I hate this ridiculously entitled attitude. If you aren't a great climber in fantastic physical shape, just don't go to Everest. I have the same kind of contempt for people who pay crazy sums of money to go on a Safari in Africa with loads of guides to shoot lions or elephants, so they can show their friends back home the pictures and the carcasses.
Actually - in that same vein. Those are the same people that show up to Burning Man spending insane sums of money and completely defeating the spirit of that event.
I am not a climber, a hunter, or someone who has ever gone to Burning Man, but if you want to take part in those cultures, you should do so with respect and humility.
Alternatively, imagine Larry Ellison paying for a shitload of comp-sci PhD students to comb through The Art of Programming to look for mistakes, only to submit them under his name so he could get his own cheque from Knuth?
Earnest hobbyism and trying to learn new things is awesome and should be strongly encouraged in everyone. Buying your way to the top and cheapening everyone else's experience is crass and a good way be shunned in almost any social setting.
If teleportation was invented, would it cheapen the pioneer's accomplishments if we could just buy a ticket to teleport to the top, grab a peek, and teleport home?
It's not elitism that I can't climb this rock or that mountain. It's the simple limit of my abilities. That's the beauty of it, really, because I have the same opportunity as anybody else- get better.
Are you willing to make the argument that looking out from the top of Everest or tramming to the bottom of the canyon for an afternoon is something that everyone should be able to do? That it's more important than preserving those areas for the future?
A while back, I had the opportunity to visit Blarney Castle in Ireland. As it turns out, the castle is an unreconstructed ruin; if you want to kiss the stone or at least take in the view, you have to climb a long, cramped, tight, steep spiral staircase. I'm old, out of shape, arthritic, and not fond of being the cause of a fairly large scale body recovery in the middle of a major tourist attraction, so I didn't go up. So far, I haven't noticed any consequences of the lack, and from what I enjoyed about the site, I'd just as soon they didn't strap an elevator to the side of the tower.
Everest tourism has costs, both in terms of sheer litter and in the lives of people who probably shouldn't be doing it anyway. Grand Canyon development also has costs which would reduce the value of the site. Are those costs worth the benefits?
Yes, absolutely. Why shouldn't humanity aspire to that?
> Grand Canyon development also has costs which would reduce the value of the site. Are those costs worth the benefits?
My point of view is that yes, the benefits do indeed outweigh the costs. There's plenty of canyon for everyone. Let one section be for families, children, the elderly and lazy. There will still be plenty of trails for hikers who want to get away from all that.
Because 7 billion people trekking to Everest would transform the character of the place so thoroughly that the reason people started doing en masse in the first place would be lost to history. Tragedy of the Commons 101.
The way we prevent these tragedies is via regulation. Needless to say, this demands time and expense that could always be used elsewhere, so if there's a natural barrier limiting access, then by all means, rely on that instead.
Once you open something to everybody, you've got to deal with...everybody. Generally speaking the people who are trying to profit from the initial development have zero interest in carrying the costs their ventures impose. Essentially, they're in the uncompensated extraction business and yeah a lot of people take a very dim view of that and will quite reasonably use any and all measures thay can to block what amounts to theft from the commons.
Says who? Who are you to tell people where they have business being?
> Those mountains are for genuine climbers that can earn their ascent there, not idiots with too much money and no respect for a mountain, who have sherpas basically push them to the top.
Again, says who?
> I hate this ridiculously entitled attitude.
Like the one you're showing telling others what they should and shouldn't do?
Good decision-making requires good judgement. If you think judgement is unfair, then go ahead and make dumb decisions. Though the whole point of having a conversation is to find out how to make good decisions, not to defend bad ones in the name of some misplaced 'right to be stupid.'
>Says who?
Well, I do. If that's not good enough for you, then do something about it instead of pretending like there's some great authority I should be appealing to in the exercise of good reason.
So what are you saying? People belong dead on a mountain?
Biology. Dying from a cerebral oedema is one way your body tells you "you shouldn't have come here". Rushing quickly up that kind of altitude is dangerous to your health - for example, one of the biggest contributors to altitude medicine was when India rushed an army to the Himalayas in the '60s to counter China [1]. They got a lot of pulmonary and cerebral oedemas, and the sizable affected population really helped the literature in the topic.
Also, keep in mind that the opinion offered was in response to someone basically saying that it was indefensible to not build a gondola ride to the top of everest. I notice you didn't tell that commenter "says who?".
The only problem I have with it is that bodies are rarely taken back and therefore contribute to the pollution of the mountain. Other than that....as long as everyone climbing knows that there is a 1.4% chance of dying, it's fine. I imagine there are extreme sports which have a similar if not higher death ratio,and I would never want to be forbidden from doing something I love just because I "can" die. And I imagine climbing to the top of Everest is what makes it special, not just standing on the top.
A set of stairs, obviously, ruins the wildness of one of the world's great wildnesses, as well as costs a lot of money for something that would likely go relatively unused.
Otherwise, as has been pointed out, you can take a helicopter to the top, but honestly, that may prove over time to be more risky than the slower way.
A dead human body is "pollution"? I guess you can counting the clothing and equipment as pollution or trash, but I would call a dead human body quite "natural".
Wisdom is knowing the difference. Or something.
Seeing a doctor used to be dangerous. Traveling to other countries used to be dangerous. So if I follow your logic we should get rid of all planes and travel because things that are dangerous should remain dangerous because reasons? And we should make sure surgery is still dangerous because reasons?
Helmets much more readily compare to ice axes, crampons, weather forecasting, ropes, anchors, avalanche beacons, pulleys, radios... and helmets! Mountain climbers are not against safety.
It's not some trivial walk around the park just because it's not considered one of the hardest summits in the world.
As for whether or not the gondola would be a good thing, I guess that'd depend on a lot of feasibility studies and cost analysis (cost to the environment, to the local populations way of life, monetary costs).
Millions of people travel in commercial airliners every day, at altitudes greater than the summit of Everest.
What makes the top of Everest interesting to visit is that to do it, a person has to overcome very difficult natural challenges. So a gondola to the top would destroy the very value it was supposed to provide.
The railroad cars offer enriched oxygen and supplemental oxygen, though they're not pressurized. Edema is a real possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghai%E2%80%93Tibet_Railway
Or this travelog:
http://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/HIGH-TRAIN-TO-TIBET-Wor...
As the altimeter approaches 17,000 feet, a package of potato chips balloons outward until it ruptures a seam. Sunscreen and hand sanitizer erupt unbidden from bottles. In soft sleeper class, Chinese businessmen sprawl listlessly on their bunks, sucking oxygen from plastic hoses. The bathrooms smell of vomit.
So given those choices, what's the answer?
*Mostly becase people use a small set of trails on their assent, and really don't have the enery to bring their trash down with them. The majority of the mountain is untouched, but the trails get a lot of traffic.