With the exception of perhaps one. Which I do not understand. Perhaps someone can explain this too me.

Water cannot be compressed. but yet when a stream of water is forced through a smaller opening or stream such as placing one's thumb over the end of a garden hose or while water is flowing down a stream that narrows, it accelerates in speed. Why does this not happen with traffic? When the same volume of traffic is forced down to a smaller outlet (I.E. three lanes merging into two lanes) it slows to a crawl rather than accelerate?

 

Unlike some (you & I), not everyone is in a hurry to get to the "watering hole".

 

Here's what seems to have happened.

The three climbers were attempting to climb Cooper Spur and then "carry over" to the easier South Side Palmer Glacier route for the descent. (Carry over means that rather than leave their overnight gear at a base camp, they had to take all of it with them.)

Time is an important factor, perhaps the most important factor. In order to move fast, you have to take a minimal amount of gear. Yes, if you take more you will have a better chance to survive being stuck, but if you take more you have a better chance of getting stuck. It's a tradeoff, and going light is usually considered to be safer.

At some point in time they appear to have reached the summit. However, there is a particular gully (called the Pearly Gates) that you need to find in order to go down the South Side route. It seems that they could not find it.

Also, at some point one of the climbers (James, the one found dead in the snow cave) dislocated his shoulder.

So at least two things went wrong. They could not find the intended descent route, and they had a serious injury. (Actually, they probably could have descended the South Side route with a dislocated shoulder, but they couldn't find it. Descending the route they climbed with a bad shoulder would have been impossible.)

Even so, if a storm had not come in then this would have been surviveable. But a storm did come in, the most destructive windstorm we have had in the Northwest in the past 13 years.

Best guess is the two who were uninjured made a desperate bid to descend the route they climbed in order to bring help to their partner. However, they probably slipped. The problem with the Cooper Spur is that if you slip and don't immediately arrest your fall, you will get swept over cliffs to your death. It is also recommended that parties do not rope up for it unless they use fixed anchors, because if one person falls, all that the rope would do is take out the others. But in the storm, they may well have roped up so that they could find each other. Probably somebody slipped, or maybe even an avalanche carried both of them over the cliff.

People are still searching, but it is very unlikely that either of them is still alive.

 

Mike, thanks for the blow-by-blow account of what may-have-been.

 

I'm very sad for the almost certain loss of all three of these young men.

 

This is a tragic loss all around. I do hope somehow, they will be found alive.

 

Very sad...the +1 and I were watching a Discovery show last night about a group of climbers on Everest. It was very dramatic - some members could not reach the summit (over 29K feet) and had to turn back. One group who did reach the summit included a double amputee! He had to be ferried down the mountain afterwards, though, and lost about two inches of the stumps to frostbite. A Sherpa actually carried him on his back for some distance! Several of the other team members lost parts of fingers and toes to frostbite. The team passed a man dying under a rock, but could do nothing to save him. There are approximately 200 bodies on Everest that cannot be recovered.

 

On the subject of Everest, the Himalaya, and commercial climbing expeditions, I recommend a book by Joe Simpson called "Dark Shadows Falling".

 

In fact, come to think of it, I recommend all Joe Simpson books.

The first one, Touching The Void, is rightly famous as one of the most gripping adventure/disaster stories ever.

This Game Of Ghosts is kind of an autobiography about Joe's life before and after Touching the Void.

Dark Shadows Falling is about the relationship between climbers and the recently-popularized big money sport of professional expedition climbing. It focuses a lot on the 1996 Everest season.

I haven't read it, but I just reserved from the library his book The Beckoning Silence, which seems to be about his reflections on turning forty and realizing that he may not really just want to keep climbing until it kills him.

He also wrote another book called Storms Of Silence, which I haven't read. Except for Dark Shadows Falling, most of Joe's books are basically about Joe. But he's a good writer with fascinating stories to tell. Most climbers I have talked to feel that Joe doesn't entirely capture the reasons why climbers do what they do, but he does a pretty good job of it. Those of you who are wondering just what it was that made these three guys try this climb, even though they knew this was a possible outcome, might get some insight from these books.

 

The topic about who should pay for these type of rescues has been debated for a long time. From all I've read, most the officials and volunteers are against charging people for a rescue. The main reason, they don't want people to hesitate to contact the authorities if they, or someone else, needs help. They do encourage donations to the volunteer rescue groups though.

I'm a walker, not a climber. I can't tell you how many people I've seen heading out on a trail completely unprepared should the weather turn or something unexpected happen. Compared to folks like that, these three unfortunate climbers had it much more together.

This is a good read about an accident that only made the news because the victim is a professional writer.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0505/050...ws_mountain.php