Mount Everest
Standing at 8,850 feet above sea level is Mount Everest, one of the most astounding mountains on Earth. There have been numerous attempts to reach the summit of Everest, yet none of them was successful until Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay’s expedition on May 29, 1953. In excess of 100 individuals made it to the summit of Mount Everest by the 1980’s and by the mid 90’s 846 people had accomplished this feat. Unfortunately, there was upwards of 148 deaths up to that point.
In 1996, two expedition companies, Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants set forth to lead expeditions to the highest point of Mount Everest. Adventure Consultants pioneer Rob Hall, alongside his two aides Mike Groom and Andy Harris lead one expedition. Hall and Groom had past experience with reaching the summit of Everest; however Harris was the only one with formal “high elevation” climbing expertise. Mountain Madness founder Scott Fischer and his two aides, Anatoli Boukreev and Neal Beidleman headed the second expedition. Fischer and Boukreev both had vast experience with climbing Mount Everest. Additionally, Boukreev held the honors of climbing some of the world's most difficult mountains without utilizing any supplemental oxygen. Beidleman had experience, but it was not as far reaching as Fischer or Boukreev. Both companies used the skill of the Sherpa locals to aid in guiding the trip and to help secure the ropes along the trails.
The Tragedy and Causes
For some, these endeavors represent incredible accomplishments, yet not all on this expedition would share the same fate. Whenever going up against Mother Nature, one gambles with the odds of who will win. On this endeavor, Mother Nature won the lives of Adventure Consultants’ Rob Hall...
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...ively impact all team members, consequently putting them into a more hazardous situation than expected. It may come easy for some to create action plans and to implement split decisions based on that plan. For others, it is harder to make proper judgments when confronted with a real life situation. Nevertheless, people need to be committed and determined to ensure the same mistakes are not made again so a tragedy like this will not repeat itself.
References
P, S. (2004, June 5). Killer Weather on Mount Everest. Science News, 165(23), 366.
Krakuer, J. (1997). Into Thin Air. U.S.A.: Villard Books.
Sutherland, A. (2006). Why are so many people dying on Everest? BMJ: British Medical Journal, 333 (7565), 452.
Temptest, S., Starkley, K., & Ennew, C. (2007). In the Death Zone: A study of limits in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Human Relations, 60(7), 1039-1064.
Chapter 2: In Chapter 2 the narrator discusses the history of everest and famous expeditions. Everest’s height was calculated in 1852 in India. Sir George Everest the surveyor general at that time used trigonometry to calculate everest height at 8,822 meters (28,943 ft). In this chapter also it talks about famous expeditions like Hillary and Tenzing and Messner and Habeler.
Ever since people knew it was possible to reach the summits of Mount Everest about 4,000 people have attempted to climb it and a one in four ratio of people have died from doing so. “Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed” (Krakauer 13). The very first person to reach the summits of Mount Everest was in 1953 also ever since then about seven percent out of every 4,000
Everest in 1996. This became the deadliest expedition to ever climb with 15 people losing their lives. Krakauer explains his intrinsic motivations to accept this challenge and many of the mistakes that helped lead to the disasters of that day. He includes himself, and explicitly blames himself for at least one person's death. The experience affects him profoundly, and in addition to telling the story, the book focuses on how Krakauer is forever changed as a result of what happened. All of the clients have difficulty adjusting to the altitude, tiring easily, losing weight and moving slowly. The climbers' experience in mountain climbing and at high altitudes varies some of them are quite qualified, others very inexperienced and highly reliant on the
Everest is an unbelievable mountain that has taken the lives of a number of the greatest climbers in history. It was my job to ensure that clients make it up that treacherous mountain safely. My name is Rob Hall. I was the main guide and cofounder of a climbing company called Adventure Consultants. My friend, Gary Ball, and I used to be professional climbers. Together we succeeded in climbing to the highest summit on each of the seven continents in seven months. This was our greatest achievement. After this, we decided to start our own company guiding clients up large mountains. In May 1992, we successfully led six clients to the summit of Everest. Unfortunately, Gary died of cerebral edema in October 1993 during an attempt on the world’s sixth-tallest mountain. He died in my arms and the next day I buried him in a crevasse. Despite the pain that his death had caused me, I continued guiding for our company and eventually led thirty-nine climbers to the summit of Everest.
Climbing makes for a difficult expedition, you need to give up the wrappers when you was ascending. You need to give up the heavy things, you need to give up your wrappers, and you need to give yourselves. Sometimes we need to give up our lives to climb the mount Everest. According to snow storm, the energy, the oxygen and the people who desired prove themselves the spring’s 96s expedition to mountain Everest was destined to be the most tragic.
Climbing Mt. Everest is an accomplishment that only a limited number of people can say they have accomplished. Despite statistics that illustrate most fail or die trying, numerous people are drawn to the mountain each year and truly believe they can be among that elite group. In the spring of 1996, Jon Krakauer, a journalist for the adventure magazine Outside and a passionate climber himself, was offered the opportunity to climb Mt. Everest. The original offer was to join an Adventure Consultants team led by Rob Hall, a respected and well known guide, climb to base camp and then write a story on the commercialism that had penetrated this incredibly risky but addicting sport. Without much hesitation Krakauer accepted the offer but not to just go to base camp; he wanted the top. The expedition started out as predicted but an unexpected storm the day of the summit push turned this expedition into the most devastating expedition of all time. Krakauer was changed for life; an article on the commercialism surrounding the mountain would no longer suffice. Into Th...
Rob Hall was a veteran climber who was determined, passionate, and respectable. Hall proves his determination by climbing the Himalaya at age nineteen (32) and deciding to tackle Everest after digressing to Base Camp during his first trip to the Himalaya, although it took him ten years and three attempts (32) before he wa...
Climbing Mount Everest is a horrific and thrilling experience that 290 people have died attempting to complete. In the novel “Into Thin Air” written by Jon Krakauer, Krakauer goes through his own journey of climbing Mount Everest and how commercialized the climbing of Everest had really become. In his journey he explains how climbers have paid as much as $65,000 to join a guided group that would lead them to the summit. The author bluntly states that some of the novices were not qualified to climb Mount Everest. With this amateurity it only made the journey twice as much difficult and dangerous. Unfortunately, a terrible blizzard struck Mount Everest within minutes of them reaching the top. For all of the climbers on the mountain, the blizzard turned what was to be a successful climb for all concerned into a nightmare. Because of poor planning, several of the climbers found themselves in a desperate situation that they had no
Krakauer describes Hall as being a thirty-five-year-old man standing at "six foot three or four and skinny as a pole" (31). His approach to climbing and guiding was meticulous and demanding. He paid close attention to details and had an intense desire to succeed. Hall made many successful climbs prior to his attempt at Everest. In 1990, after three separate attempts over a span of ten years, Hall finally made the summit of Everest. Hall’s flair for publicity had allowed him the success of his prior climbs, but he decided that the guiding business was preferable to constantly pursuing sponsorships. After creating Adventure Consultants, his mountain climbing enterprise, Hall became very successful at getting his clients to the top of Mount Everest. By 1996, he was charging sixty-five thousand dollars per person. This fee was the highest of all the companies on Mt. Everest.
The cost for a guide to bring someone up the mountain can be upwards to $70,000. People wanted to go regardless of their health and condition and guides would just do their job and just lead people up without knowing if they are weak or not ready for the climb.”Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs […] into an apparent death trap?”(Krakauer 8). This quote is an example of how the guides treat the people climbing up the mountain with the. They disregard the condition and state the people are and just keeping leading them up asking or knowing if they are weak and not ready for the climb up. Not only is this part of guide’s fault for people becoming injured or dead it is also the person’s fault for not thinking about themselves and the state and condition they are in to try to climb up the mountain.”It can't be stressed enough, moreover, that Hall, Fischer, and the rest of us were forced to make such critical decisions while severely impaired with hypoxia”(Krakauer 285). Jon Krakauer is responsible for some of the deaths of people mentioned in the book because of the decisions he made. Krakauer himself said he had guilt for not fully helping the people with hypoxia. The timing and decisions he made for descending back down also did play a role in how he caused some people to die instead of helping
Krakauer uses character motivation to express the characters ambition to successfully summit Everest. Scott Fisher, the Mountain Madness head guide, “has this burning ambition to be a great climber, to be one of the best in the world.” His ambition is useful for his climbing career, but when he “pushes himself beyond any physical limitation,” he ends up dying in the end. Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Fisher’s climbing Sirdar, beats himself up for his death. Krakauer said, “Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal
What Shakespeare might call the fatal flaw of Fischer’s expedition seemed to be a collective lack of humility amongst his team, stemming of course from the top with Fischer himself, the “face” of the organization. Fischer was an ambitious man who was desperate to earn the respect of his peers, and came across as nothing short of overconfident when he was quoted in Krakauer's Into Thin Air as saying, "Experience is overrated. […] We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired. […] (W)e've built a yellow brick road to the summit." (pp. 85-86) Even Fischer's experienced guide, Anatoli Boukreev, was not immune from pride, opting to make the climb without the use of supplemental oxygen, a decision that was not only completely unnecessary, but arguably ended up costing the lives of members of his team at the summit. Indeed, as Krakauer noted, there was a palpable lack of a team dynamic, a result of the Attraction-Selection-Attrition Theory; the team felt more like a bunch of individuals, all "in it for himself or herself." (Krakauer, p. 213) In a life or death situation, having a strong team dynamic is more important than ever. But Fischer was more interested in the parts, than the whole. As part of Fischer's ambition, he had made an effort to recruit high-profile clients, including a New York socialite who wrote for Allure magazine, and Krakauer himself, who could lend the expedition some heavy publicity, but brought very little by way of experience when it came to summiting a mountain as extreme as Everest.
In an informational article, by Guy Moreau, titled Why Everest?, Moreau writes, “In recent years, this problem has been made worse by the large number of climbers who want to conquer Everest.” The article also says that, “The climbing season only lasts for about two months…Climbers need to leave the final camp by late morning. Then, there can be so many of them in the death zone that there are traffic jams. Some days, up to 200 people set off.” Since there are delays, people have to stay longer, and they “…can suffer exposure and use their precious supplies of oxygen.” Many people end up dying since they all thought they could climb the
One of the elements behind the desire to climb Mount Everest is the determination to summit as a redemption. Stacy Allison, the first American woman to summit Mount Everest, explained how climbing allowed her to recover from an abusive
On May 10th, 1996, a mountaineering expedition turned into a disaster when an unexpected storm hit Mount Everest and eventually took twelve people’s lives along with it. While some events are agreed on the disaster, what actually happened that night and the events leading up to it are heavily debated. This debate can be seen in the books Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev where they disagree on crucial details leading up to the climb. Although Anatoli was the better climber, Jon Krakauer’s account is more credible due to his knowledge on the subject, great character, and determination to show the most honest account of the story possible.