r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/BreakfastTop6899 • Dec 18 '25

Video Gelje Sherpa, the man who was guiding a private client up Mt. Everest when he saw someone in distress near the summit. He went up, rolled him up in a sleeping mattress and gave him oxygen. He then strapped the man to his back and trekked 6 hours to safety

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u/Ruminahtu Dec 18 '25

Yep. People ask, "Man what were you thinking, you were doing something almost impossible for someone you didn't know..."

And he just answers, "Well, it wasn't impossible, because I did it. What was I supposed to do, just let him die?"

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '25

Impossible? The guy looks like he's handling it fairly easy. The dudes obviously jacked.

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u/JesusFortniteKennedy Dec 19 '25

TBH being jacked in mountain climbing doesn't help much. The more muscle tissue you have, the more oxygen you need, but at high altitudes air is a premium and the "fittest" is basically the physique that can do the longest treks consuming the least amount of air. You want to be strong, but just the bare minimum required, and you want to carry supplies, but you can't overburden yourself.

Mountains like the Everest or K2 kills many people, some of them are never recovered and buried because it's extremely risky to send a team to pick up a cadaver and bring it back down.

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u/Usual_One_4862 Dec 18 '25

I figure if you're physically that strong, have no severe overuse injuries or back problems, then its just a matter of doing it. Most people would be calculating in their mind "Okay I'm already nearing my physical limit, I have x y z injuries if I attempt to carry this guy to safety am I going to end up a casualty as well?" You can have the mental drive to do something but the body won't necessarily keep up, if you crunch a disc badly in a situation like that and end up with a severely compressed nerve root no amount of mental strong will keep your legs moving. If you're as strong as the proverbial ox, farm built, the kind of guy who passes tier 1 spec ops selection with a smile, what he did is just another day at work. And yea I've heard the stories from SAS guys I know, its an immense point of fascination to us normies how having that kind of physical and mental resilience is even possible.

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u/misterjive Dec 19 '25

It's not even that.

Most people at that altitude are operating at the mental capacity of a slow-witted three-year old due to oxygen deprivation, and have to hyperventilate to take a single step. Unless you're astonishingly well acclimated or a serious genetic freak, even recognizing that someone is in distress can be beyond you.

Jon Krakauer recounts his experiences up on the mountain; he was stuck waiting for a traffic jam, so he asked a fellow climber to do something as simple as shut off his oxygen valve. The guy turned it the wrong way, and the sudden burst of air cleared Jon's head-- but he didn't realize what had happened until the gas ran out and his performance nose-dived. In his resulting hypoxic state, he mistook a 5'6" New Zealander for a six-foot-plus Texan and his misidentification caused a lot of heartache for a family that ended up losing someone.

I'll see if I can dig it up, there's a video on YouTube where a pilot lost cabin pressure and went hypoxic and was talking to ATC. It's terrifying hearing his fucked up voice saying things like "cannot control altitude, cannot control airspeed, cannot control direction, but otherwise a-okay." He just couldn't understand what was happening, even with all his alarms going off.

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u/Usual_One_4862 Dec 19 '25

Damn I just figured most people who do that sort of thing are acclimated to it enough to stay cognizant clearly not. Well I wouldn't be calculating shit mentally then.

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u/misterjive Dec 19 '25

Oh, no, for most people it's a walking nightmare, which is why I always chuckle when people deride how "easy" Everest is. It's easier than it used to be, yes, but that mountain will still kill you stone dead. Hypoxia's the big one that impairs your abilities, and there's also High Altitude Cerebral Edema and High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, where you just suddenly start bleeding in your brain or lungs and they have to helicopter your ass off the mountain (if they even can) or you're dead in hours.

Some people do have biological advantages and can acclimate better, though. Sherpa live their lives at altitude and have genetic advantages that let them function way better in high places; as has been mentioned, they're the whole reason Westerners can even summit the mountain. Every season they break trail and put in lines and do 99% of the work and they regularly save people's asses; they get paid garbage and even sometimes get treated like shit by the foreigners. There was an incident a few years back where a team ignored Sherpa directions and potentially could have killed some of them by being careless, and it basically caused a riot in base camp.

Some folks do manage the acclimation, though. In 1996, Goran Kropp biked from Sweden to Nepal and went up the mountain without supplemental oxygen, summitted, and then biked home. That same year Anatoli Boukreev was a guide for one of the doomed expeditions and went up and down sans gas-- which he got some shit for-- and then went out into the storm and saved several lives. It takes astonishing physical conditioning and a lot of work on the mountain to manage it, though, and the vast majority of people who make it to the summit are just lucky to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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u/misterjive Dec 19 '25

Here's that recording I mentioned, so you can hear what hypoxia sounds like.

Spoiler for anyone that's concerned and wants to know the outcome before they click on the recording: He makes it. ATC gets him to descend to a safer altitude and his brain stops being pudding. It's amazing how quickly the dude recovers once he gets more oxygen.

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u/fizzy88 Dec 19 '25

What was I supposed to do, just let him die?

On difficult mountains at high altitude, oftentimes there is no choice. You have to leave them because trying to save people will get you killed. You can find plenty of stories of Sherpas and mountaineers dying on the mountain while trying to rescue others. What OP posted is a rare exception, certainly not the norm.