The Idiocy of Mountain Climbing

Reading the BBC article below reminded me of the idiocy of mountain climbing.

I know that people like a physical challenge, especially the young, fit, athletic types, but given the extreme danger that mountain climbing poses, I think it's idiotic to do it. This is especially so for very high mountains like Everest which have a literal death zone (it's not even in quotes) since above a certain altitude, the air is too thin and cold for a person or animal to survive it without oxygen.

To give a better understanding of the death zone, if the typical jetliner develops a fault and depressurises above 10000 feet, the pilot will quickly dive it down to 10000 feet, since above this altitude, people start finding it hard to breath and can faint or even die due to hypoxia, especially those with health issues like breathlessness. The death zone on the other hand is at an enormous 26000 feet and is the absolute limit of what a person in top physical condition can endure, so no wonder people die there. On top of this, climbers are seriously exerting themselves the whole time they climb, requiring even more oxygen, making this problem worse. Everest's summit is well above this too, at 29032 feet, so you can see the problem.


Mountain cleanup crew.jpg
Picture credit: Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa

These high mountains are literally littered with bodies of victims who have succumbed to the harsh conditions, including falls. It then takes other people to risk their lives to bring the bodies back home. Often the bodies are just left there since even companies who specialise in recovery don't want to go into the death zone due to the risks to their staff and yet people do this for "fun".

Sorry to be so blunt, but the whole thing is just stupid and pointless and I think it should be banned. There are plenty of other physical challenges which will give one's body a serious workout without putting their life in danger.

Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa cannot forget the dead body he saw just metres from the summit of Mount Lhotse in the Himalayas more than a decade ago.

The Nepali was working as a guide for a German climber trying to scale the world’s fourth highest mountain in May 2012. The body blocking their path was thought to be Milan Sedlacek, a Czech mountaineer who’d perished just a few days earlier.



In mountaineering, the death zone refers to altitudes above a certain point where the pressure of oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life for an extended time span. This point is generally tagged as 8,000 m (26,000 ft), where atmospheric pressure is less than 356 millibars (10.5 inHg; 5.16 psi).

 

Crims

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Good article!
I've never been a fan of it myself, even though I've climbed some mountains here in the UK - though not even like this example. I've turned my opinion around on this point - there are a lot of people who decide to climb mountains, and I'm honestly not judging either way. Most of us consider the idea to be extreme though in my view there are simply the people that definitely will do it whether or not it's allowed. A girl I know named Laura tends to do mountain climbing every month here.
 

Retro

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Indeed, climbing less extreme mountains is better, but still carries significant risk.
 
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