

Dead bodies on Mount Everest - jayeshsalvi
http://imgur.com/gallery/rkRAk

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lostlogin
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.

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

~~~
pvdm
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.

~~~
kbenson
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.

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

