Err…don’t the vast majority of people bring O2 tanks? All the posts above seem to be suggesting that all the hikers are just breathing the air at altitude.
Everest is climbed in stages. Camp 4 is at 26,000 feet. Only 14 mountains in the world are higher than Everest’s camp 4. 13, if you exclude Everest!
While there is sufficient air to live, climbers attempting the summit have been consistently oxygen deprived for some time before they summit. You can’t suck bottled air for days straight. If you’re going to use it, you save it for the peak attempt.
You’re the author of that? I quite enjoyed that article when I first read it a few months ago. I was not aware that any SCP authors were on this forum.
Poor old Green Boots has been up there since 1996.
I’ve heard (but have no cite) that here is not a single Starbucks beyond a certain point.
There’d be no point, they wouldn’t be able to get the water hot enough for coffee.
There have been several threads on this, nothing new to add, excpet to say that, the people who pay $60,000+ to climb Mt. Everest are a special bunch. Most of them are “Type A” personalities, who have been successful in most of the things they have done in life. They have done everything, so they are looking for a new challenge…only thousands of people have done this.
It is an extremely unpleasant, cold climb. I don’t know what they get out of it.
Gravity.
Maybe an iced latte?
mrAru and I were just discussing the bodies on Everest, and he pointed out that the common thing to say is that they claim that it would be too dangerous to hump the bodies down, so I posited that whenever someone ran across a body, they chip it out of the ice and give it a good heave downwards after sticking a tracking device on it.
So, if you had a dearly departed idiot who cacked himself climbing Everest, would you get bent out of shape if he were coaxed downwards by being heaved off into space instead of gently and reverently carried down at great risk to life and limb?
[Obviously you can tell what my opinion is about someone doing something stupid and dying.]
It’s my understanding that it’s fairly common to push bodies off a ledge when bringing them back down is impractical. Francis Arsentiev’s body was so disposed of in 2007, nine years after she was left to die. The same expedition had planned to give Green Boots a decent “burial” as well, but was unsuccessful - it’s likely that at this point, what remains of him is essentially part of the mountain.
The routes up and down are probably mainly along ridges or other relatively easier slopes. If you just pushed a body downwards, it most likely would go over some precipitous cliff where it would be even more inaccessible.
ETA: Maybe you mean they wouldn’t ever be retrieved but simply heaved out of view, but then why put a tracking device on it?
Implication is weight in carrying O2 stores? Or physiology of breathing?
O2 bottles are heavy considering how long they will supply oxygen. You have to ration them so you only use them when needed or you will run out before the most difficult sections. One of the many factors that contribute to all the deaths is using up all your O2 on the way up leaving none for the descent. Each climber can only have so many.
But, bottled oxygen isn’t the same as being at sea level. It’s not as efficient and you can’t stay on bottled O2 forever at altitude.
One more risk I didn’t see mentioned is the people. People have had life-saving gear like oxygen bottles and tents stolen from them while on ascent. There is a serious problem of an “everyone for themselves” attitude up there. If you have a problem up there, people will leave you to die so they don’t miss their chance to summit.
Also some people can’t even trust their own guides. Nils Antezana was left to die by his group. His guide later used pics from Nils’s camera and claimed them as proof of his own summit.
There’s a particularly nasty chute on Mount McKinley called the Orient Express, so-named because of the number of Asian climbers who met their ends there. Falls in that 40 degree chute typically measure 1,000-2,000 feet.
Thank God.
I picked up the Kindle version of High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed because of this thread ($1.99!). It’s pretty sickening.
I have a few friends who have climbed on Everest, one who summited, and they all say that travel above 24,000 feet is not the same activity as travel below. Many things are familiar, but the mindset is completely different. It’s easy to compare to other mountaineering but the challenges, risks, mindsets, and rewards are much different.
I recommend that you read Sir John Hunt’s, or Edmund Hillary’s accounts of the 1954 ascent. These people were real heroes-they would never abandon a dying climber. Something very ugly has crept into mountaineering…and its not something I would want to be around!:mad: