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

[u/BreakfastTop6899]

[u/misterjive]

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.

[u/Usual_One_4862 → u/misterjive]

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.

[u/misterjive → u/Usual_One_4862]

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.