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The Wall Street Journal has an in-depth, up close look at the Sherpas and the dangerous business of helping people climb the world’s highest free standing mountain.

The Sherpas have spoken. There will be no climbing season on Everest this year. At least, not with their help and that means that the western “climbers” who go to the mountain can’t do it. They have no ability to do it without the help of the local guides, who go ahead of them, fix ropes, put ladders in place and carry heavy loads up the mountain to establish base camps so that the final push to the top can take place.

16 Sherpas (including members of some other groups/tribes) were killed last week when crossing the most dangerous part of the ascent, the field of ice sometimes called Popcorn, which is topped by a massive amount of ice and snow that hangs on a ledge above. This whole thing is heartbreaking, but, frankly, I don’t care all that much about the western climbers who have invested a lot of money and time to try to bag the world’s highest mountain. Compared to the death of the Sherpas, their losses are small.

The climbing companies that charge those who have a lot of money to guide them to the top have done something that, in the fact of mass death, was unconscionable. They push most of the danger of the climb onto the Sherpas, people for whom a few thousand dollars is a lot of money. This is the ordinary, sad and normal thing of people who have power pushing down the “little people”, the people who don’t have power and money. Had there never been any deaths in this manner, it still would have been wrong.

There has long been controversy since the professional mountain climbing “adventure companies” got into the business of charging clients for the guide services to the top of Everest. Most of the controversy has been around whether people who were making the climb were truly prepared to do so, whether amateurs and dilettantes were putting other people in danger just because they had money and wanted to do something rare. Most people never stopped to think about the Sherpas, myself included, at least not long and seriously. All that is over now. The Sherpas were angry, upset and the families of those killed were furious when the government of Nepal said it would give each of the families a mere 401 dollars (in the local currency) as compensation for each of those killed.

While I did some freestyle climbing years ago, I don’t consider myself part of the “climbing community”, but I can only hope that there are serious discussions and major changes ahead. The idea, for one thing, of people being “guided” up the mountain like it was some sort of strange Disney World adventure is ridiculous. If you can’t climb on your own, you aren’t really climbing. Yes, the danger of death is still there and still very real, but climbing by having someone else do 96% of the work is a farce. It happens because people make a lot of money doing it.

Why weren’t western climbers killed crossing the ice field beneath the snow and ice overhang? Because the Sherpas spent much more time in the extreme danger zone than the paying customers. The Sherpas are the real heroes of every photo taken atop the mountain.

They do the work, presumably, because they love it and are great climbers, but we have to face the fact that it is for the money. Rich people getting poorer people to face danger for them is not right. It happens every day, of course. There are thousands of men in North Dakota right now doing dangerous work drilling for natural gas and oil and we all use the product without a second thought. Everest, however, is different. No one has to go up a mountain.

Joe Rieter, a climber from California, clearly seemed to have been shaken by the deaths of the Sherpas in these quotes from the NY Times:

 His disappointment, he said, was overwhelmed by sadness over the Sherpas’ deaths. On the day of the avalanche, he said, he watched the dead men being carried out of the ice field tethered to ropes dangling from a helicopter, and he found himself wondering whether scaling Everest was worth the risk.

“I have a great plan,” he said. “I am going to go home and hug my 12-year-old. I’ve seen numerous things in my life, but nothing was ever driven home as to watch those guys on cables being brought down.”

Heading home, “there’s just a tug of war going on within me,”€ť he added. “I have put years of my life into this. But I am going home alive. I think I’m done with the mountains. I’m going to cherish what I have and count my blessings.”
 

This is a time of great sadness. Hard working people have been crushed under mountains of snow and ice and their families are left without a father to earn support or to care for children. Next year, of course, people will still go to Nepal and they will still be pushing up the mountain. The Sherpas will get a lot more money, but the fact will still remain that people with money are paying others to take danger, the risk of death,  for them.

When we want something very badly, a kind of moral blindness can set in. That’s why men pay prostitutes for sex, because they believe they must have it, so they disregard the human on the other side of the equation. It is why a lot of bad things happen in life, because people seek something without restraint and without consideration for others. The business of guiding amateur climbers up the world’s highest mountain should be changed forever, and most likely stopped completely, but I doubt it will happen.

Climbers leave Everest amid regrets and tensions among Sherpas

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