Triage in the Death Zone

July 31, 2006 5:27 PM

"The situation didn't have any intrinsic calm to it,"he says, "There was some excited radio communication and the roar of the wind and storm was also very cautionary. I knew it was in the process of killing people out there..."

Dr. Stuart Hutchison, a Canadian cardiologist, was a member of one of three expeditions climbing the southern route on Mount Everest in early May of 1996. Just after midnight on the morning of May 10, he and 34 other climbers crawled out of their tents on the South Col and started their final summit push. After weeks of climbing up and down between camps on the mountain; scaling the treacherous Khumbu Ice Fall and waliking the Western Cwm to acclimatize their bodies to the to the rarefied air at and above 14,000 feet above sea level, everything came down to the next 24 hours.

The day would end with 11 climbers dead on the mountain. Until now Dr. Hutchison has maintained his silence about his role in, and experience of, that tragic day on Everest. [more inside]
posted by persona non grata (50 comments total)

The disaster--the worst single-day loss of life in the mountain's history (PDF)--was famously documented by journalist and "adventure writer" Jon Krakauer, himself one of the first May 10th summiteers and a member of Hutchison's expedition, in an essay for Outside Magazine entitled "Into Thin Air". Krakauer would later expand his essay into a book which sold over 3.6 million copies and spent a year on the New York Times best-seller list. (It also inspired a much-maligned TV movie.)

By placing much of the blame for the deaths of several of the climbers that day on the shoulders of the legendary Russian climber and expedition guide, Anatoli Boukreev and the climbing sherpa Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Krakaur's essay/book created a controversy in the international high-altitude climbing community. The ill will was intense and Boukreev, along with writer Weston DeWalt, penned a book-length rebuttal. There was much back and forth between the camps (see the links on the left of that page), and the dirty laundry of modern guided climbing of the worlds highest peak was well aired.

With the death this spring of the young British climber, David Sharp--on a clear day on Everest when his near-corpse was passed by many climbers--the question remains: is the summit of a dangerous mountain the the ultimate goal? Or, is it the climb that counts?

Previously on MetaFilter
posted by persona non grata at 5:27 PM on July 31, 2006

First link goes to a definition of triage. I just sayin.
posted by gottabefunky at 5:34 PM on July 31, 2006

Is there a point here? Seven links in a fpp and I can't find one that relates specifically to the text of the link. A link to triage? A link to a picture of some tents? WTF?
posted by F Mackenzie at 5:42 PM on July 31, 2006

Which one is Hutchison's account?
posted by keswick at 5:43 PM on July 31, 2006

Because it is THERE?
posted by HTuttle at 5:43 PM on July 31, 2006

It's the last link. Good article, but fantastic burying of it. Maybe the first link, which happens to be a quote from the article, should actually be the article.
posted by lowlife at 5:43 PM on July 31, 2006

Oh, and when I say "last link", I mean "last link of the more inside".
posted by lowlife at 5:44 PM on July 31, 2006

Ah, thanks lowlife. It was the 20th link I was looking for. Silly me... giving up after only 15 seemingly-pointless links!

Next time I'll take a LIFO approach.
posted by F Mackenzie at 5:50 PM on July 31, 2006

This post is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 5:53 PM on July 31, 2006

Thanks for the fix, Matt or Jessamyn. :-)
posted by persona non grata at 6:07 PM on July 31, 2006

> he and 34 other climbers

2009: seventy thousand climbers crawled out of their heated tents an hour before dawn, screamed BANZAI, and assaulted the summit, but were thwarted by a single Yankee abominable snowman with a 1911A1 and five bullets. 27000 died.
posted by jfuller at 6:09 PM on July 31, 2006 [3 favorites]

Maybe the first link, which happens to be a quote from the article, should actually be the article.

Alas, that's not my style. For better or for worse.
posted by persona non grata at 6:27 PM on July 31, 2006

The first link is supposed to be the main one in a Mefi post.

I already knew what triage was.
posted by washburn at 6:42 PM on July 31, 2006

I think the use of the quote as being the link into the story, rather than pointing to a page which has no intrinsic association (without actually finding and reading the article first) has some value. But hey, I survived the posting style, so it can't be that bad! I only went through five links before deciding that my time would be better spent hovering over them and looking at the browser's status bar to see if the destination was what I was hoping for. :)
posted by lowlife at 6:47 PM on July 31, 2006

"Alas, that's not my style."

And that, my friend, is why you will never be welcome here.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:48 PM on July 31, 2006 [1 favorite]

I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on here. Where's the link for Dr. Hutchinson's material? We already discussed the morality issues a couple of weeks ago.
posted by bim at 6:49 PM on July 31, 2006

Click "the climb" in the more inside. It's a nice article.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:50 PM on July 31, 2006

Thanks. I gave up about midway through before.
posted by bim at 6:52 PM on July 31, 2006

good grief!
posted by brandz at 6:55 PM on July 31, 2006

"Alas, that's not my style."

And that, my friend, is why you will never be welcome here.

Quite.
posted by The Monkey at 7:00 PM on July 31, 2006

Persona non grata, I liked your post. Pay the haters no mind.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:15 PM on July 31, 2006

Stuart Hutchison and I interned in the same city (Montreal) in the same year (1986-7), he doing straight Medicine at the Montreal General and me doing a rotating internship at a little Catholic hospital, St. Mary's. I was intrigued, much later, to read "Into Thin Air" and discover someone I had met. I approved of the author's deft characterization of Stuart at the end of the book as, I'll paraphrase, a self-satisfied member of a prominent monied Montreal family.

Stuart and I crossed paths in the St. Mary's emergency. He was forever pulling me aside and trying to 'teach' me things. Remember, he was at the same level of training as me, but felt justified in assuming a professorial air while he enlightened me. Still, he wasn't obnoxious about it: it was clear that he honestly felt that he was helping me, a less capable individual. I bear him no ill will. After all, he represents my little brush with greatness.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 7:16 PM on July 31, 2006

A few fascinating statistics:

• The principal export of Nepal is t-shirts reading "Mom and Dad climbed Mt. Everest and all I got was this stupid T-shirt"
• New restaurants on the slopes of Everest account for 26 percent of McDonald's global expansion
• Everest is growing by .31 meters a year, due entirely to defecation by climbers.
• At current rate of increase, by 2019, everyone in the world will be climbing Everest.

posted by George_Spiggott at 7:17 PM on July 31, 2006

Also, I lived on Rue Hutchison during my years in Montreal. Coincidence? In retrospect I think not.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 7:18 PM on July 31, 2006

How weird, I just finished reading Into Thin Air yesterday.
posted by astruc at 7:42 PM on July 31, 2006

Alas, that's not my style. For better or for worse.

Interesting article, but my style vote goes to 'worse'.
posted by tula at 7:48 PM on July 31, 2006

A satellite image loop (1.3 MB) of the 1996 storm.
posted by rolypolyman at 8:34 PM on July 31, 2006

his near-corpse

Most tightly-wound spin-term I've seen in a while. They didn't leave anyone to die at all, they merely left a near-corpse to become a full-corpse.
posted by scheptech at 8:43 PM on July 31, 2006

png, Just finished looking at this excellent network image of relationships in the mid-East and I was thinking about how narratives are less linear and more like mosaics. That said there is something both like a clib up the mountain in the sequence of your links, with the apex being the last link and also something like a mosaic in the collection of links you included in your post.

When MeFites make creatively formed posts there is usually a negative response to the form, like the person whose post was just the letter "e". Or the person whose post was made up of computer notations, like ^.

Like others here I was mystified by the triage link but in the end I enjoyed reading the stories of the Everest fiascos.

There was an amazing documentary in 1975 called The Man Who Skied Down Everest. Breathtaking: They say I skied 6600 feet in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I fell 1320 feet. I stopped 250 feet from the crevasse.
posted by nickyskye at 8:45 PM on July 31, 2006

oops, not clib up the mountain, climb, obviously.
posted by nickyskye at 8:46 PM on July 31, 2006

Interesting. I've read Into Thin Air, three or four times. I find it interesting because I have been in a lot of situations where I had to trust others with my life and they trusted me so I could relate. Especially to people who are essentially loners being drawn into assigning blame when the group falls apart. Jon Krakauers client/ experienced climber dichotomy mades the story as far as the book is concerned (it's certainly not the writing).

Personally, I think that if you go into something like that in a group and someone dies due to a situation any one of you could have anticipated then everyone is a little bit responsible. There's little point quibbling over the amount of responsibility. For starters you encouraged each other to climb Mt Everest....
posted by fshgrl at 8:57 PM on July 31, 2006

Wow, you guys sure are easily confused. ;)
posted by Kloryne at 10:37 PM on July 31, 2006

Good post.

But the "southern route" link is intensely frustrating - those pictures definitely need bigger versions! Click, curse, click, curse...
posted by smeger at 10:40 PM on July 31, 2006

"Everest is growing by .31 meters a year, due entirely to defecation by climbers."

I don't think you can defecate at the summit, because I don't think you can eat/digest during the final approach.

I always assumed that the lack of oxygen in the air meant you needed oxygen bottles to be able to sustain the exertion of climbing, in order to reach the summit, but I recently found out it's much worse than that - even lying down, moving nothing, there is so little oxygen available that your body is dying, consuming itself. You're on borrowed time. Because of this, as your body crumbles, more climbers die on the descent than on the ascent.

I think I'll go find out more about this. It sounds like altitude sickness might be similar to radiation sickness.

I think I'd prefer a beach in Hawaii :)
posted by -harlequin- at 11:03 PM on July 31, 2006

Actually, Hutchinson gave an extensive interview to Explore, a Canadian outdoors magazine, in 2001 or earlier. (I read it that summer in an Alpine Club of Canada hut.) It was a long article, rather more interesting than the one linked and directly addressing the controversy of Into Thin Air, The Climb, etc. The biggest point I remember him making was that he felt the members of the team were far more qualified to be on Everest, in his opinion, than the glory-hound amateurs paying to be hauled up the mountain that Krakauer made them out to be.
posted by bradhill at 12:22 AM on August 1, 2006

The figure 14,000 feet in the original post can't be correct. Everest Base camp is at 5600m or over 18,000 feet. 14,000 feet is a mere 4260 metres. You'll huff and puff and most people can't go straight to this level from sea level.

But it's pretty girly stuff really and after a while at this altitude you can do everything you do at sea level. Although smoking a cigarette takes about 15 minutes.
posted by rhymer at 1:19 AM on August 1, 2006

Remember this shit, kids, because soon there will be hourly Chinese helicopter rides up Everest (except for a wide set of concrete steps with guardrails up the last section, so you can say you climbed to the top). There will be an assortment of national flags at the summit from which you'll be able to choose one and pose for photos (after briefly removing your oxygen mask). Then you will walk down the steps and wait in the heated snack bar for the next helicopter. Dying on Everest will be as unusual as dying in an asphalted, parkinglotted, tourbussed, snackbarred, trashcanned, fannypacked&bumbagged national park.
posted by pracowity at 1:55 AM on August 1, 2006 [1 favorite]

Remember this shit, kids, because soon there will be hourly Chinese helicopter rides up Everest

Then instead of Everest being covered in empty oxygen tanks and corpses, it'll be covered in shattered helicopters and corpses.
posted by eriko at 5:07 AM on August 1, 2006

Altitude sickness sucks -harlequin- but unlike radiation sickness the cure is pretty good. You turn round and descend. Often all you have to do is rest for a day a few hundred metres lower and then start climbing again. I've had it quite a few times, mostly over 6000m in the Andes.

Also, the acclimatisation and blood thickening process is quite cool. If you ever spend time on the Bolivian altiplano or the Tibetan plateau, you discover after a few weeks it's perfectly possible to do a spot of extreme jogging at 5000m.
posted by rhymer at 5:31 AM on August 1, 2006

> Dying on Everest will be as unusual as dying in an asphalted, parkinglotted, tourbussed,
> snackbarred, trashcanned, fannypacked&bumbagged national park.

But if your Everest experience won't be complete without it, it can be arranged for an additional fee.
posted by jfuller at 8:23 AM on August 1, 2006

I died on Everest. The other clibers used my corpse as a sled to ride down the sideof the mountain to safety. It was one of the worst, but proudest, days of my life.

It was also the last.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:28 AM on August 1, 2006

Remember this shit, kids, because soon there will be hourly Chinese helicopter rides up Everest...

The chopper is French in this case, I think.
posted by persona non grata at 12:58 AM on August 2, 2006

There was an amazing documentary in 1975 called The Man Who Skied Down Everest.

Actually, nickyskye, my grandfather produced that film and my father wrote the score. It won the Best Feature Length Documentary at the 1976 Oscars. I am very familiar with it. My grandfather's appearence is famous on two counts: he was seated next to Shirly McLean (sp?) who was nominated for the same award and she looked at Budge and said, "Your film is so much better than mine. You deserve this." And then he won it. And then his brilliant acceptance speech:

"This is an American award for a Canadian film about a Japanese skier skiing down a Nepalese mountain."

He was tight, Budge was. I miss him a lot. No wonder I have a bit of an Everest obsession.

I met Youchira Muira (the skier) when I was a kid, at the Oscar party on the farm where I grew up. Funny and fake as it might seem, I am looking at that Oscar right now (it is here in my Mum's house). Budge was a cool guy and my father was a great composer. And Miura was one of the most peaceful people I have ever met. Great film. :-)
posted by persona non grata at 1:15 AM on August 2, 2006 [1 favorite]

[Your grandfather was the Crawley of Crawley Films? The people behind The Tales of the Wizard of Oz? As in Socrates and Rusty and Dandy Lion? Yay! "Oh, the world of Oz is a funny, funny place..."]
posted by pracowity at 7:38 AM on August 2, 2006

It's a shame this was such a poorly done FPP, because it's a fascinating story and well written -- and the other links are probably worthy too, I'm just now finished plowing through the primary story.

PNG, you should think about why you post. If it's just to stroke yourself, with no regard towards actually conveying information, then by all means continue your style and enjoy your echo chamber. But if it's to shed light on an issue, to illuminate the best of the web, as it were, then reconsider. Heed the advice of others in this thread and design a better FPP next time.
posted by intermod at 7:55 PM on August 2, 2006

Yeah, pracowity, my grandfather was Budge Crawley. I and all of us in his family miss him a lot. He was a wonderful man and a great film maker.

And yeah, intermod, it was a pretty poor front page post, but I have a very personal connection to the mountain and I was a bit drunk when I formatted the post. And I thought Matt would like it because I know he is interested in Everest stuff. I tried a trick that didn't work. As Kurt Vonnegut says, "So it goes". At least my next post was worse. ;-) *sighs*
posted by persona non grata at 9:29 PM on August 3, 2006

Nice find, pracowity: by "athletic" they mean that Budge was a swimmer, and apparently a very good one. His father bought him a 16mm camera to film himself swimming so he could improve his strokes. The rest is film history. Important point.

Thanks for the article. I will be sending that to my uncles and aunt and my Mum. Budge's kids (he died in '86). Cool beans. I remember sitting on the floor in a recording studio in Montreal in the 70s when the guys from Nexus were performing the Everest score. I miss my old man a whole lot. Fucking unreal stuff for a kid to be a part of. I remember that the Coke was free and I had to take my shoes off.
posted by persona non grata at 9:42 PM on August 3, 2006

Oh, and for what it's worth, here's my dad. The poor fucker died of Lou Gherig's Disease in '98 but he kind of deserved it. Heh. A terrible thing to say but, well, whatever. He was a brilliant asshole. He was hard on us kids but I really do get him now. Great player. And I am his last and favourite child. You wanna know who likes my tune "Hole In My Mood"? Larry's ghost does. He couldn't speak when he heard it but he wept a river. He recognized the Hoagy.
posted by persona non grata at 9:49 PM on August 3, 2006

And FWIW I wrote that last link.
posted by persona non grata at 9:52 PM on August 3, 2006

This is so fucking depressing. :-(
posted by persona non grata at 11:04 PM on August 3, 2006