The aspect that strikes me as troubling is that “high altitude mountaineering” appears to be an activity whose logistics require a mixture of enthusiasts who are voluntarily in it for the parts-of-human-nature stuff and locals who are there in no small part because they need the money.
I see no case to be made for forbidding the mountaineers from taking on more or less alarming amounts of risk if that’s their thing; but unless someone is mountaineering without support staff it seems like you have a pretty dire occupational health and safety situation for 50% or more of the people on site; even if you keep the most overt ‘the native help is cheap and expendable’ behavior under control; just because the overall risk is so high; and the activity has so many support staff directly accompanying clients.
(edit: I haven’t had luck finding good broader statistics as yet; but for K-2 it seems to be the case that most summit attempts are around half support staff, sometimes slightly more, and half clients. For base and intermediate camps and people shuttling supplies up and trash down I’d assume that the percentage of support staff rises sharply; but that mortality rates are significantly below the summit’s 20% for more routine support activities. If anyone knows of a good breakdown of occupational injuries and deaths in Nepal it would be much appreciated.)
Except that there’s nothing new to explore here. This is only for self-gratification. A selfish pursuit that puts not only my own life at risk, but the lives of many others including other climbers, rescuers, and vulnerable indigenous people.
I fully realize the “code of the mountain” dictates that there’s not much you can do if there’s an incident at a certain altitude, but that doesn’t make the whole pursuit any more unnecessary and inessential to humankind.
There’s many other athletic and recreational activities that are plenty extreme that don’t inherently risk the lives of dozens of other people if you make a mistake or if nature turns on you.
The people climbing, including the porters, are aware of the risks and accepting them. There is arguably a need to better protect and compensate people working as porters and guides, but I don’t believe that ending high altitude mountaineering is the way.
There are plenty of other pursuits that put other’s lives in jeopardy, and none of them involve exploring. Car racing. Flying planes. Sailboat racing. Playing American football. Banning athletic pursuits for being risky is ridiculous. Telling people they can’t climb the highest mountains is never going to fly. Good luck banning that.
Exploration doesn’t just literally mean discovering new land, or first time ascents. It can mean personal exploration, going somewhere and having your unique experience of it. It can mean taking different routes, different ways of doing a route, without oxygen, as a traverse, alpine vs expedition style, ski mountaineering, paragliding off a summit. Weather and climate conditions change, making it a new challenge. It’s silly to declare exploration over, just because someone has stood somewhere once. We keep discovering and rediscovering as the world changes, as we change or or learn something new.
I am not sure of the status of the Austrian climbers who reported this, but they certainly seemed appalled by the (lack of) action from the other climbers.
This seems like an incredible amount of pomposity and privilege. But I guess as long as someone can fulfill some sort of journey of self discovery by engaging in unnecessary and dangerous activities with a huge amount of risk for unnecessary danger to others, it’s cool because at least the people who can afford to take part in these activities will get some gratification from it?
Should we only engage in activities that everyone can afford? Should there be a risk level that everyone has to agree not to exceed? The people doing this have chosen to do this, even the Sherpas. If the local climbers chose not to be guides then most expeditions wouldn’t happen. While it seems confounding, the risk of dying is part of what motivates people to do extreme things.
No, but, how about bring your own porters, or would that be too expensive?
No, unless, that risk involves leaving orphans behind. Anything else is an “Orphans? Not my problem” attitude (see also mandatory helmet laws).
I’m sure many of the guides enjoy what they do. Well I’ve known janitors and grocery workers with an elevated passion for what they do too. In any case, if their choices were unlimited, they might do something else. Maybe not, but I think “choose” is doing some heavy lifting here.
I recall on one of those documentaries that some thrill-seeking son of a Korean billionaire (or near enough) died on Everest in 2004 with a couple of his companions. Apparently the father paid a crew to try to recover the bodies the following year – they were only able to recover one – and one of the recovery guys himself died in the process.
(Here’s a very short article - light on details about it)
Lots to be done to improve the conditions of sherpas, but past a certain point there’s very little you can do for someone else up that high.
Well, there’s risky and there’s risky - as Lion pointed out up thread, for every five people that summit K2 someone dies.
There are 22 players on the field in an American football game, if American football players died at that rate there’d be around four people on average dying on the field every game. An NFL season is 272 games, so that would be 1088 deaths on the field every year.
There’s only about 1,700 players in the NFL. So that’d mean most of the players in the league would have to be replaced by the end of every season, because they were dead. At that point it’s clearly a bloodsport and absolutely should be banned.
ETA: For context, one of the most comprehensive studies on Roman gladiators found the rate of death for the losers was about one in five, so one in 10 for gladiators overall - and at it’s bloodiest in the second and third centuries the overall death-rate got to one in four.
Source: Futrell, Alison, ed. The Roman Games: Historical Sources in Translation. Vol. 17. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
So TIL after looking that up: if you’re climbing K2 you’ve got the same chance of dying as the loser of a gladiator duel in the bloody Colosseum.
Interesting choice of words. I’m sure many do it out of necessity because they have a valuable skill and can make some money rather than because they truly want to.
