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General Climbing Discussion

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Hmmmmmm... 2-May-2005 At 6:36:48 PM itchyfingers

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i konw that the outcry has been going on for a long time about the commercialisation of everest. I think that its probably all been said before, but thats never stopped me! ;-)

1- to say that you should simply not use the stairs and go around is redundant: i don't know where they have been placed, but if you applied the same logic to places around the grampians then you'd be rockclimbing to aviod the stairs. To not use them in certain cases may be more dangerous then the previous route.

2- i know people like Rob Hall and ilk often claimed that it was a natural process (commercialisation) and that it made sense to make it safer for the people who were going up. however, (and i know its been said...) i think that if something is beyond your ability as a climber, or mountaineer, then leave it until you can do it under your own power as it were.

3- It is a process that is gradually eroding the standards of mountaineering, and as neil said; it will only increase. The debate used to be about the use of oxygen, then sherpas to carry the gear (and how they were treated), then fixed ropes, the ladders that had been placed and now the stairways. Underlying all of this was the discourse regarding who should be climbing it. This includes the people who are unable to get up without guides, and the varying degrees, i know of mountaineers with years of experiance who go on these 'tours' simply because it saves them from the organisaitonal hassles.

Furthermore, it becomes an issue of who could stop it, even assuming like i do that they should. The nepalese, tibetan and chinese authorities are all more then happy to have as many teams enter their borders and climb as possible, because they charge such large sums of money to do so. And by default, this means that by having experianced teams to take inexperianced people up the mountain, the publicity grows (if it needs it) and more people come, in a spiral that gets tighter and speeds up the change in ethics on the face.

But after that (rather eloquent if i do say so myself) piece, F@*& them all and leave it as it was!
;-) lol.