Also, it was just funny.

Why do we care?

“And that’s what you’re going to wear?”

a lot of lives could be saved by a fake Outside Magazine reporter interviewing each climber on the way up

Now I have a vision of Doris Roberts sitting in a folding chair and reading a magazine while waiting for climbers to come along so that she can grill them.

Its clearly not that Everest is a source of inevitable death, but that it requires training and knowledge to do it safely. 

If it brings people joy, great. just do the prep

That said, what would ever possess someone who is not a mountaineer to every fucking try something like this?  WHAT!?!?  WOuld someone please fill me in?  Is it the very large crossroads of stupidity and spirituality?  And the cost?!  Maybe that is why she asked if I was nuts.   What is it?  There are much cheaper ways to kill yourself that do not involve innocent people.

http://www.ameriglide.com/item/AmeriGlide-agac-used.html 

If it’s accepted that dying in general is a crappy process, it seems to me that dying while doing something enjoyable would be the best way to do it. At least those moments leading up the sealing of your fate will be exciting, and hopefully when they find your corpse there’s a smile frozen on your face.

As long as your death doesn’t put other people in danger.. it’s anything goes.

- Robert A. Heinlein

1) The cachet of summiting Everest has as much to do with risk as it does history, maybe more to a certain type of individual. So without having to assume the risk of allowing your own clients to die you enable a system of lesser colleagues who take all the liability and maintain the deadly mistique while bolstering your rep as superior in quality.

2) The bigger and more well-moneyed outfitters can also hire or buy up any startups assets that prove themselves.

So you maybe have a system that allows people to profit from the failure of others at no real risk to themselves.

Where has that concept gone wrong before?

Given that the mountain is apparently obnoxiously crowded at times, mostly by people who don’t die, they may actually be telling the truth on that one most of the time…

However, after finding the blog (http://climbingagainsthunger.blogspot.com/ ), it seems very clear that the client was referring only to corpses of climbers who had died the night before. There appears to be no mention of the living climber in distress at all. 

Everest has major problems, and much like Hillary, I find the attitudes of many who climb it horrifying. But using this quote in what seems to be an improper context to further that view, and calling out the client by name, seems dubious.

Just enough to make them ask themselves “ok, what dumbass thing am I doing that people might later point to and say I earned a Darwin Award?”

Surely most people who now summit Everest have read Into Thin Air. Maybe they could just have a cutout picture of the authors holding a sign “Please Don’t Become My Next Story.”

It seems like they’re fairly rationally maximizing their profits. Now the climbers…

Not to mention: Is the desire to try this inborn or cultural? Good luck figuring that out.