It happened again Monday. A group of climbers fell off a mountain ledge and had to be rescued. Luckily everyone in this particular incident (including a Labrador) survived. The group was climbing Oregon’s 11,239-foot Mt. Hood, a rock that has resulted in the deaths of at least 13 people in the past decade. Golly, the human spirit is forever indomitable. And brain dead.People have an unexplainable need to be on top of stuff. Kids climb trees, often resulting in broken legs or a complete inability to get down. If there’s a mountainous region in town, by God an architect is going to put a house there. Shifty foundations be damned. Nobody wants the first-floor office. Everyone wants the prestigious one at the very top of the building, so if there’s a fire they have the smallest chance of getting out alive. People love taking risks, no matter how small or subconscious, so it’s only logical that some take this inane fascination one step further and set out to climb man-eating mountains.
Some people might say complaining about the danger in a mountain-climbing excursion is a cowardly argument. Anyone who disagrees with extreme behavior must be a wimp. That’s not the point here. When someone climbs a mountain, they endanger themselves. That’s fine. Living on the edge is perfectly acceptable. The survival-of-the-fittest philosophy allows these people to make life-ending decisions, but placing others in the line of fire is atrocious.
Sky-diving is a good example of an activity that usually only endangers the life of the participant. When someone jumps out of a plane, that’s it. The chute either opens or it doesn’t. If it does, all that’s left to do is land safely. If it doesn’t, the diver just prepares for purgatory, paradise or another post-life destination. No one’s going to rush up in a helicopter to catch him or dive out of the plane with a jetpack, rapidly descending in order to scoop up the thrill seeker before he alters the color of the ground. Worst-case scenario, the sky diver lands on someone, but at least the chances of that are extremely low.
However, when one of the crag-crawling “adventurers” sets off to climb something that’s been climbed hundreds of times before, they are setting up trouble for the rescue teams that may have to come save the climbers from their own inexperience.
There is a very limited number of reasons for people to rock climb in the first place, and none of them justify the danger created by the act. One reason is pleasure. Some people apparently find climbing a mountain “fun.” This is not a good enough reason. It’s an easy argument to make that most things that kill people or cause them to have limbs amputated are not, in any way, fun.
Another inadequate reason to climb is humanity has to check every inch of the earth to make sure it’s not missing something. Great, Mt. Everest has been conquered. What does that mean? Was any oil found up there? A new life form? Jimmy Hoffa? No, nothing. It’s just a gigantic rock, and no one even got to jump off it.
The third reason to climb a mountain is to save some uninformed loon who has become trapped somewhere near the top. Now there’s a chance to set up a chain reaction. One rescue team goes up, but they become stuck. Another team goes up after the first team, but they encounter problems, as well. All this could be avoided if the initial group of climbers would stay home and watch “Cliffhanger.”
An Oregon state representative has introduced a bill that will hopefully diminish the risk to rescuers. If passed, the bill will require all climbers to carry locators with them on climbs. Granted, this will make it far easier for rescuers to find the lost or injured, but at the same time, it is a disadvantageous law.
If climbers are handed locators, they are bound to think that nothing horrible will happen to them. If they get hurt, they can fire up the locator. If they get lost, they can fire up the locator. It’s doubtful that any of these people will think that there is still the potential to fall 2,000 feet to their deaths.
“That sounds like a long fall,” they’ll say. “But it’s snow at the bottom, right? We’ll be fine.”
There’s really only one piece of advice that can help reckless rock climbers. Stop climbing dangerous mountains.