Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to conquer Everest, joined in a raging controversy over the incident, sharply criticising the climbers who left Sharp to die.
Everest pioneer blasts climbers who left dying man
Updated Thu. May. 25 2006 10:12 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060525/everest_death_060525?s_name=&no_ads=
The climbing world is facing tough criticism after dozens of mountaineers are thought to have passed by a dying climber struggling to survive as he descended from the summit of Mount Everest last week.
The British climber, 34-year-old David Sharp, had climbed the mountain solo and was on his way down from the summit.
More than 40 climbers are thought to have seen him as he lay dying, but almost all passed him by.
He was later found dead in an ice cave, apparently from oxygen deficiency.
Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander and the first climber to successfully summit Everest, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, slammed the climbers who left Sharp behind.
"If he'd been a Swiss or from Timbuktu or whatever that didn't matter," Hillary said in a television interview.
"He's a human being, and we would regard it as our duty to get him back to safety."
In another interview, Hillary said many climbers today are more concerned about scaling peaks than they are about human life.
"There have been a number of occasions when people have been neglected and left to die and I don't regard this as a correct philosophy,'' Hillary told the Otago Daily Times newspaper.
"I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.''
Praise for Mark Inglis, a disabled climber who became the first double amputee to scale the peak on prosthetic legs quickly turned to criticism after he admitted his team stopped and tried to help Sharp, then continued on their way.
Inglis, also a New Zealander, told Television New Zealand that his party stopped during its final push for the summit to check on Sharp, who appeared to be close to death.
A slight movement of the eyeballs was the only indication that Sharp was still alive.
Inglis said they tried to give oxygen to him and sent out a distress call, then continued to the summit, leaving Sharp where they found him about 300 metres short of the 8,850-metre summit.
Inglis said there was little they could do for Sharp, and his party put the safety of its own members first.
"I walked past David but only because there were far more experienced and effective people than myself to help him,'' Inglis said.
"It was a phenomenally extreme environment; it was an incredibly cold day.''
Ben Webster, a Canadian who has guided five expeditions to Mount Everest, told CTV's Canada AM the recent situation exhibits a common phenomenon in the high peaks.
"My first reaction is that it isn't surprising. This happens every year, it just happened to be this incident that has caught the attention of people. But this happens pretty consistently on high mountains, and in particular Everest," Webster said.
In fact, during a Discovery Channel expedition that Webster led in 2004, his team encountered a group of struggling climbers and was able to help save four people.
Prior to the climb, he said, the team had a discussion about what they would do if they encountered climbers who needed their help. His team decided they would help.
"In the case of 2004, that's what we did. We actually provided oxygen and helped people down."
But, Webster said, it's easy to be an "armchair quarterback," and pass judgement.
The question to ask, he said, is whether the people who passed Sharp climbed by him as they made their way to the summit, or on the way down. If they were on the way down, they could have decided, within reason, that they didn't have the resources to help Sharp down the mountain.
If they were on their way up, the decision to pass him by is less understandable.
"If you're on your way to the summit, that begs the question of whether you're putting the price of someone's life tied to a piece of rock and ice, which is the summit of Everest. That's the more troubling question."
In the case of the Inglis team, the climbers were on their way to the summit.
Death is no stranger to Everest. In the last 53 years 1,500 climbers have reached the summit, but about 190 have died in the attempt.