Fellow climbers say video footage shows Kristin Harila’s team walking over body of frostbitten man during record ascent

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66 points

Which just highlights how exploitative the whole endeavour is. Rich Westerners hire poor locals to risk their lives for no good reason beyond clout. These aren’t scientific expeditions, there’s no actual value in them.

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35 points

I agree, all of these ‘hikes’ should be banned. It’s absurd.

Of course, people will claim that these hikes provide jobs and a healthy economy for people who would otherwise not have work but it just once again shows how these hikers are exploiting desperate people who are literally willing to die for a job.

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3 points

I agree with you. It’s not like most of these trips are creating any advancements. People are dying so that other people can see a view and brag about it. What a terrible return for a human life.

I’m all for saving lives and looking out for eachother. That being said, many of these expeditions come with a dumb expectation that random people should also be willing to die. You shouldn’t be able to intentionally do things for fun that you know will likely risk other people’s lives. Many kids have lost their parents because of this.

I kind of doubt that the people who live there really feel like they have a way out at this point. Even if they found a way to be financially stable outside of this industry, I feel like a large amount of very selfish people would be angry that they couldn’t go on these trips with the natives anymore. How could they stop people from showing up?

Maybe people shouldn’t be going on a mountain that’s known to be deadly if they know that they will absolutley need to rely on a guide to survive. Maybe people should be working their way up mountain difficulty, and not just starting at the extreme ones. People should also start to respect the danger of being on a fucking mountain.

So many of these deaths would have been avoided if these expeditions weren’t a thing. If people can’t do this safely without continuously risking the lives of others, we should seriously look into stopping it. So many families are permanently missing loved ones because of this industry.

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2 points

Oh, come on now. In the worst year, Everest claimed 11 lives.

In the United States of America, on average, 22 people die from COWS.

Extreme sports, like mountain climbing, are dangerous, but not nearly as deadly as fishing (drownings).

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20 points

I don’t agree with op’s opinion or yours, but you are really misusing statistics.

Way more people are exposed to cows and fishing than to Mount Everest, orders of magnitude more.

Or do you think a fisherman should perform comparable preparation to someone climbing to 8k meters?

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3 points
*

It’s a bit misleading to compare total numbers instead of percentages. The most people to ever summit Everest in one year was 800 in 2018, and an average of 4.4 deaths occur per year to do it.

That’s 0.55% mortality for this one mountain.

If you apply the same odds to any other sport they would probably be banned. Could you imagine if 9 NFL players died every year? It’s roughly less than 1 per year at the moment I believe and that’s still pretty bad.

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