Plus the plane has been without oxygen for a while and everyone is loopy, has a killer headache, and can’t seem to focus. The longer you stay increases the odds that you won’t deploy your own parachute correctly.
If the guy was lower on the mountain, was concious, hadn’t been out overnight, and the potential rescuers had shown themselves capable of performing at altitude, then I think the situation becomes much murkier. With a reasonable chance to make a rescue, I would feel obligated to assist in any way I could. My summit bid would be over without a second thought. However, having never been above 18,000’ I can’t say that I know what I would be able to do. And since people react so differently to altitude, none of us can say what those folks were capable of doing.
But I would never put myself in those situations for lots of reasons, the least of which is that I’m simply not fit enough.
Hillary’s statements are statements on ethics, not climbing. Lining up climbing experts to contradict Hillary’s ethical statements is not compelling, especially when Hillary’s statements are that those who’d abandon the guy are behaving poorly.
Right, because on Mt. Everest, if you’re in trouble, you’ll be abandoned. This so-called fact is not being established in a vacuum, but in the context of what appears to be pathological social dynamic; a self-reinforcing game whereby more severe unethical behavior generates more danger which generates more unethical behavior. The excuses being given for the failure to help the guy only strengthen the problem of moral hazard, because the culprits are being let off on a defense that would not stand elsewhere.
Sure, the guy who died should have known what he was getting into, just as those who passed him by should have known as well; there is a very serious risk of having someone terribly injured, and rather than be prepared for that contingency, the problem is anticipated by making excuses in advance and relying on them when needed.
The leader of the climb should be brought up on charges of criminal negligence, at the very least. He knows he’ll be leading an expidition into a situation where giving assistance is likely; he should be prepared to act on that rather than ignore it. Failure to prepare for such a contingency is criminal and inexcusable.
A extremely brave and talented helicopter pilot landed on Everest (twice!) in 1996, but I forget at which camp it was (tho’ I believe it was above Base Camp, so Camp I or II, most likely). The first time he evacuated a critically ill climber (Tibetan? I forget); the second, the aforementioned and equally damaged Beck Weathers. The helicopter he landed was so stripped down he could only take one at a time, and conditions were such that Beck thought he was a dead man (again) because most thought the pilot wouldn’t risk it again. But he did.
It’s extremely difficult to fly a helicopter at that altitude - the air simply isn’t thick enough for the rotors to get any purchase or lift. And Sharp would have had to descend several thousands of feet before he would even have been in the range of a helicopter rescue.
Matter of fact, the air’s so thin at Everest’s peak that if someone at sea level (that’s me, near enough) were magically transported and dropped at the summit, he or she would black out within a very few minutes and would quickly die thereafter.
It’s a whole different world there. I’d love to visit Everest, but I know enough that I have no business going any further than Base Camp.
I think their defenses would stand up anywhere. You know when the flight attendants give the safety spiel on airlines? You know the part where they say “secure your own mask before assisting other passengers”? That’s what you’ve got here. Firefighters and other professional rescue workers aren’t expected to rescue people if it puts them at too great a risk; why should climbers (the majority of whom aren’t professional rescuers) be expected to do so?
Not true. Teams of climbers plan for contingencies and figuere out what they’re going to do in advance if someone gets hurt. When I go with friends, our teams are indivisible. If one of us is hurt or having some kind of problems, we’ll all turn around. That’s just our own plan, though - I have a feeling that plans like that wouldn’t be acceptable to most people who attempt Everest.
The leader of what climb? Sharp was soloing. When Inglis’ team passed him, he was beyond help. To attempt to bring him down would have been incredibly dangerous if he had been able to help; if he had been incapacitated, it would have been damn near impossible. If you simply tied a rope around him and tried to drag him down, 99 times out of 100 you’d end up with four dead climbers.
In general, in an emergency response situation, the first rule is: don’t create more victims. If rescuing someone would put yourself in danger of becoming incapacitated or fatal injury, you don’t do it. I’m a little peeved at people using this excuse as they proceed into a more dangerous situation i.e. increasing altitude on the mountain. I understand that you don’t want to create more victims for emergency responders, but why complain that you don’t want to take additional risk when you are about to take additional risk for no tangible benefit anyway?
I’ll admit that I know exactly bupkis (perhaps less ) about climbing mountains, but I do know that to abandon someone like that you better be relying on some threat that was making you leave the area anyway, and not trying to put responsibility on someone who’s trying to rate the chances of a person’s survival over the radio!
I want to thank Telemark for providing a mountaineering perspective on this, and I appreciate that s/he is sharing a lot, and soldiering on, perhaps in the face of my own ignorance, but so far I really haven’t seen the light, and still have to disagree.
Couldn’t they have sent the inexperienced climbers back down, taking some fraction of the most experienced to try to bring Sharp down? If even the judgement of the most experienced climbers was such that they didn’t consider and reject this possibility for some reason, what the heck business do people have on that mountain anyway?
And what’s this business about passing the buck to someone giving odds of survival over the radio? Ultimately, judgement and responsibility should rest with those on the scene and the medical judgement there, not of those who can neither see nor properly assess the situation over the radio.
Sorry, I feel like I’m getting worked up about this. :smack:
I also appreciate Telemark’s contributions, and I also find those contributions unpersuasive.
I find it completely irrelevant that being above a certain altitude seems to turn people into climbing automatons. There are some things that normal, ethical people don’t do. Abandoning a still living man to his fate is one of those things.
Out of curiousity, how much help does a mountain climber with no legs require to get to the top of Everest and back down?
According to both the story and those who’ve posted here about the debilitating effects of the environment, it was precisely because they are unable to make complicated decisions for themselves. The director of the climb was down where he could breathe enough oxygen to think straight. They weren’t passing the buck; they were relying on the only one capable of making a reasoned decision.
Ex EMT with extra training in exposure related injuries and high-angle rescue.
Pulling someones proverbial nuts out of the fire is hard work. Retrieving people who cannot assist you from things like mountainsides is hard and dangerous even at 1,000 feet let alone 20,000. We had 3 minor injuries just training in this stuff 30 feet off the ground.
People who are not trained for this type of rescue work, in these types of conditions, are begging to die.
Something else many people here are taking for granted. Specialized rescue teams in any situation come in with a massive excess of good quality equipment and highly skilled manpower to deal with a situation quickly and safely. They also are intimately familiar with the types of problems they face and know the limits of their skills and equipment under worst case scenarios.
When you are taking the chance at dying yourself, there is no try. Its do, or do not.
You’re kidding right? What kind of lessons do you teach your children? Not that I have ever been on an exotic vacation like that but I’d help someone in distress as best I could. Money, a phone call to the police, a cool drink, a blanket. That would be in the realm of what normal people would do in such a situation.
But if you want to play Schindler’s List then it’s your turn:
It’s New Years day, you have a pounding headache and you’re driving to your dying mothers house to help out. While on the way you see a cat that has been run over and is frozen to the curb in it’s own blood. As you drive by you see it’s eye’s tracking you. WHAT DOOO you do?
Well there’s your problem: climbing automatons are not “normal people.”
Isn’t the wisest choice here to grant the benefit of the doubt? Unless you think that every one of the 40 climbers who passed him by just happened to be sociopathic, doesn’t the fact that no one who was actually there tried to help suggest that the man was, in fact, incapable of being saved? If the issue was in doubt, wouldn’t you expect at least a few people to try?
You’re going to have to clarify that. If plans like that are not acceptable to most who attempt the climb, then they are indeed deserving of severe moral indignation.
Consider the trade off being made. The claim is that to try to save someone is to take on unacceptable risk. I call bullshit on that. For a crew to be prepared to help one of their own, or another — and if the claims made are accurate, coming across a crew that has somebody in need of assistance appears to be a high-probability event — means to carry more equipment, which will tax the body more than the equipment of those unprepared. This doesn’t increase the danger, it increases the probability of aborting a climb; the added danger comes from self-imposed risk, not proper preparation. Even boxers are smart enough to throw in the towel.
In any other field that tests the limits of human ability, the participants are expected to take plenty of precautions for safety. The fact that the limits are being tested on Everest is no excuse whatsoever; it’s a coward’s copout for selfish, negligent behavior. Those willingly entering into a situation where their fellows face a greater than 1-in-6 chance of serious danger is obliged to prepare to assist the wounded, and “would have died anyway” is an excuse only when judging between two mutually-exclusive casualties.
To put it another way, all Marines are volunteers, yet no damn Marine would ignore a wounded man just to climb a zit on the face of the world. How much one pays for one’s stupid little vacation is no excuse for not helping someone, especially when there’s no qualified expert on hand to pronounce the victim beyond help. Reading the links clearly instructs that the decision to ignore the man was made by someone communicating via radio, the man clearly indicated as the leader of the climb. Milgrim’s experiments are old news. There’s no excuse for what happened. They were in no position to judge the viability of the man’s life with sufficient certainty to not attempt to help, and they should have been prepared to help in the first place. If being prepared means they won’t make the ascent, then so fucking what?
I haven’t climbed Mt. Everest, but I’ve read a number of accounts of the climb. And in every single one, a common theme is that you ARE tired, exhausted, cold, and oxygen-starved by the time you reach Camp 4 - and then you still have the summit to get to.
The human body can NOT “acclimate” to 26,000 feet. You can survive it for awhile, if you’ve allowed for maximum adaptation to high altitude, but you can’t stay up there long. You ARE oxygen deprieved - even breathing 100% O2, the air pressure is so low your body can’t efficiently absorb it so yes, you are hypoxic even when breathing 100% oxygen. One feature of hypoxia is a reduced ability to make decision and reduced judgement… You also can’t get warm with so little oxygen. You aren’t happy, even if you’re sipping tea - and good luck getting it hot. The boiling point on Everest is so low that boiling - actually *boiling[/i - tea can be safely drunk immediately.
Beck Weathers and the other extremely frost-bitten gentleman who got off Everest during the disasterous 1996 season survived ONLY because he was able to haul himself to his feet an walk/stagger most of the way down to (if I recall) camp 2. Those who could not walk did not live. Everyone who stopped and tried to help a downed climber died above Camp 4 - and a couple of people did try to help the fallen.
If you’re able to stand up and stagger there’s some point to helping you. If you can’t, then trying to help you can be suicide. I’m sorry if that’s hard to understand, but apparently that’s the way it is.
There have been a few people who made the climb not to the summit, but to clean trash off the mountain. Good for them. There is still very little they can do to help someone too weak to stand up. A few, very few, people have managed a rescue off the upper slopes of Everest but it’s a damn chancey business. Even so, I don’t think those rescues occured above camp 4.
As extreme altitude climbing has been described in this thread, I believe they were sociopathic, at least temporarily. They’ve been described as unable to reason properly, barely able to take a glove off and put it back on, and able to focus only on keeping moving.
I see no reason to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who deliberately chooses to put themselves in a situation where they lose the ethical reactions of a normal human being, most especially when they should be prepared for trouble anyway.
Of course not, because that’s not what the wounded Marine signed up for. They understand going in that, barring extraordinary circumstances, their fellow Marines will come to their aid when they’re in danger, and they’re expected to do the same.
Likewise, the people climbing Everest understand that they are not going to be carried off the top of the mountain, and that if they can’t walk down on their own they’re not to expect to be saved, as it would be useless.
Then no one ever climbs Everest, that’s what. No great loss, perhaps, but if everyone involved understands and freely accepts the risks, then I don’t see the problem.
You can’t have it both ways. Either the 40 climbers were too out of it to make a proper judgement, in which case they’re not ethically accountable, or they did still have enough of their wits about them, in which case their unanimous verdict would suggest that we who don’t know what we’re talking about should shut up. Either way, it seems very unlikely that the climbers were wrong to abandon him.
The article said they were 2 hours out of the last camp. There would have been supplies at this camp for the return trip. if you don’t use the supplies to complete the trip then there are extra supplies available. 40 people moving 1 person back to a camp which should have included a hyperbaric tent. The other climbers in the article chastized the injured climber for going alone. If 40 people can’t help 1 person then what good are they to each other? I call shenanigans on the tribe of 40.
) about climbing mountains, but I do know that to abandon someone like that you better be relying on some threat that was making you leave the area anyway, and not trying to put responsibility on someone who’s trying to rate the chances of a person’s survival over the radio!