I really enjoyed both these readings this week. Until K2: The Savage Mountain, I had never heard of the incredible, and tragic, story of the1953 American expedition. This story was one tale of bad luck after another, yet at the same time, a story of incredible heroism and friendship. Charles Houston and Robert Bates did a great job at capturing my attention and keeping me intrigued. This story emphasizes the true passion and brotherhood that the sport of mountaineering saw in its earlier days, long before wealth and accessibility found its way into it. Houston proved to be the type of leader that these daring ascents require. He picked his team accordingly, and put his team as a whole ahead of individuals. Once they reached Camp VIII and saw that the weather had taken a turn, they decided to wait it out. After days when it had remained rough, Art Gilkey found himself with blood clots, and in a life or death situation. At this point, there was no question in Houston, nor any of the team members, that they must brave the storm and descend back down to get Gilkey to safety. The determination and faithfulness to Gilkey to attempt to save his life, is extremely heroic. The act of trying to attempt a rescue in those conditions at that altitude on K2 is impressive enough, let alone the miraculous belay of Pete Schoening in order to save the lives of all the climbers. Luck may have been involved with the placement of the ice axe, the rock, and the rope, but luck wasn’t involved by choosing a team that was full of competent and strong men like Schoening. The opposite can be said for the Everest expedition of 1996, one that is picked apart in Catherine Palmer’s article, Shit Happens: The Selling of Risk in Extreme Sport.

For the most part, everyone is familiar with the tragic story of the 1996 Everest climb, so this part itself did not come as a surprise. However, I was completely unaware of the circumstances that surrounded the tragedy, and was appalled by some of the behind the scenes facts that led to the deaths of the climbers. Palmer does a great job at providing evidence as to why commercialization of mountaineering has become a hazard. She argues that in order to run a successful adventure based business, companies downplay (or nearly erase) the risk that is truly involved in these ‘adventures’. Not only do they promise that their is little to no risk involved, but that anyone without experience can participate. By doing this, Palmer claims that “as such accounts make clear, money mediates or mitigates risk, in doing so producing a dubious kind of expert: if you have sufficient money, then that qualification is enough to get you to the top of Everest” (Palmer 332). Sandy Pittman, the New York socialite her lost her life on Everest, is a prime example of the type of people that can now “climb” Everest, simply with the right amount of money. Palmer notes that Pittman “took gourmet food, as well as a TV and video player, so that she could watch movies in her tent — a fair indication that she was not entirely prepared for the exercise she was undertaking” (Palmer 331). If this was the case, how come she wasn’t pre screened to check for experience? Why wasn’t there a leader or guide in charge to make sure each team member was qualified for the task at hand, just as Houston did for K2? One never heard of relaxed attitudes in the earlier days of mountaineering, like the one from an American executive (who later lost his life on Everest) who stated that “experience is over-rated, I’m telling you, they’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit” (Palmer 332).

Although both readings provide us with accounts of tragedy where ‘shit happened’, the two stories couldn’t be more opposite. Houston, Bates, and their team members were carefully selected and more than capable and qualified to make the climb. However, unforeseen circumstances led the crew to have to turn back in order to save a teammate, and friends, life. On the contrary, the 1996 Everest tragedy was full of team members who were highly unqualified, with companies urging their guides to take that team to the summit no matter the conditions or risks involved, simply to make a dollar and gain one up on their rival companies. K2 is a story of tragedy involving heroism and pure bad luck; Everest is a story of tragedy involving greed and selfishness. This makes one question whether the commercialization of mountaineering can only get more detrimental as time goes on.