Posted on 06/14/2006 5:50:58 AM PDT by Mr. Brightside
"I285 around Atlanta kills far more than that each year."
LOL! Yep. Its kind of a flat Everest. Not as cold, but twice as dangerous. Minimum speed 85 MPH. Minimum distance between cars 5 ft.
I have read the book about the 1995 expedition. National Geographic had a nice series called "Mountain Men" It profiled all the "big" mountains, Matterhorn, K2, Everest, etc. There is no correlation to saving a person drowning to someone dying on Everest, as some posters have tried to make. I have never tried to climb a mountain, but after reading and watching these programs, it takes every ounce of energy to just put one foot in front of the other. People who climb Everest or K2 are not greedy. I see it as the ultimate test of mind over matter.
That would make it above the Third Step in your picture and quite impossible for an immobile person to be saved.
But 300 ft. from the Green Boots cave is off the ridge and someone can be pushed/belayed on his ass all the way down to Camp Three.
Not fun....and the bumpy descent may kill him if he can not assist, but definitely doable.
I want everyone to look at Mr. Brightside's photo.
Someone above the Second Step and immobile....is dead....no question about it.
Someone at Mushroom Rock (between First and Second Step)....with just a little mobility and a minor miracle...a slim chance.
Below the First Step, and odds change to about 20% (of getting him down...not necessarily surviving) if healthy people are near.
"That being said, 40 people could not carry a man down from the summit of Everest."
First, the circumstances at that altitude are so deadly that I'm not one to second-guess what they should or shouldn't have done.
But from what I've read the guy was immobile by the time they understood his predicament.
If so, that meant lowering his body down the Steps, etc., *all the while trying to keep him alive*, and with all the implications thereof. Also, of those 40 people, maybe 5 were physically capable of participating in a rescue. If that.
At altitude in the Himalaya you are focusing on two things: putting one foot in front of other, and breathing. Period. Each and every step is a monumental effort of body and mind. And let's not forget that the descent is always demonstrably more dangerous than the ascent.
So what if they did? Maybe they thought he was resting for a bit. Maybe he even acknowledged that he was OK.
We really don't know what happened there. So every critique is a pointless exercise in "coulda shoulda".
I know two people that died and another who developed cerebral oedema over the course of two hours at much lesser altitudes in the Everest region.
Of the two deaths, one was a 22 year old kid, the other a 54 year old Austrian guy with years of mountaineering experience. Both died in the same week on the 18,500 foot Cho La Pass that connects Gokyo Valley to the Khumbu Valley. The older guy had an apparent heart attack, the younger guy I don't know for sure but everyone said he was going up way too fast without proper acclimitization.
As an aside, they had to pay a Sherpa some obscene amount of money to bring a yak up to the Pass and recover the body (Sherpas don't like hauling dead bodies around).
The third was a woman in our little trekking group who went from a minor to a splitting headache, and then vomiting, in a couple hours. It was pretty obvious what was happening to her, so her boyfriend took her down from Lobuche to the lower-altitude next town where she recovered almost instantly.
Going down several hundred meters is usually (not always) enough to fix the problem, if you catch it early enough.
"Sounds like HIS GREED did him in."
Not to besmirch the dead, but behind every critique made by an experienced mountainer (except the crank Sir Edmund) is this unspoken thought: "Sharp was a fool to go solo, he took his life into his own hands, he was climbing beyond his skills and abilities, and he endangered other people on the mountain with his hubris."
Good thing "Sam McGee from Tennessee" didn't try to scale Everest. He'd still be complaining. Brrrrr.
Yes, and we're all very impressed.
Well I don't doubt the difficulties of performing a rescue and even some of the climbers did provide oxygen, but for 40 climbers to walk over, around and beside a man in need of help is pathetic.
The thought of climbers matter-of-factly navigating their courses and using the exposed and still-clothed corpses of long dead anonymous climbers as reference points is more than a bit grisly.
Reminds me of that great 70s book, "101 Uses for a Dead Cat." 101 Uses for a Dead Mountain Climber.
"What is your location?"
"We are 150 feet past Green Boots and almost to Frost-bit Brit."
Why would a frozen man be any heavier than he was before he was frozen?
Not heavier. But harder to move.
Unless he was frozen to the ground (possible) I don't see why he would be harder to move. You certainly wouldn't have to take any care with his arms and legs because he was going to lose them anyway.
Of course this Brit might have cost the life of those trying to move him because they needed all their strength to get themselves down. I can understand why they left him but it would be a difficult choice.
Has the question been answered yet, did they walk around him and leave him on the way up or on the way down? The "difficult choice" you are talking about doesn't matter if they did the former.
If that was the case, then why was the climbers original story that they knew he was dying on the way up? That's not speculation, that's recorded on TV.
Both could be true. It would not be unusual for a climber to signal that he is ok, when those around him doubt it.
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