A
survival challenges Mount Everest ethics
By Alan Cowell
The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2006
LONDON It has been a deadly climbing season on Mount Everest, with at
least 10 deaths recorded so far.
No incident seems quite so strange as that of Lincoln Hall, a
50-year-old Australian climber who was the 16th victim - but only for
one night.
Hall's tale, which emerged here on Saturday, offered an inspiring
counterpoint to the grim end of a British solo climber, David Sharp,
who was left to die while roughly 40 other climbers passed him on their
own attempts to scale the 8,850-meter, or 29,035-foot, peak.
Sharp's death revived a passionate debate over the ethics of
high-altitude climbing, particularly in what is called the death zone,
where conditions, temperatures and the lack of oxygen combine in such a
way that would-be rescuers may forfeit their own lives while trying to
save a sick or incapacitated fellow climber.
Hall, one of Australia's best-known climbers, was on an expedition
whose members paid a minimum of $16,000, according the expedition Web
site.
Though at least one member of the expedition was forced to turn back,
Hall and others made it to the top on Thursday.
Accounts on Saturday, pieced together from expedition Web sites and
newspaper articles, said that on the descent, Hall suddenly collapsed.
He was pronounced dead by the Sherpa guides accompanying him and
abandoned at 8,687 meters. The cause was understood to be cerebral
edema - a swelling of the brain.
The next day, according to accounts from Hall's fellow climbers, he was
spotted by Dan Mazur, an American veteran of many Himalayan expeditions
on his way toward the summit. Mazur, they said, realized that Hall was
still alive.
Incredibly, he had survived the night.
"Lincoln was motionless, but submitted weak attributes of life," Alex
Abramov, the Russian leader of the expedition, wrote on its Web site
(http:// www.7summits-club.com).
The expedition sent a team of 13 Sherpas to rescue Hall. Three Sherpas
with "tea, oxygen and medicines have reached Lincoln," the expedition
Web site reported Friday.
He ascribed Hall's initial weakness on the mountain to an "acute edema
and hypoxia," meaning he was not getting enough oxygen.
By 10 p.m. local time Thursday, Hall and his rescuers were said to have
descended to a camp at about 7,000 meters on the North Col of Everest,
a pass connecting Everest to another peak to its north. And by
Saturday, "Lincoln Hall was able to walk on his own" to the Advanced
Base Camp farther down the mountain.
That he had been able to walk unassisted was taken as testimony to a
remarkable recovery and raised the question of what might have happened
to the Briton, David Sharp, if he had been helped.
A New Zealander, Mark Inglis, the first double amputee to reach the
summit earlier this month, was one of the climbers who passed the dying
Sharp on his way up the mountain.
Inglis told New Zealand television: "Trouble is at 8,500 meters, it's
extremely difficult to keep yourself alive, let alone keeping anyone
else alive. On that morning over 40 people went past this young Briton."
Inglis said he radioed for help but a fellow mountaineer told him:
"Look, mate, you can't do anything. You know, he's been there X number
of hours, been there without oxygen, you know, he's effectively dead."
The episode outraged Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who, with
the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, made the first verifiable conquest of
Everest in 1953. Hillary said that "people have completely lost sight
of what is important."
"In our expedition, there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one
member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to
die," he told a New Zealand newspaper, The Otago Daily Times.