Macabre dead body photos on Everest

Yeah, but if it is your wife, you go try anyway. That's what the guy did so good for him. It's like that kid who fell into the den of dogs at the Pitt zoo. How did the mom not jump in to try to save him? I just don't get it.

  wrote:

There's one segment of the climb they call the "rainbow valley" because of all the brightly colored jackets worn by the dead strewn about. Some of these may be part of that, I did not read the entire thing.

One of my favorites parts of Everest climbing mythology is the Second Man Syndrome, where lack of oxygen and altitude sickness causes climbers to believe they have a persom accompanying them that isn't there. They have conversation and everything with their imaginary friends.

You mean that's not real?

I've had that ever since the 30th avenue drill one year. ;-)

Everyone should climb Everest with a small parachute and a crazy carpet.

When you conk out you should get on the crazy carpet and get a push back down the hill. Pull the chute if you go off a cliff.

It's a decent shot at living.

SMJO wrote:

Everyone should climb Everest with a small parachute and a crazy carpet.

When you conk out you should get on the crazy carpet and get a push back down the hill. Pull the chute if you go off a cliff.

It's a decent shot at living.

I would think there is a good chance that you'll just bump into another giant mountain and get stranded on that.

stop it boner wrote:

I think that if I was climbing the mountain and started seeing dead frozen people I would stop and not want to participate.

Think about it, in 100 years at the rate they're going there will be so many dead bodies that the entire mountain could be covered in them.

who would want to climb that or worse risk becoming part of it?

I've always found those sticky strips that catch flies to be rather humorous. As a fly is flying toward the thing, it obviously sees that there are hundreds of dead insects already stuck to the tape. Yet they are too stupid to realize that this is something to be concerned about. They just land right on the thing next to their dead and dying kin.

When I see one of those things, I always think of an analogous situation with humans. You're walking to your favorite restaurant and when you arrive you find that all of the customers are stuck to their seats, screaming for help. Instead of thinking "hey, I should get out of here," you obliviously plop down in your regular booth and meet your demise.

This idea always seemed funny in its absurdity. I mean, a human being wouldn't be so stupid, right? We wouldn't see dead bodies all around and think "nothin' wrong here!" We'd see one dead guy and we'd be out of there, right? But this is pretty much exactly that situation. We're basically as dumb as flies.

Many activities are risky and potentially fatal, such as driving. Mountaineering is no different. Good mountaineers respect the mountain and train for many, many years before tackling relatively minor altitudes. Just the hike to base camp and back is a grueling experience that can be a dangerous endeavor for someone who is not in top physical, emotional and psychological condition.

Flies are not stupid, they just don't see very well. They can see there's a bunch of flies and a place to land, but they can't see they're all dead until they've already landed.

Flies are magnificent creatures with amazing abilities. They are aeronautical geniuses.

Maggots have been used to save people's lives since ancient times by preventing wounds from festering.

So Creepy wrote:

Yeah, but if it is your wife, you go try anyway. That's what the guy did so good for him. It's like that kid who fell into the den of dogs at the Pitt zoo. How did the mom not jump in to try to save him? I just don't get it.

I would not be climbing Everest, and would not let my wife do it either, unless that was her expertise and she was very very good at it. In that case, we'd both realize that she might not be coming back.

I have no fondness for zoos and would not take my kids to them.

Being burned to death or freezing to death have to be the worst ways to die.

Laying on a mountain with a broken leg and slowly dieing of hypothermia that probably took hours. But that human spirit of taking risks and aspiring for challange and great accomplishment created every progress in our world society. Not just greed.

Chantal Mauduit? According to Krakauer and Viesturs, she passed out "stone cold" very near the top of Everest in 1995 and was brought down.

we're as dumb as flies wrote:

I've always found those sticky strips that catch flies to be rather humorous. As a fly is flying toward the thing, it obviously sees that there are hundreds of dead insects already stuck to the tape. Yet they are too stupid to realize that this is something to be concerned about. They just land right on the thing next to their dead and dying kin.

They're trying to help.

Don't get the high altitude gig...I prefer to enjoy my mountains without an astronaut suit. Plenty of challenge in lowly ranges like the Sierra or Cascades for me, and I can enjoy them in a t-shirt for a good chunk of the year.

because it is there wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFr1KdY6aiw

A cliff or waterfall is just there too. Doesn't mean go jump of one.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote:

The odds of dying on Everest are pretty low. The odds of dying on Annapurna are 35%, K2 25%, vs 1.3% for Everest.

The numbers you're quoting are actually deaths per successful ascents. The link below shows that 38 people died on Annapurna for every 100 ascents (2008):

Even though Everest is proportionally low danger-wise, there have been many more successful ascents, and many more deaths.

break it up wrote:

Being burned to death or freezing to death have to be the worst ways to die.

Laying on a mountain with a broken leg and slowly dieing of hypothermia that probably took hours. But that human spirit of taking risks and aspiring for challange and great accomplishment created every progress in our world society. Not just greed.

Hypothermia is actually supposed to be a pretty painless way to die. After a while you don't feel cold anymore, and then you just pass out. Surviving hypothermia/frostbite on Everest would be horribly painful, I'm sure.

One of the guys who survived the '96 disaster on Everest:

I met Reinhold Messner and the one thing that he said that stuck in my mind was, the goal in big mountain climbing is not to summit but to make it back to base camp alive.

He is one of the greatest climbers of all time, and what he meant was that too many inexperienced climbers put too much effort in getting to the summit thinking that is the ultimate goal and then die on the decent.

Azaleas wrote:

One of the guys who survived the '96 disaster on Everest:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IGNqUzXtnjM/TzdPKscLqEI/AAAAAAAAAi8/f4N5gPRRz2E/s1600/beck-weathers01.jpg

If that's the face of courage, I'll remain a coward.

Funny you should say that. I met Kurt Diemberger, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Diemberger

, at a talk on our campus, and he said that you don't meet many people who have climbed the 8k peaks that aren't missing a few appendages to frostbite.

It was a fascinating talk by the way, and he had some wonderful photos of Dhaulagiri. He wouldn't talk much about the K2 disaster in 1986 however.