No, this is a hugely selfish act. Other folks are right that people are indeed wired to get addicted to these types of feelings, but every day people choose NOT to give into their wiring. I respect THAT a lot more than climbing Everest.

Anticipating a straw man: No, we don't have a duty to eliminate all unnecessary risk from our lives. But a single act with a 10% mortality rate seems reckless.

I won't judge you for your judgement, and I might even share it for people mountaineers who have kids, etc, but I can not agree with your premise that risking death is automatically bad because of how others might feel about it. There's more to life than staying alive.

But what is the gain here of climbing Everest after it has been climbed hundreds of times? Astronauts clearly benefit humanity with more than just great stories. I can't see much marginal benefit for society for each additional Everest climber.

I'm not saying it's wrong or selfish to continue to climb Everest. For the climber him/herself I imagine the benefits are enormous and perhaps worth the risk of life. But I just can't see much benefit for anyone else.

If the mountain climber's goal is to be a stronger person, both he and the people around him benefit from his achieving it. If he comes out of the experience a strong, unintimidatable leader who inspires others and fights hard to make the world a better place, it's even arguable that the people around him benefit from his experience more than he does.

I and my oldest son both have a form of cystic fibrosis. I have figured out how to get us well (we actually work together on it but I do most of the research). Reading up on altitude sickness was an Aha! moment for me. In some ways, medical science doesn't have much of value to offer me in terms of thinking through the problem and coming up with new solutions. Medical science is mostly about finding better drugs rather than a better understanding of the process involved in what is typically a slow torturous death where your lungs deteriorate until you qualify for a lung transplant (assuming you don't have bad habits that disqualify you).

Reading this piece was personally meaningful to me in surprising ways that I probably can't adequately express. I belong to entire communities operating in their own medical equivalent of "The Dead Zone", where lack of oxygen, high doses of medication and so on create very emotional, inflammatory discussions and many people seem incapable of thinking logically. I wrestle continuously with both how and whether to offer assistance in the face of enormous hostility and long odds that it will really do any good. Even people who are interested in what I am doing sometimes write me and bluntly state up front "I will never make the extreme lifestyle changes you have made. But can you tell me more about ... (some food or supplement)?"

Stories about mountain climbing, altitude sickness et al are the absolute best analogies I have tripped across for what I am dealing with. I don't care if mountain climbers are crazy or selfish or whatever. I am grateful for the information they provide. I have a medical condition that forces most people with it to basically gradually suffocate. So I find value in the stories and experiences of mountain climbers. Also, living at 3000 feet above sea level for about 2.5 years, thereby forcibly expanding my lung capacity, probably helped save my life when I spent a year at death's door and was bedridden for 3.5 months and finally got a diagnosis after a lifetime of being treated like a hypochondriac.

Some people are facing things like this totally involuntarily and their situations are difficult to talk about in normal company because it is viewed pathetically rather than like a heroic struggle. I don't need any pity-parties. I am perfectly capable of wallowing in self-pity without any assistance. I need some kind of healthier, more useful feedback. Pieces like this one may be the best I can get given the kind of social responses my story tends to inspire.

Fascinating. It is certainly no regular doctor would prescribe to anyone. But it makes sense.

My grandfather was wounded during the war and as a result was left with a severely reduced lung capacity. When he came back, everyone was surprised when he started singing in a local church choir. Here is a man that can barely breathe and now he wants to sing. Everyone in the village thought he was crazy. But I think the singing was helping him breathe a great deal. He lived 50 more years.

So sometimes the counter-intuitive thing makes sense.

I am often frustrated when I talk to doctors because I want to know in more details what is going on, I want the results of tests explained and so on, Then I am not sure if they are just busy and think I am an asshole for asking annoying questions, or what I am more scared of, they don't actually know or care to know these things and just prescribe pills according to a textbook checklist of symptoms.

Someone who helped me enormously for a time was a former RN who later studied a lot of alternative medicine approaches. I took guaifenisen (sp?) for a time and was trying to figure out what it was doing that it helped. After an internet search failed to answer my questions, I asked her what it did in the body or if she could come up with some information online that might help me understand (she had a track record of coming up with stuff like that). She basically told me "I don't think anyone really knows that. That isn't how drug studies work. You are asking questions that the medical establishment cannot answer." So I suspect that in many cases your bigger fear is exactly what is going on.

I still don't know what gauifenisen really does to the body. It ended up being the last remaining drug I took for a time. I got off it some time in the summer of 2009 and have been drug free ever since.

This might help you to maintain that extra lung capacity or even to build it out further.

I've had a collapsed lung about two years ago and it was my years and years of sax playing that probably saved the day (that and a helpful neighbor that figured out that something serious over and beyond serious chest pain when inhaling was amiss, I'm off the 'if it came by itself it will go by itself' persuasion, which is ok most of the times but not always).

um... what?

If you enjoy doing something, do it. Don't do it so you can add it to your list of life experiences so you can pretend that you've lived a better life than somebody who hasn't done it.

Note, I'm not talking about everyone that does it, just most people.

"Note, I'm not talking about everyone that does it, just most people."

You say that like being selfish is automatically and unquestionably a bad thing.

Playing an X-box is a mildly selfish act. It's fun, but probably isn't a real big win for family, friends, society, etc. Not too damaging to them, though, unless done in excess.

Getting massively drunk and then driving your sports car around risks bystanders (sherpas), your life (causing sorrow and hardship for friends and family), and society (cleaning you and your victims off of the road cost money and time).

I was going to create a startup, but unfortunately I think it's just too selfish of an act. What if by giving up my cubicle I screw over my family and pets that depend on me? Can I be so selfish as to give up my livelihood, my life savings and dedicating every waking moment to making my startup succeed?

I would argue that creating a startup--much like climbing Everest--is a risky endeavor with unspeakable rewards. I am not a mountaineer, and I would never risk my life on a mountain just for the pride.

But you have to wonder, as we sit here talking about it on the Internet, do these people know how to really live in a way we haven't experienced? Maybe it's the physical exertion or the satisfaction of accomplishing one's dreams, but you can't chalk up every hardcore mountaineer (or any other deadly hobby, for that matter) as mere adrenaline junkies. The real debate here is whether or not it's worth it to risk your life in order to live it to the fullest.

Good one.

My point, however, was that I do not presume to judge others based on the risks that they take in their own lives. The juxtaposition I was trying to make is that people comfortable in their corporate lives might say it's selfish or crazy to persue one's dreams of creating a startup at significant financial risk, just like some people here are saying it's selfish or crazy to want to climb Everest.

Is skydiving a suicidal activity? Are surfers that risk shark attacks or storm chasers that follow tornadoes nothing more than stupid, selfish, suicidal sacks of meat? I personally don't think so, but you are of course entitled to an opinion all of your own.

By the way, I'm more than happy to converse different opinions in a civilized manner; bleeding sarcasm isn't necessary to get your point across.

Now, we're talking life instead of life savings, but I find it hard to say that their decision is wrong in any ethical or moral sense, and I'm curious what moral framework would justify your viewpoint. Additionally, burning through your life savings (and that of friends/family) can easily cause more long-term harm than having a mom or dad that died while climbing Everest. You just think that one risk is acceptable because it doesn't terminate in death. But there are greater things to fear than dying.

Additionally, suppose there were some not-to-distant dystopia in which reading non-approved books were a capital offense, and the state/corporate/whatever apparatus caught 10% of all offenders and had a 100% conviction rate for that 10%. Would that suddenly make reading wrong? I think most people have the intuition that the law is wrong, not the reading.

Similarly, I have a hard time seeing why 10% of people dying while doing something somehow makes it wrong per se.

What about the folks who lose their life savings when their businesses fail, and decide to commit suicide? I have no stats on how often that actually happens, but it's something to consider.

Dying in a mountain may be part of the process of living your life and it's not less stupid than dying in a car accident, however climbing a mountain and have 10% chance of dying in the process is just plain reckless and selfish.

Your life is your own, but don't expect to get approval and admiration from everybody else.

But it also doesn't count the many people who start climbing the mountain but turn around before the summit and make it down alive.

The true statistic is likely much less than 10%.

However, only about 2700 individuals climbed -- which puts the deaths / "uniques" back up to 8%. And if you assume that the sherpas die less frequently than do the tourists, 10% doesn't seem too far off.

Interestingly, K2 seems to be much more difficult with a much higher fatality rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander

The attempt numbers you quote, 4102 attempts by 2700 individuals, was for 2008. A year with one fatality.

Those odds are quite different.

However, the rate stands. It's not correct, according to the source on 8000ers, that 4000 people climb it in a year. Indeed, the list shows that number is for all time as well.

(Perhaps 99.9999% if you include the Dalai Lama)

[1]: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedo...

10% of people who attempt a summit die, but that does not mean that attempting a summit necessarily has a 10% chance of death. That 10% figure is not conditioned on your individual preparation, your guides, and your fellow climbers. I would guess that with the right preparation, the chance of death is much less than 10%.

He's able to be so successful because he makes sure his climbers are adequately prepared, and he doesn't allow people to climb who he doesn't think are fit enough. It seems like (at least from the Discovery series) that many of the people who die are hiking on their own, without the help of one of the successful companies, so when something goes wrong, they don't have a support network to help them.

I honestly don't know, but I would guess that people attempting to climb Everest are not just random climbers, but people who train specifically for this.

Last year there were 330 summits and 5 deaths, so roughly 1.5%

Thanks for the link O.P, it really made an impact on certain priorities and perspective.

The other half is that in most of America and many parts of the rest of the world, most people can't support themselves financially or otherwise without driving a car at least 5 days per week. The same is not true of climbing Mt. Everest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

Automobile travel is one of the most likely voluntary activities to kill you, and the most likely direct cause of death (as opposed to things like smoking which kill you indirectly over time).

This is for values of "you" which != "mountain climber." Hell, I stay away from mountains and a car isn't going to be what gets me--I swim at midnight in the ocean here in Florida, and ride my motorcycle to work almost every day when the weather's cooperative.

This is what gets me about mountain climbing - you can't really be good at it, at least not in the sense that it will save your life. There are so many unknowable, uncontrollable factors that make the difference between life and death, to the extent that you play Russian Roulette with each climb, the only reward being a spectacular view.

I saw Touching the Void (recommended) a few months ago and it described how on one occasion two climbers basically climbed onto a snow overhang and when it broke it was too late to do anything about it. There was no way to know that they were heading onto an overhang at the time, it looked solid as anything else. This is not a skills-based discipline, just crazy gambling. I don't get it.

In modern society most people have lost their respect for nature. Going into the mountains and climbing them makes you respect nature in all its awesome force. You're walking a very fine line, where you're taking risks but also mitigating those risks by using proper equipment.

For the most part this is a skills based discipline, but the fact remains, you're dealing with nature, an unknown force.

So the people who don't risk their lives climbing mountains have lost their respect for nature? I think you might have that exactly backwards :)

That's why I'm staying the heck away from it.

I respect lions, too.

I'm not going to test this theory myself, but here's a cute story about a lion who was raised by humans and still recognized them even after being reintroduced into the wild: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_the_lion

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405422/quotes

There are countless counter-examples to this claim. For example, Jerzy Kukuczka's spent three nights out above 8000m on K2 without food, water, tent, or sleeping bag. During this time, he covered substantial technical ground to summit their new route (the South Face) and descended safely without assistance and even without frostbite. His partner, Tadeusz Piotrowski, was suffering more seriously from the exposure and fell while downclimbing ice unroped. Kukuczka was not just "lucky", he was prepared and knew how to last in extreme conditions. His decision-making with regard to batteries (his headlamp never worked when it mattered) and rope (he died when the second-hand 6mm rope he was leading on cut) was not so good.

Touching the Void is a great story and Joe Simpson is an entertaining writer, but he's also notoriously accident-prone and has some peculiar risk analysis judging from his writing about places that I have climbed. Sure, cutting edge alpine-style climbing is dangerous and requires a great deal of competence, but it's still not crazy gamble you describe as long as you make objective decisions.

Accidents on hard routes are either because of objective hazard (e.g. climbing underneath a serac, an obvious hazard that the climbers chose to accept because they thought the route was "worth it") or human error (e.g. rappelling accident). You choose where to climb and you assess conditions. Some hazards are hard to assess (avalanches from slopes that you cannot evaluate), but most accidents related to objective hazard involve a specific decision that was known by the participants to be risky.

It is not the case that choosing to attempt a big objective involves an especially large risk. But if you never make risky decisions, then you are likely to fail at your objective (maybe climb something less impressive). The trick the prolific climbers who make it to old age have mastered is evaluating risk sufficiently accurately to get the big lines without dying. There are a couple who were just lucky, but by and large, luck runs out eventually so you have to be good at assessing risk.

If you play games where one set of moves means you'll certainly survive and win, then you're going to make those moves. It's like playing chess, with a loaded gun beside the board so you could shoot yourself if you chose to. That might give you a thrill the first time, but you'd soon get bored of it, and you wouldn't learn anything worthwhile from it.

The really absorbing games are the ones where every set of moves could get you killed, and the winning ones are more likely to than the safest losing ones.

Many books have been written about this stuff. I think Joe Simpson's This Game of Ghosts is the most accessible.

I do believe that Jerzy lived through that event due to his preparation/talent for handling extreme conditions and his mental focus (to keep warm when sitting in the snow all night, to not make mistakes after being out for so long). Piotrowski was no slouch, but he fell because he got sloppy. Perhaps his physiology was also somehow less robust. Note that lots of other people have died because of one night out in the same conditions, even following a comfortable tent-bound night of sleep and a day with food and water. These two were strung out from their big new route and after the second night of sitting in the snow shivering without food or water, they still broke trail up to the summit. It was after the third night out that Piotrowski finally got sloppy on the ice climbing.

But that's precisely not the main reward. You can get a better view from an airplane, and who cares? Climbing isn't about the view any more than a solo circumnavigation in a small sailboat -- sure, you see amazing things and they're breathtakingly beautiful, but that's not why you do it.

I'm not a mountaineer and probably never will be, but I can definitely see the draw. It's the challenge itself, and the fact that the so much rests on your ability to focus and make rational decisions in the face of extreme danger.

Great post. For those interested in experiencing the splendors of the Himalayas with less of the grittiness, I'd suggest booking a trek. Everest base camp treks can be done in 2 weeks or less for a modest price, along with many other scenic and adventurous treks in the area - no mountaineering needed. Tea houses provide an alternative to camping, no need to "poop in holes," and I found the food available great. You can't escape the lack of bathing, nor the possibility of altitude sickness - but I had an amazing time, and hope to go back some day. My one suggestion: go during low season.

One drawback with booking a set itinerary is that if your body doesn't take to the altitude well and you need more time to acclimatize, it could jeopardize your trip. Within a group of 10, a couple people likely will not make it all of the way to base camp and will need to stop. If that worries you, finding a more flexible itinerary will let you travel at a slower pace if need be.

This is the sort of scenery you can expect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6ZPYwlj4bc

It's an industry catering to reckless thrill-seekers.

At an organizational level, you are correct. There are very few places left unexplored by the human race on this planet. However, on an individual level, if you have never been to the summit of Everest, then it is very much a personal exploration. Maps and guides reduce the required effort from superhuman to formidable, but I see a clear exploratory factor.

At a personal level -- answering the question "what have I explored" rather than "what has the human race explored" -- the chasm between having crossed the Hillary Step and merely having read a description of it is vast. You are exploring your own limits in a purely figurative sense, and this could be boiled down to "thrill-seeking", but you are also literally exploring the terrain and geography, figuring out how to hoist your own personal mass beyond each obstacle. It is this very personal sense of exploration that I think drives most non-professional mountaineers.

Also, even at a macro / organizational level, completely new routes are tried (explored!), and the route through the Khumbu Icefall changes every year.

Actually, IIRC, most of our oceans are completely unexplored.

what is HN with all the passive aggressive insults of other people's comments?

whatever the preparation and outlandish cost, perhaps it's not simply ruthless determination that makes someone abandon their team mates, and yet still have the energy to summit. In such alien conditions, utterly hostile to human life, climbers might face their own mortality. Under the spectre of pure, unadulterated fear, they must realize that they are beyond help as well as beyond helping anyone else.

If they don't, they fall among those who never leave, abandoned on Everest.

I used to have arguments with one of my old roommates about space exploration. He would argue that if we found a planet several thousand light years away that could support human life, we'd never get there because nobody would volunteer to go. I could never get through to him that there are people who will take any risk to get to do something like that, even if it meant only being memorialized in the memories of their distant descendants or being frozen for a few thousand years and never again seeing everything they'd ever known.

However, human history supports the idea that there will always be those few who are willing to do things for reasons which evade the rest of the human race. That's just the way we're wired.

My opinion is that this "wiring" is crucial in what makes us human. It makes us grow and discover our full potential. So you will still have people wanting to dive in apnea for 5+ mn or crazy programmers experimenting stuff with twitter. And that happens even if those people are extremely logical/intelligent people.

I'd go to friggin Mars, just to step on its red soil. I'd go there on a one way trip to stay there and die and I'd sign up tomorrow. If I only could.

But sadly modern world is too worried about my well-being to let me do something like that.

Not really. Many of the people actually working towards going to Mars probably feel as you do. The problem is it's actually hard (technologically and politically).

Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the retort: "Because it's there", which has been called "the most famous three words in mountaineering".

There's a reason we don't see more pictures of our dead heros.

"Mountains are the means, the man is the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man." - Walter Bonatti

"When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath...I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will." - Messner on the first solo ascent of Everest

I have never been to Everest (would like to one day), but I climb 14ers in CO all the time. Climbing at high altitude is simply the hardest thing I've ever done from a mental, physical, and emotional standpoint. Once I started climbing everything else in life just seemed easier.

One of my hobbies used to be brutal enduro-hiking, and my little trip up Rainier years ago still stands out in my memory as the hardest thing I've ever done.

If HN readers really need that entrepreneur spin on this, then I'd suggest that there are a lot of parallels between summiting (and knowing when not to summit) and entrepreneurship.

Everest specifically is probably more because it's a trophy; there are a lot of mountains out there that would afford a pretty similar challenge.

Everest is a trophy, for sure, and it is hardly a purely difficult climb (that's not to underscore the objective dangers, however). Stevie Haston, a famous and accomplished British alpinist, has compared Everest to doing push-ups with a plastic bag over your head.

Also -- risk of accidental death aside -- climbing and mountaineering are probably the two singularly best ways to maintain great physical conditioning.

Anyway, that's enough HN for me for a while.

I remember the John Krakauer Book _Into Thin Air_, about an Everest disaster, made me want to climb it -- I haven't.

It's the whole "yeah people die, but it won't be me" attitude.

I remember coming out of Saving Private Ryan thinking "that looks like fun", despite what I know intellectually.

Going through live fire infiltration training cured me of any such sentiment.

Oops.

What did you explore? Nothing, it's all documented, explored, exploited. Hell, it's a tourist attraction.

The two people I was talking about in the quote you took out of context, however, were serious explorers and mountaineers. One had a few dozen first ascents under his belt, and the other had summited Everest 19 times.

Edit: I might actually use that as my short summary of the trip.

I've never made it to 20K, infact the highest I've reached is 15k feet being a non-professional climber and it is hard to do justice of the difficulty of every step after 12k. From the difficulty in breathing to not being able to sit for anything more than 30 seconds, it is really a testament to the strength of the climbers who make it to 20k and above like the OP.

So please don't downvote too much.