What's heroism got to do with climbing mountains?

29 May 2006

Yesterday, Australia's top female climber, 43 year old Sue Fear, was believed to have died after falling into a crevasse on the world's eighth-highest mountain. Ms Fear was the second Australian woman to climb Mount Everest, and a friend of Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall, who was rescued from the mountain at the weekend after being presumed dead.

This followed last week's debate surrounding the decision of double amputee mountaineer Mark Ingliss to leave a stricken climber he passed, to die.

There’s something profoundly disturbing about the idea of a man dying, freezing, alone in a cave, 800 metres below the peak of Mount Everest. Knowing that 30 or 40 other people saw him huddled there, and felt there was nothing they could do but leave him to die.

I should say that I’ve never faced such extreme conditions as those described at the top of Everest. Temperatures down to 40 degrees below zero, frostbite gnawing away at limbs. Climber Stephen Venables wrote in the Telegraph that at that altitude, the landscape is a ‘rarefied, desolate place where the human body is effectively dying; where the longer you stay, the more you deteriorate.’

Ingliss, whose achievement was overshadowed by the dying man on the mountainside, said it was hard enough to focus on keeping yourself alive at those altitudes. He said they did everything they could to help, but there was no hope of him escaping the ‘death zone’.

The death zone. It’s as if life was never meant to exist in these environments. I can’t help thinking about people up at that altitude, slowly dying as they trudge towards a peak, while around them lie the bodies of others who stayed too long, who let the death gnaw away so much of them that they were left lying there forever.

The rules are different in the death zone, the climbers tell us.

But we’ve heard the ‘rules’ argument before. We’ve heard it used as a refrain to cover actions in times of war and insecurity. We’ve heard it used to justify actions to clamp down on undesirables, or to condone actions such as torture. The rules are different in these circumstances, the perpetrators tell us.

Perhaps the rules are different because life was never meant to be in that way. These zones of death are completely foreign to everything we love and cherish about life and living. Perhaps we need to

AUSTRALIA

What's heroism got to do with climbing mountains?

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