Alternatively: TIL most of the people who climbed Everest only half-assed it.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
187 points (95.6% liked)
Today I Learned
17872 readers
70 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's already pretty much a rich people hobby. There are many facilities and heavy assistance from locals. It's dangerous still. But it's not even among the top 5 most deadly, dangerous or difficult climbs. In really good weather you can pay for a helicopter ride to get you even further up from base camp thus making your climb shorter.
Pretty deadly for the sherpas though, who have to deal with the shit of the rich idiot tourists going there in massive numbers. So if they want to insist it's extreme, at least there's that.
Just rely on the Sherpas to hard carry them
Weak. To really say you’ve climbed Everest, you need to start from the Challenger Deep.
Is it really climbing if you don't start at the planet's core?
I read that in Boss Nass's voice.
Here's the actor with a story that includes a bit about coming up with Boss Nass's voice, iirc
Here is a really good article about the topic. The gist is that typically in mountaineering, there's not often an official definition of the "start point", but the "end point" is back at the start, so people who die midway on the return journey don't "count". The "top" should be easy to define, but often, the top of a mountain is a large area, and you aren't going to hike around looking for which part is just barely the highest. Also, some true summits are habitually avoided as sacred places to the locals.
So whats the time limit? I’ve been to the ocean, i just went home for a few years before going mountain climbing.
Did you walk the whole time?
My house is base camp.
soon we'll find bodies near the beach and claim Mount Everest took another victim... there lays green sandals
You also desecrate a sacred mountain and have to climb over plastic bags of shit and human corpses.
Just pave a road to the summit at this point.
I mean the corpses in their bright jackets are useful, they tell you about the dangerous spots! 💡
If you measure from the surrounding area, the Mauna Kea is higher than Mt. Everest.
I kind of like the argument that Ecuador's Chimborazo is the tallest on the basis that it's the farthest point of Earth from the centre of the Earth
if measured from the base, Everest isn't even the highest mountain on earth. So if you don't start at sea level, did you really climb the highest mountain?
But what is the base?
Thing is, that's a more complicated question than it sounds.
I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you...
Only to be with you...
I suppose, in fairness, climbing the top part is a bit harder than climbing the bottom part.
Though, if you think about it, quite a lot quicker.
I believe the term for height from base is called prominence. The highest one can climb is Denali in Alaska, at around 5500m. Obviously omitting mountains that have their bases on the ocean floor like Mauna Kea ofc.
Prominence is a bit more complicated than that. It refers to the height of a mountain or hill's summit relative to the lowest contour line encircling it but containing no higher summit within it. Everest's prominence is actually still its height above sea level.
Everest is a bit unique in that regard since, as the highest peak, by definition it can't have any higher peaks within any contour around it.
I never realized it before, but Mount Everest is a name straight out of a fantasy novel. Like a slightly more polite term for Mount Death. Pretty badass.
Funnily enough, the man it was named after was against calling it that. It came about because the Tibetans and Nepalis on either side of the mountain used different names for it (Qomolangma and Sagarmatha respectively), so British surveyors concluded that there was no accepted name to put on a map and they would simply give it a new one. In English. George Everest, the prior top British surveyor in India, objected on the grounds that his name couldn't be written easily in Hindi, but the Royal Geographic Society ignored him and the used it anyway
I have heard the (Nepali-speaking) Nepalis didn't even have a name for it at that point, and I have a feeling Qomolungma wasn't known to the Brits, because the mountain was surveyed from far away at that point.
Incidentally, "Tibetans and Nepalis on either side of the mountain"- it's Tibetans on both sides. On the Nepali side are the Tibetan group known as Sherpa, whence we get the term Sherpa for a Nepali/Tibetan mountain guide. Further south than the Sherpa people are 'Nepali' people by ethnicity. (And of course properly there's a lot more than two ethnic groups in a cross section of Nepal!)
Ahh, thanks! My knowledge of the region isn't great, I just remembered that story off hand - and of course, that's the story as told by the British colonial administration too
plus his name was said to have been pronounced "ee-v'rest" instead of "ever-rest" as the mountain is called today.
Yeah, but you gotta admit, the name is pretty bad ass
It definitely is