to summit themselves; they would have had to put the potentially hopeless health of a total stranger above their own desire for personal achievement or glory.
It seems that extreme climbers are a different breed, indeed. I hope I never care enough for any personal acheivement or hobby that I rationalize away my own humanity.
I wonder how much of the lack of concern for the dying climber was due to the (what’s the name of that phenomenon??) where everybody thinks that somebody else will stop to render assistance, so they don’t do it themselves?
But they were ascending, and did reach the summit. I just read a commentary here where a guy left camp four at 9PM and reached the summit at 1:00PM the next day (and of course, had to get back down). I’ve read a more conservative times of midnight-five PM the next day round trip.
Inglis found Sharp 2.5 hours after leaving base camp. Are you telling me Inglis had the power and oxygen to climb for somewhere around twelve hours, and decend, but didn’t have the power to help Sharp?
I’m not buying it. After 2.5 hours Inglis wouldn’t even be tired yet. That is what camp is for- acclimating, warming up, stashing extra oxygen, and preparing for the long slog ahead. This isn’t oxygen deprived “heat of the moment” every second counts stuff here…just a few short hours before Inglis was happily sipping tea in a tent mentally and physically prepared to climb Mount Everest. The weather forcast was presumably good for the upcoming hours.
He could have turned back for supplies, used the five hour round trip to think of a plan, and still had many hours to give it his best shot. They say it takes 6-8 sherpas to carry a body down. Surely some number of the 40 people that passed could have gotten Sharp down to camp somehow without too much in terms of mortal danger- I’m pretty sure he was well below the most major hurdles of the last leg. And if it didn’t work- well, everyone goes home a little bummed, but at least they know they didn’t leave some guy to die alone on a mountain without at least trying.
I listened to someone today at work give an opinion that trying to help Sharp, or bring him down would have been hazardous. That said … 40 people. In this day and age, none of them could stop to try to assist. Egad.
Can’t say I’ve climbed, and I don’t think Hillary ever had to try to bring someone down bodily off the the mountain either, but – all I can say is that it’s tragic.
www.navarra8000.com
That’s my cousin. I’m not a pro, I haven’t gone climbing for years and I realize y’all mostly don’t speak Spanish, but he’s been up Mt. Everest several times.
He’s mentioned the corpses as being left behind either “during a storm” or “he fell into a trench”. He’s lost partners and friends up there. He took several attempts to finally “peak”, because he was always the youngest, therefore had to open the trail for the group and would have to give up and turn back.
Christ, if he’d passed that guy and not helped I would have given his butt such a kick he would’a landed in Arkansas!
What kind of “human beings” are we that we’d rather see the sights than help someone?
The “on the way up” part stuck out in my mind as well. I’ve never been in that position or anything remotely similar, so I’m not going to judge in this case.
However, from a purely selfish persepctive: if I were pursuing personal achievement and bragging rights, then my choice is between “climb Mt. Everest” and “rescue a guy from the face of Mt. Everest.” Well, chicks dig heroes.
This is a completely inaccurate picture of life at 26000’. You are always tired at that altitude. No one is strong, they are just various degrees of weak. Mentally, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything beyond the immediate task at hand. All planning is done so that you don’t have to make decisions; it’s all most people can do to put one foot in front of the other. When putting on your gloves takes 15 minutes, imagine how long it would take to organize a rescue.
And there aren’t extra supplies. There’s just enough oxygen to get up and down. Stopping to help people and effect a rescue would use up supplies and put everyone at risk. Relying on hypoxic people to perform well and remember to tie in correctly, etc is a taking a huge chance with people’s lives.
And there isn’t a pool of sherpas at Camp IV ready to run up and pull a body down from that altitude. Anyone up there is a support person for another team. Are you going to pull them off from their support duties and endanger all those clients for a likely futile attempt to rescue someone who’s already spend the night out?
I don’t buy this for a minute. While a rescue is possible, it’s not very likely and it would increase the risk for everyone involved, and even those not involved. Everything up there is a major hurdle when the victim cannot assist in their own rescue.
And I think it would be silly to deny the push that people feel when they’ve trained, sacraficed, and suffered for years to get to that place. It’s probably their only chance to ever achieve their goals (whether you agree with that goal or not) and ask them to give it up because someone else made a poor (but understandable) decision. I have friends who’ve been up there and they’ve been honest about what they could and would do. Up there, they admit, you’ve accepted that you’re pretty much responsible for your own life.
Frank asked earlier about someone stuck on a fixed rope with people log jammed above or below them. Yes, they will cut the person off the line, what else can they do? Imaging someone frozen at the exit of a airplane on fire and you need to get to the exit slide. Everyone behind them will burn to death unless you push that person out of the way. There’s not much else to do. People who don’t move up there get cold and die. You have to keep going, anything else is a recipie for disaster.
These are my thoughts also. This is the part I have trouble with-that those 40 climbers passed by this man without even stopping at all. I can understand how difficult or impossible it would have been to attempt a rescue and that there wasn’t enough O2 to spare, but my God, there were 40 PEOPLE up there at the time. Out of all those people, there was not one who could be bothered to simply stop and stay with the man for a few minutes at the very least?
And among 40 people, isn’t it possible that enough extra O2 could have been made available? As another poster said, they were on their way up and still had enough O2 to get back down-surely they could have all spared a little? I suppose that’s not a very practical idea, but it sure beats leaving a man to die alone exposed on the side of a mountain.
I don’t know quite where to come down on this one.
If you’ve read many accounts of people climbing Everest, you know that up there all you’re thinking about is just not dying. It’s pretty high in the running for most extreme place on Earth. No oxygen. Freezing cold. And absolutely NO ROOM FOR ERROR. You have a schedule. You have supplies. You have a team. Deviation from your plan can mean death.
Even if you’re on your way up, you don’t just decide, “oh, I’m going to tend to this dying man and formulate a new plan for getting down.”
From the warm comfort of my office, it’s easy to say, “someone could have and should have helped him,” especially when you hear Sir Edmund say it. But, what a tough tough call.