Click-baiting Climbing’s Culture of Risk
The media dishonors the dead by attempting to reckon with complex questions of risk through simple paternalistic tropes simply because they make for good headlines
Read Moreby Andrew Bisharat | Dec 9, 2021 | Essays & Opinion
The media dishonors the dead by attempting to reckon with complex questions of risk through simple paternalistic tropes simply because they make for good headlines
Read Moreby Andrew Bisharat | Mar 7, 2020 | Essays & Opinion
In 2012, Hayden Kennedy, Kyle Dempster, and Josh Wharton took on one of the world’s most formidable mountains: Baintha Brakk (23,901 feet), AKA The Ogre. This infamy was initially earned in 1977 when Chris Bonington and Doug Scott completed the first ascent of the craggy, steep mountain situated in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range. Things went awry for the Britons on the descent when Scott shattered both of his ankles in a rappelling accident. “A quick examination revealed head and trunk OK, femurs and knees OK but—Oh! Oh!—my ankles cracked whenever I moved them,” wrote Scott in his seminal essay “A Crawl Down the Ogre.” With Bonington’s help, Scott spent the next seven days literally crawling down the mountain on his knees through driving storms. The climbers ran out of food and resorted to eating rice scraps excavated from cigarette-laden garbage. Bonington contracted pneumonia. Then he had his own rappelling incident in […]
by Andrew Bisharat | Jan 28, 2020 | Stories
“If you lived in the U.K. in the 1970s/‘80s, you would think every top climber in the country had died in the Himalaya,” says Dougald MacDonald, editor of American Alpine Journal. Dougal Haston, Nick Estcourt, Alex McIntyre, Peter Boardman, and Joe Tasker were the best British alpinists of their time, and all of them died within a period of a few years in the mountains. “I would say a higher percentage of elite alpine climbers died in those days than today. But that’s just a gut feeling.” I wonder if that’s true. Amid any tragedy, especially when a celebrity dies, it can be tough to see the big picture, objectively and dispassionately. My article last month reviewing the past decade of climbing alluded to just how many alpinists are now gone. I was thinking about death after seeing the news of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, […]
by Andrew Bisharat | Aug 10, 2017 | Books & Films
“Alpinism is the art of freedom,” wrote Voytek Kurtyka, the great Polish alpinist who redefined...
Read Moreby Andrew Bisharat | Oct 29, 2014 | News
A lot has been written about Everest’s darkest day, April 18, 2014, in which 16 sherpas died in an...
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