This happens every time a climbing video goes public where someone is dying on an 8km peak.

This isn’t like hiking in a city park, you don’t get rescued that high.

Do the sherpas and porters get treated differently? Sure. But not in respect to rescue. Whether you’re a sherpa or 20 year alpinist, in nearly all situations you’re on your own.

Quote from the link: https://kristinharila.com/what-happened-on-k2-27-07-2023/

"Then at around 2:15 the accident happened. I did not see exactly what took place, but suddenly Hassan had fallen and was hanging on the rope between 2 ice anchors. He was attached to the same rope as all of us, it was pitch black and we could hear him to the left side of us, away from the path. We could also see that he was hanging about 5m down but we did not know if he slipped and fell, or if a bit of snow collapsed below him.

"At first, nobody moved, probably out of shock and fear, then we realised that he was hanging upside down and was not able to climb up by himself. He must have fallen almost 5 meters and his harness was all the way down around his knees. In addition, he was not wearing a down suit, and his stomach was exposed to snow, wind and low temperature, making it extremely dangerous. With Lama and Gabriel, we first tried to get the attention of number 1, Hassan's buddy who was before him. However, it seemed he couldn't get to him either.

"So the three of us set out to help him, along with number 3 in line who tried to also pull him up, clipping around the 4 people in front of us. Lama put down an additional ice anchor, I attached myself to this one and to the fixed rope as Lama climbed over to Muhammad, who was still hanging upside down. He tried helping him there alone, but it was impossible for one man to turn him around. Then, we made another plan, Lama climbed above and Gabriel went from below as I stayed next to the ice anchor since Lama was now only clipped to a rope to me. This way, we managed to turn Hassan around. He did not have any oxygen mask, neither did he have a down suit. His legs were twisted in an awkward position, most likely because of the way he fell. Gabriel gave Mohammad his oxygen and tried calming him while positioning him head up. Mohammad's friend, who was number one in line, came down to Lama to help us. We had also added a new rope to Gabriel so that we could fasten it to Hassan.

"As we were trying to move Hassan up closer to the path, an avalanche went off around the corner where the fixing team was. We got message that they had problems. At this stage, we decided to split up. Gabriel stayed with Hassan and his friend in the bottleneck. Worried for the safety of the fixing team, Lama and myself went forward to see how we could help them. Lama, Gabriel, the friend and me spent 1,5 hours in the bottleneck trying to pull him up before the avalanche and distress call from the fixing team.

"When we got in contact with the fixing team we realised they were okay. Lama continued to the front and I stayed behind and asked the Sherpas if they were turning around. They said yes, and as we understood it that meant there was more help going to Hassan. We decided to continue forward as too many people in the bottleneck would make it more dangerous for a rescue. Considering the amount of people that stayed behind and that had turned around, I believed Hassan would be getting all the help he could, and that he would be able to get down. We did not fully understand the gravity of everything that happened until later.

"Back in the bottle neck, Gabriel had managed to make a pulling system with 3 anchors and a rope, and Hassan's friend was helping Gabriel to pull Hassan up, little by little. As they did, people were crossing them, trying to get away from the dangerous bottleneck that lies at 8200m. Everyone was exhausted, especially Gabriel who had been pulling and helping Hassan for so long. Luckily Halung Dorchi Sherpa from 8K came to help with the last meters, to pull Muhammad up to a little snow shelf in the bottleneck. Gabriel gave, again, his oxygen to Muhammad. He also gave him hot water and tried to warm his body as best as he could. We don't know why, but Muhammad was not wearing gloves, so Gabriel also tried to warm his hands.

"For an hour more, Gabriel stayed and tried to help. All he could do was to stay with him and talk to him. At some point, Gabriel had almost no oxygen left and realised that if he himself wanted to come home that day, he needed to fetch more oxygen. He had to go up in order to get one as he knew his Sherpa had an extra bottle, but was much higher up. In total, I think Gabriel spent almost 2,5h with Hassan in the bottleneck while people were passing by. I don't think people understood the gravity of what was happening with Hassan as they were climbing, and that is why we see they are stepping over him to reach safety on the other side.

"Gabriel stayed with them as long as he could before he had to leave to get more oxygen for his own safety. This was very very traumatic, for everyone involved and I can only imagine the physical and mental strength it took for Gabriel to do something so heroic and kind.

"MingTemba, Makhpa, Lama, Nima and myself were still climbing up and we didn't know what had happened behind us, but we saw people catching up. We heard that Hassan was getting all the help he could. Very soon after we reached the summit, Gabriel joined us. I asked him if they got Hassan up and he had said yes. I asked if he was alive, and Gabriel said that he was, but that he was in a very difficult situation. We understood that he might not make it down. It was heart-breaking. It was only when we came back down that we saw that Hassan had passed and we were ourselves, in no shape to carry his body down. You need 6 people to carry a person down, especially in dangerous areas. However, the bottleneck is so narrow that you can only fit one person in front and one behind the person being helped. In this case, it was impossible to safely carry Hassan down.

"Back in Base Camp, we heard that people thought no one had helped him but we had. We had done our best, especially Gabriel. It is truly tragic what happened, and I feel very strongly for the family. If anything, I hope we can learn something from this tragedy. Everyone that goes up a summit needs proper training, proper equipment and proper guidance. From what I understood, Hassan was not properly equipped to take on an 8000m summit. What happened is in no way his fault, but it shows the importance of taking all of the possible precautions so that we can help ourselves and others."

Some people seem to think that all of life is a controlled experience, that's the equivalent of a ride at Disney World.

That's not even logical.  Someone part way up can assist someone going back down.  It would just cost them the summit.  Plenty have seen SAR in action and high angle rescues.  Sure, help can not come up to them but the other climbers are already there.  It is not always feasible but it often would be they are just more focused on getting to the top.

The photos were probably taken in low light, and you can't see great detail in the highlights, but yes, that is ice next to, and above them.  It is a massive death serac, bullet hard at that hour, and it can shed pieces when the sun comes around.  Or worse, huge blocks can cut loose.  There's video of descending parties reversing the route at night, reaching the fixed ropes to get to the "snowy hill walk", and finding those ropes severed by serac fall.  Some of the teams rappelled right off the unsecured lines, not knowing what had happened.  At daylight, other parties and team members ascend back up to the bottleneck and try to rescue people, below the bottle neck, just sitting in the snow slope.  I forget the overall outcomes, mixed iirc, but while it looks so casual in the photos from below, it's still challenging terrain in those conditions.

No.  There's not a chance in hell I could climb that serac for more than a body length up there, if even that much.  At sea level, the technical grade would probably be AI6 or WI6, because it's vertical to overhanging and it goes on for a long way.  At sea level, I would love to get on that if it was say 10m high, but, there's no way I could make it 30m, even 11m would be a stretch, probably 10m for that matter.

ETA:
To get an idea of how steep it is up there, look at how the guy frames the video.  He frames it to the serac being vertical.  But it's not.  The people are vertical.  Look at the difference between the horizon and the serac as the horizon first comes into the frame during the pan.  That serac is a monstrously overhanging beast.  But, despite the immense objective hazard posed by this thing, the Abruzzi is still the chosen path of least resistance.

So you want to go camp on what amounts to a landfill with metric tons of human feces?

Different strokes for different folks i guess.

Still beats San Francisco.

This. Trying to save 1 person way the fuck up there......probably aint happening no matter what. But the ego of them too....

And at the end of the day you have no real business being there, other than "look how great I am."

Lol. Why didn’t they shoot the knife out of his hand?

Slide him on the path....tell me you haven't climbed steep snow and fixed lines without telling me you haven't climbed steep snow and fixed lines....

Well, that guy is an angel.

But....you're forgetting the "ride him to safety like a toboggan" option!!!

They spend paragraph after paragraph saying they did nothing and they left him to die.

Then, at the very end of the article they mention what really happened.  The guy FELL to that position,  he was looked at by SEVERAL people including other sherpas. He was dead by that time.  You don't remove bodies very easily from altitude.  Everest is littered with them.

I bet those same climbers that are screeching about equality of sherpas and who are trying to frame the situation one way,  are also all for abortion.  Just a hunch

Google says the cost to climb Everest cost between $35k anf $65k.  Nat. Geo  says up to $120k.  Figure 4 persons needed to be willing to forgo that investment to save Hassan.  Too bad there wasn’t a Sherpa code or something......all Sherpa climbing stops and the Sherpas drag the stricken down IF they go down below a save able point.  

Personally I used to think it was cool and read books on Hillary and other explorers in the 70’s.  I know despise the adventure tourist trade clowns that in part but their way to the top.  Yea, I know you still have to do the climb.   The novelty of submitting Everest is gone.  Oh and the 1 and 5 die trying to summit?  I don’t think that stat is accurate, look at the line going up.   When the weather is right you have what 50 to a 100 people trying to go from the last camp to summit?

I think the whole thing is obvious......ain’t no one willing or trying to save no one up there.  It’s the video that merely exposes the reality of that.   Whether they were low enough to exfiltrate him or not, the type of self centered highly egotistical people that are compelled to summit are not about to cancel their purchased ego boost opportunity to save Ahpu, Mohammed or even Jane or Tony.  

At least when the summiting was only maybe a few people a year there wasn’t the indifference of the many.  I read old stories where a small group of guys back in the day did have to leave a stricken climber.  They did what they could but at a certain point, you know you have x time and O2 to save yourself.

You’re confusing Everest with K2. No lines of 50-100 people going up K2

That's a ton of context (TLDR for most people here of course)...

Sounds like a couple people actually put in a ton of effort to help the guy, and most of the other people assumed that somebody else was helping.   Making those kind of assumptions is human nature though.

My speculation: had the incident occurred at a spot other than the 'bottleneck', there would have been a bigger effort organized, and possibly the guy could have been saved.

But unfortunately it happened right at the (literal) worst place on the entire climbing route.

Very true

100% spot on!

Character is the one thing these rich pricks can't buy in a store and so they obsess over it and try to find it in strange places and in crazy way.

A woman trying to set a record and failing to do the right and moral thing when the time came? I'm not sure I can fault her, though I will anyway. I doubt a woman would have been capable of effecting a rescue in the first place. Much like policing, when women attempt to do things at their limit, they are out of luck when things go sideways.

I know where K2 is.  It's in Pakistan, well part of it.  Sherpas are Nepalese.  Which is what I was referring to.  You can expand the comment on Sherpas' dependence on tourism for their economy, to the rest of the peoples of the Upper Karakoram range where K2 sits, if you like.

Missed the last part initially.  Yep, a climber on K2 (or Nanga Parbat, Annapurna I II, etc...) knows what they're doing, far more than a "walker" on Everest.  If they don't, other people get to die too.

Yea!   Where is the ADA compliant escalator?   bitches!

You’re right!  My mistake, it took me until page 2 to figure it out.

I also picked that they weren’t farther down but in the choke point.   Not much to do at that point.   Hey at least they retrieved him from the terrifying hanging frozen meat fate.  They laid him out, comforted him in his final hours.   There is that.  

I guess the mental stumbling point is that this happened on the ascent.  If all hands stopped the ascent and worked on the rescue and exfil they may have saved him.  It just isn’t done nor expected up there.

"You didn't climb that!  You had help!  Bow to my indignation!"

Well, guess what, those Sherpas had help, too.  From these guys.  And, it's also kind of rare to see many tributes and acknowledgements of these guys on the social media and company pages of the Sherpas.

Photographing and documenting the work of these guys is the work of the "rich white guy's" photographer, or maybe by the "not so rich white guy" with his own camera if he can't scrounge a way to bring in a photog.

And, even if you do photograph and document the toil of these guys ... it might be for naught when you come back down and they're all gone, along with base camp and your film because of a mutiny; or, you come back down and they put a knife to you to rob you for bonus pay; or more confusing yet, the mutiny if backed by your own liaison officer.  Because, that's the way it was in the 1990s.  



We mock people for being Instagram types, yet our mockery stems from the very same attention deficit departure from long-form essay.  127 character sound bites.  That's what we've reduced the human experience to.

Better views,for sure.

The reason he’s called Super Sherpa is because that kind of thing is normally impossible.   You get injured high enough up and you’re on your own. Everyone up there knows it. Trying to turn it into a class struggle or some such shit is asinine.

The video doesn't lie!!!

Well would you look at that...

"Context"

How we were unable to discern all of this detailed information from the video I'll never know...  

I drove by an accident once on the freeway on my way to a party and didn't feel guilty at all about having a good time. infact I'd wager hundreds upon hundreds of people drove by that same accident.  

Why?  Because shit APPEARS to be under control or there APPEARS to be nothing I can do.   Life goes on.

That man was dead before he stepped on that mountain.

Also that high in the death zone following would have happened:
1) bypass him, is is as good as dead
2)stay with him and comfort him till he expires (which is what happened)
3)have 3 or 4 people die instead of one because of how high he was up in the death zone and the effort and oxygen required to get him down will get other people killed.


In case people cant comprehend this let me get the crayons out. Even with their oxygen bottles and masks that high up? That is slow motion having a plastic bag tied around your head you will die it will take longer. Descending to lower altitude will stop it, the more you exert yourself and struggle the faster you waste the oxygen the faster you die. The oxygen mask gives you a tiny margin of error.

This.  And that mountain must be littered with the dead.

Minor point, but how is he a Sherpa if he's Pakistani?

It absolutely was his own fault. There are accounts that more than one person TOLD Hassan that he was ill-equipped, and should turn back, but he apparently chose to ignore that advice.

Want to talk about egos and narcissism? How about when people tell you, "Dude, you're not prepared for this. It's dangerous", and you go, "Nah, man. I'm good"?

The SJWs who made the video and are screeching, "Somebody should've done something!". In that bottleneck? Get real.

“You need 6 people to carry a person down, especially in dangerous areas. However, the bottleneck is so narrow that you can only fit one person in front and one behind the person being helped. In this case, it was impossible to safely carry Hassan down.”

Too bad they didn’t have a bunch of arfcoms there to just slide him down the hill.

Check out the post above yours.

The term Sherpa is loosely used for the porters/climbing assist crew (especially by journalists, who don't particularly concern themselves with distinctions like Nepalese vs Pakistani).

Stupid article, didn't read.

That's what happens when you die on the mountain. There's a reason Everest is littered with bodies spanning decades.

Those SJWs should volunteer to be inplace on the mountain and on standby to help facilitate rescues such as this.   I suspect there would be no need to rotate volunteers, only replace seeing as they would likely never come back down.

People who have difficulty merely standing up from the armchairs they quarterback from, no doubt.

One look at the photos/video of the location of the incident, and knowing the altitude they're at, should have made it obvious. Even having 3 people simultaneously trying to tend to him in that spot, would've made things more dangerous for everyone.

How well would their CPAPs work, at those altitudes?

I thought this was the deal. You fall as a climber you get left behind because others would die trying to save you.

Peak cold.

Oh K2 is a high altitude graveyard full of hubris as well.

I never said he could be rescued from K2.

By default, because I can't really think of another word that fits the situation.

He's not an independent climber, lead team member, client, guide, apprentice guide, porter, et cetera.

So, sherpa, with a lowercase s is probably the most descriptive single word we have.

From the descriptions I've read, he may have been support to a guide.  Possibly even a liaison appointment.

It's an unusual situation in Pakistan.  To venture into this region, you are required to have a military liaison officer assigned to your party.  O4 or O5 type.

Those jobs are highly sought after and they’d rather risk death than lose it. For every job that’s open there’s a line of people waiting to take their spot.

That didn't look like a body.  It looked like some equipment or clothing.

I have no doubt about it!

I just don't know shit about K2 so I didn't want to say that.  

And that is another media story that seemed to have a number of omissions.

It garnered all sorts of righteous indignation about the guide not properly acknowledging the guy who saved him.  But, when reading about the full mechanics of the rescue, who he was guiding for, the state he was in, and how he was evacuated off the mountain, it's a lot more clear that a number of other Nepalese were involved in the carriage and coordination, and they would have had ample reason to shortchange the guide on the details of his rescue.

Oh, and just to preemptively throw water on the "rich yuppie whitey" stuff, this guide-partner was Malaysian, and his role in this guide service was to bring in clientele from southeast Asia, etc.  A guide service run by, drum roll, an indigenous Nepalese team.

I bet there's guyspeople in prison saying it too.  


Edit for my sexist remark