Posted on 05/23/2006 8:42:02 AM PDT by Paddlefish
Mark Inglis, an amputee who conquered Mount Everest on artificial legs last week, yesterday defended his party's decision to carry on to the summit despite coming across a dying climber. As his team climbed through the "death zone," the area above 26,000 feet where the body begins to shut down, they passed David Sharp, 34, a stricken British climber who later died. His body remained on the mountain.
Mr. Inglis, 47, a New Zealander, said: "At 28,000 feet it's hard to stay alive yourself. He was in a very poor condition, near death. We talked about [what to do for him] for quite a lot at the time and it was a very hard decision. "About 40 people passed him that day, and no one else helped him apart from our expedition. Our Sherpas (guides) gave him oxygen. He wasn't a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one." Mr. Sharp was among eight persons who have died on Everest this year, including another member of his group, a Brazilian. Dewa Sherpa, a manager at Asian Trekking, the Katmandu company that outfitted Mr. Sharp before his climb, said he had not taken enough oxygen and had no Sherpa guide.
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The company charges $6,000 to provide services as far as base camp -- far less than the $35,000 or more cost of guided trips to the summit. Other mountaineers have criticized the commercialism of climbing the 29,035-foot peak, with guides charging huge sums to climbers with minimal experience.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
You have no idea what the conditions are in a place like that. If you stay with him, you die as well. It is all climbers can do to put one foot in front of the other at that altitude. A lot of people have died on that mountain and several others in the world. It's the nature of the sport. No other climber is going to feel guilty about his death.
Maybe they wanted to see if he would regain enough strength to sit or stand on his own... Anyway, no decisions made at this altitude are entirely rational.
No. He was under no more risk than if he had kept going.
"Trying to bend God's words in a way that makes these men unnacountable"
I bent nothing. There was nothing wrong with what went down here. The man was free to make his own choices and he did. Furthermore, the party that went on concluded that they could not help the man.
"The point of the story is each of us is accountable for our neighbor, even if our neighbor is an idiot.
You are not accountable for me. My Freedom and my will belong to me. I don't welcome others dictating to me what I should do and I don't want, or expect their help. I do not appreciate other folks forcing their decisions on me. You are not my keeper and the Bible gives no one the authority to claim they are. Nor does the Bible give you the authority to call someone an idiot.
As I said before, the story tells of a Samaritan man that hauled the man to the next in and put up cash for his recouperation. Don't point a finger at anyone else and don't shout for more rules. Put up the cash yourself into a fund these adventurous folks can draw on for more manpower, equipment and supplies. Better yet, park your butt up there to "save the whales".
This isn't fairy tale land here and that guy wasn't some poor unfortunate victim. He chose to go on a dangerous adventure for his own enjoyment. Seems you keep ingnoring the fact that the climber that went on lost his fingers and more stump, the stump that was left from losing his legs in a prior climb.
But not enough to carry a dying man down with them.
The Good Samaritan was not at immediate risk to his own life.
High-altitude climbers in the "death zone" of mountains are.
In "Into Thin Air", Jon Krakauer calls Beck Weathers "a Republican blowhard".
Just a little food for thought...
Mr. Inglis, a New Zealander said,"...He wasn't a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one".
No sir! Not only did you show yourself less professional, you showed yourself as a self-absorbed, nihlistic A-hole!
I hope your decision haunts you the rest of your days.
To satisfy what the outraged (and oft misguided) posters on this thread demand: do something for the guy. It was a humane gesture of sympathy, giving him a few more minutes to live. They couldn't rescue him, but they could sacrifice a bit of their own precious resources to comfort the dying as long as they could.
Would it have been possible for them to transport him back down the mountain?
Would it have been possible for them to transport him back down the mountain?
Of course that was 10 years ago.
Maybe Jon's grown up by now.
And they made the wrong one! Leaving him to die - and that 40 others did the same throughout the day - is incredible.
To leave a dying person behind is the wrong choice. Barbaric.
Big BS Alert.
No. The challenge of Everest is precisely based on the extreme difficulty of not only getting to (or even near) the top, but of getting yourself back down. They can't even carry an extra few pounds of oxygen, much less another human.
Very well put!
Kindly explain how to do it given those conditions, then.
Care to elaborate?
You might remember this one: http://climb.mountainzone.com/2002/story/hahn/html/hahn_090302.html
Also Dave Hahn...
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