Dead bodies on Mount Everest | Hacker News Reader

Dead bodies on Mount Everest

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14 pointsjayeshsalvi6 comments

There is a great story about a team member getting sick of the slow progress Sir Edmond Hillary was making cutting steps on Everest at the early stages of the ascent. A team member went up to tell him to hurry up. The guy got to him, spent several minutes laboring to catch his breath? Said good work, and started back down without Hillary breaking from cutting steps.

It never occurred to me that dead bodies would just be left there.

Reading some stories about it, it's worse than that. The dying are tramped past, there isn't the oxygen to stay, and there isn't the manpower to get them down. The stories are awful. There a series called Everest: Beyond the limit that was quite good (but with a terrible sensationalist angle and a tedious theme song/echo thing after adverts). It discussed issues and death quite well.

At that altitude, the effort to move a dead body is four times the effort at sea level. If you attempt it, you put your own life in danger.

I understand the reasoning why they aren't always recovered, it just never occurred to me that there were bodies that are routinely passed but left up there until now. I'm more horrified by the situation than anything else.

That's not to say that the behavior is entirely acceptable. The story of the man whose body froze but was still alive and people just trudged past him assuming he was dead until someone finally heard him moaning softly is particularly horrific.

I understand that horrible situations can call for relaxed moral constraints just to survive. Living/fleeing an area seeing active military conflict, severe drought/famine, and any number of other extremely taxing situations can call for harsh decisions in order to survive.

I think this is different.

What we have here is (I admit, I assume) a bunch of privileged people purposefully submitting themselves to extreme hardship for a sense of accomplishment and meaning. In a way, emulating what they were lucky enough to have avoided by nature of where and who they were born as.

I didn't really have strong opinions about mountain climbing at this level before this montage (beyond thinking it's a bit ridiculous), but now I'm somewhat disgusted by it.

Yes, life and death is sometimes horrific. Makes you appreciate life even more when you contemplate death.

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