Netflix documentary on Everest earthquake

Nobody goes to Everest anymore. It’s too crowded.

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Nobody goes to Everest anymore. It’s too crowded.

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Aren't people dying basically because they are waiting in line too long to scale to the summit?

My wife has watched 37 Everest shows/movies/docs lately for some reason. And told me last night about this new one comin out.

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Why in the world would anyone want to scale Everest?

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Because it's there. At least that's what they claim

Buddy of mine from college did this, but that was like 20 years ago.

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I love watching Himalayan climbing and hiking videos bc of the beauty of the mountains but those people who actually climb are a different breed.

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My old Sales Director at Omniture/Adobe died in that Everest traffic jam that happened a few years ago. Don Cash. He's still up there. I think it was assumed he went into cardiac arrest on the descent and the sherpas gave up trying to get him down after he fell one too many times.. He had lost 3-4 digits on his right hand climbing one of the other 7 Summits a year before his Everest trip. I have this macabre habit of reading old news articles about him every six months or so.

As of December 2021: 6,014 different people have reached the summit of Mount Everest.

1,826 have swam the English Channel.


Which T-shirt would you rather have?

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Nobody goes to Everest anymore.

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It’s too crowded.

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I won't be doing either, but it's a more exclusive club to swim 21 miles than to hike 6 miles up.

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Recently watched Lost on Everest on Apple+ (recommend if you're into these kinds of shows) and they had a shot where 200 people were in line to get to the summit.

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From some of the videos I've watched when I went down the YT Everest video rathole, Everest is the easiest to summit. Some of those other over 8000 meter mountains are a death trap.

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Everest is the easiest to summit.

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I can't agree with that and I doubt any mountaineer would.

Outside of expedition logistics, there are two main factors in the easy/hard math for a summit: technical difficulty and danger. While due to the collapse of the Hillary step Everest is actually technically easier than it used to be but the number of people on the mountain lined up for the summit window raises the danger significantly which the altitude excebates. While the death to summit ratio is one of the lowest of the 14 8000ers the toll it takes on your by is by far the highest. I think it is hard to argue in the general sense it is not one of the hardest 3 including K2 and Manaslu. You could put Kangchenjunga in that group based on technical difficulty. This all depends on how you balance technical and danger. On the easy end, you have Shishapangma but most rate it here because they stop at the forepeak. The true summit is only about 50' higher but about 4 hours of walking in a knife edge with serious exposure.

Then you get a mountain like Annapurna, which I consider my crowning achievement even though Everest gets all the cocktail party discussion. It has the fewest summits of any 8000er, it is very close to K2 but when I did it there were quite a few less on Annapurna. It also has the highest death to summit ratio. When I claimed it almost 30% of summit attempts ended in death.

Why do people do such statistically stupid things? For me it was for the profound sense of accomplishment. The minutes standing on a summit are so special and yet have to be so carefully measured against the chance of not getting back down safe and intact. You might work your arse off for weeks and get a long 30-45 minute period to reflect, you might just have time to pull off your mask and take a couple of breaths without the Os and head back down or you might hit your turn around window 100 vertical feet from the summit and abandon all that suffering and take the L. It has been proven over time that ANYONE can climb these mountains but by the same token ANYONE can fail at climbing them. The only thing you really know about the people that summit them is they had a decent amount of luck and they have a willingness to suffer for a goal most think is silly and arguably stupid.