Articles like this are very suggestive - of course while in the warm, in front of the computer everyone would try to rescue the poor climbers. However add difficult terrain, height, snow, fatigue and race with the clock and you have wholly different story. Consider how much effort is needed to transport someone by Mountain Rescue teams in lower mountains (<4000m) - teams of 2-5, lot of ropes, pullies and special transport stretchers.
Even seasoned climbers admit that you are pretty much solo on the high mountain. The strongest ones with highest morals have even tried helping some other party at these altitude but with very little effect. The moral choice is hard - would you put your life at very high risk just to attempt rescue with very little probability?
I'm pretty sure the moral choice was easy at first -- of course you help! -- and then got harder as there were more and more tragic outcomes, until it swung all the way to becoming an easy "no." It is morally correct, perhaps mandatory depending on your beliefs, to value your own life as much as another person's, especially one climber valuing his own life as much as another's. You have to balance the odds of dying yourself against the odds of saving another person. Plus, under those conditions you would be risking several lives -- an entire team -- on helping a single person who has a slim chance of survival, in a situation where the rescuers have little more strength than what is required to sustain and control their own bodies. This assessment might be considered unduly pessimistic if there were not plenty of deadly history supporting it, but there is. Therefore, it seems like an easy decision to me. Not that it matters what I think, since I'll never be there to make it!
Ultimately it is a matter of priorities. Yes rescue is difficult in the death zone. Yes people are generally on their own up there and if you fuck up and die it's on you.
But on the other hand, why are you climbing? It takes resources and a very serious effort to get to the summit and back down. And it takes a particular kind of person to do that, to use all those resources and expend all that effort while stepping over corpses or soon-to-be corpses of others. That's not mountaineering to me.
I have never been on Everest and likely never will be, so I can't say whether I would attempt a rescue. Nevertheless, I don't think I could live with myself if I pursued the summit while others were dying.
This is my reaction as well. I can understand hard choices in survival situations. However, there's more than a little difference between people stranded in a lifeboat and people traipsing past the dying on their vacations.
I don't buy people chest-beating about the danger and adventure of their recreational choices, then explaining that the reason they passed by a collapsed or injured person to continue on to the summit and cross something off their bucket lists was because to do otherwise would be just too dangerous.
I agree, but I also want to point out that in most cases people are only going to be passing already-dead corpses, not living people who need to be helped or saved.
Having just read information on the 1996 Everest blizzard, it seems that guides and other climbers generally try to help those that are dying or struggling, but the options are few, and the oblique, ignorant "If they're still breathing there's still hope!" just creates more deaths in the long run. You can only do so much, and if someone is too far gone, there is no point in risking the death of the would-be rescuers in a futile attempt.
I call bullshit. The problem is that certain mountains, notable the "seven summits", most of the 8000m peaks, and a few others such as the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and Rainier are overrun by people who are completely clueless. These aren't climbers, they are rich people who want to tick off a box on their list of life accomplishments. These peaks are heavily commercialized and guiding outfits are selling something outrageously irresponsible because there is a lucrative market for it.
The climbing world is full of dramatic remote high-altitude rescues. The following story is a great example taken from google's cache of Alpinist's archives (the original which seems to be no longer available was at http://www.alpinist.com/doctcl/ALP11/profile-trango):
The great epic of Trango Tower began on September 9, 1990. Takeyasu Minamiura, a thirty-three-year old Japanese climber, stood just under Trango's summit with his paraglider sail spread out on the snow behind him. He had just spent the past forty days soloing a new thirty-pitch A4 route on the east prow (Minamiura called his a "capsule style" ascent, but it is the closest to true alpine style that any first ascent on Trango has come), finishing the line that Wilford and I had started in 1989. As if pulling off one of the greatest big-wall solos of all time wasn't enough, he planned to cap his adventure with an airborne descent to the glacier, 2000 meters below.
After reaching the summit, he committed himself to the scheme with Samurai dedication, throwing off his haulbags, which were attached to a chute. Ominously, the gear flight went awry: his bags hit the cliff, then slid at warp speed down the gully to the Dunge Glacier. Low on food and with no ropes, Minamiura waited for a favorable wind for his takeoff. When a head-on breeze came around, he tugged on the riser cords of his rig. The canopy inflated.
But as soon as he stepped off the cliff, his chute collided with the wall. It deflated like a pricked balloon, sending him sliding down the south face of Trango Tower. Forty-five meters into his fall, the paraglider snagged on a rock horn, and Minamiura stopped. He hung at the end of a tangle of strings, wheezing from the impact, his feet dangling in space and his smashed eyeglasses bent around his face. The ice axe strapped to his back had prevented his spine from breaking.
He kept his cool, pulled out his radio and contacted his four Japanese friends, Masanori Hoshina, Satoshi Kimoto, Masahiro Kosaka and Takaaki Sasakura, who had just completed a twenty-four-day ascent of the Norwegian Buttress on Great Trango. Rather than asking them to rescue him, he told them he had had an accident and requested a helicopter.
The next morning, he disentangled himself from his parachute cords and traversed five meters to a narrow ledge. This place became his home for the next six days.
Minamiura's Mayday sent his friends scrambling. While two men went to look for him visually, Kimoto and Hoshina marched to a Pakistani army helipad at Payu, twelve miles away. On September 11, in a stripped-down Lama heli hot-rodded for high altitude, Kimoto and Hoshina flew to Trango Tower. The machine shook violently at 6000 meters, but they spotted Minamiura waving from his perch. Crosswinds prevented the pilot from landing or lowering a climber onto the narrow summit, and they radioed Minamiura that a heli rescue was impossible.
Instead, Kimoto and Hoshina embarked on a daring plan: they would be flown from the Dunge Glacier to the Trango Glacier, and from there climb the original British Route.
No one had repeated this route. When the Japanese started up it, they found canyon-like ice gullies and gaping chimneys festooned with ancient fixed rope. Fourteen years of ultraviolet degradation and stonefall had reduced the ropes to bootlace strength. Clasping ascenders to the tattered lines, they gingerly moved up. Often, they belayed each other on a separate rope and placed protection while jumaring the old cords. "Yes, those ropes very dangerous," laughed Hoshina when I met him in 1994.
While the rescuers battled weathered ropes and waterfalls pouring down the Fissure Boysen, Minamiura waited. On September 12 a helicopter dropped food and first aid, but Minamiura couldn't catch the package. The nights of September 13 and 14 were cold and sleepless. Minamiura kept in radio contact with Takaaki Sasakura at base camp, talking about the meals they'd eat back in Japan. His thirst was becoming unbearable.
On September 15 the helicopter dropped more food, but it too disappeared. Then, on the radio, the pilot alerted Minamiura that a can of cheese had jammed in a flake fifteen feet above the ledge. Minamiura knew that if he left his bivy he might slip off, but he was starving and climbed to the flake on wobbly legs. He immediately found the cheese and ate it. It was his first food in six days.
On September 16 Hoshina and Kimoto rappelled to Minamiura, having blitzed the British Route in three days. The trio continued down by the Slovenian Route. By September 18 they were back on the Dunge Glacier. Minamiura had lived on Trango Tower for forty-nine days, the last twenty-two of them without a break.
Nice story. However it takes place at much lower altitude (around 6000m). Trango is great climbing area with demanding climbs but it is entirely different category than Everest.
It is not saying that one can not succeed in saving someones life (even if it is highly unlikely). It is more if you are willing to risk your life to do it. If there weren't people risking lifes in rescue there would be no firefighters or mountain rescue. But one can hardly look down at people covering their butt first in extreme situations of high altitudes.
I agree that some mountains are heavily commercialized though.
If you ask anyone who has been both places, they will tell you that the Trango rescue or the 1977 Bainthha Brakk epic demonstrate far more tenacity and competence against far thinner odds than these Everest scenarios. This statement includes one of my climbing partners who went back up from high camp after their own long summit day on K2 to rescue incompetent people who should have turned around when their own team members couldn't be bothered.
I don't think it's that rescue attempts are more difficult on Everest but rather that they are more futile. If a climber collapses from HAPE/HACE in the death zone it is often too late to help them.
Of course I agree completely that rescue attempts become more difficult when you throw in a bunch of type-A amateurs.
I didn't say it was futile to attempt a rescue, I said it was comparatively more futile to attempt a rescue. You have to make an assessment - is it likely that we can save this person and is it worth the risk?
Then there is the psychological aspect. In the Trango rescue, Minamiura was in radio contact with the rescue team. It's a lot harder to leave someone when you can communicate with them.
In the case of David Sharp it's not entirely clear he was beyond help, at least at the point when he was first found. I don't think that Ingall's made the correct decision but I also have to accept that it is difficult for me to really know or understand what happened. What I do know is that many climbers suffering from HACE can die very quickly - often much quicker than they can safely descend. In those cases, they truly are "as good as dead" though I don't believe there is any way judge whether an individual is at that point or not.
And next time try not to cherry pick a single word from my post.
Beck was left by people who were perfectly capably of helping, despite evidently still being capable of getting himself down. Your example is good too, but there are many, many examples of people in radio contact with a camp only a few hours of non-technical terrain away, but where the people in camp don't actually do anything in time. Also, being physically present next to the person who needs help seems like a bit closer psychological connection than a radio, but there are still cases of people being left behind due to incorrect evaluation of "futility".
I agree completely, and agree with your original statement that the major problem with Everest is that it's full of amateurs.
I'm just saying that the technical difficulty of a rescue isn't the only criteria. In the case of Minamiura, his survivability if he was rescued was high. The chance of him being rescued was low. For someone suffering HAPE/HACE on Everest it's probably the reverse. I didn't mean to suggest that they should be left behind.
Even seasoned climbers admit that you are pretty much solo on the high mountain. The strongest ones with highest morals have even tried helping some other party at these altitude but with very little effect. The moral choice is hard - would you put your life at very high risk just to attempt rescue with very little probability?