J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by tino_11

I wouldn't!

Yep, it gets worse too ;)

Jan I Stenmark wrote:Tino: A good point well made :)

I hope that if you look now it should be a "little" more reasonable :oops:

BTW, thanks for only criticising the image size ;) You are a gent!

Jan

believe me, I am in no position to criticise anything else about your picture. If it had been me in those circumstances, it would have been one great long streak down the middle with no turns, and a large headshaped indentation in the snow just of the shot at the bottom )

Can we have a bigger picture next time, I can barely make that one out?

Bit Geordie if anything, certainly not German )

I'm afraid I have lost my Scottish accent a long time ago :cry:

With all due respect, I believe I stated that things from this time around are unclear. I tried to base the point of the post around the tragedy on Everest in '96 rather than speculate on the incident on K2. The K2 situation has only made me post about something I have been thinking about posting for some time.

However if popular consensus believes we should lock it for the time being, then I can respect that also, but it is a discussion I would like to know other peoples feelings on at some point.

Firstly, I just want to say how sorry I feel about the tragedy that has transpired on K2 over the last days, and how my thoughts go out to all involved as well as their family and friends. This seems to have become the single biggest mountaineering disaster after 1996 on Everest. It saddens me to think that 11 lives can be wiped out just like that, and although it is to be expected in a sport with such inherrent risk, I wonder if this would have happened at such a scale 30, 40 or 50 years ago?

I am a keen armchair mountaineering fan, not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I adore reading about all the triumphs, and feel humbled by some of the sacrifices and acts of selflessness seen throughout the history of the sport. However mountaineering in the Himalaya has become more dangerous over time, with higher fatality rates, whilst equipment , forecasting, rescue and communication get better. There has to be a reason for this. It seems that the money introduced into this kind of sport has done anything but improve it, rich businessmen and woman with little or no training can pay upwards of 75k to be guided up these mountains, when something happens, be it bad weather, and ice fall or an avalanche, then these expeditions turn to chaos and quickly it becomes every man for himself. Allthough the exact details of this tradegy are not fully understood, it is clear from the conflicting stories of what led to 8 deaths on Everest in 1996, that something is fundamentally damaged in this sport. Should 25 climbers, working in different languages with different interests all be at or around a place named the "bottleneck" at the same time?

I do not mean to bring this up as a subject to worsen any pain felt by the mountaineering community, I know or suspect many of you guys climb or know climbers. However this is becoming all too common in the Himalaya: issues such as permits, inexperience, money, number of people on the summit at once surely have to be addressed sooner rather than later. If the governments of Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet are not prepared to regulate this industry, should the mountaineering community themselves not do so?

I hope I have not caused any grief by this post, I just think its something that needs to be discussed.


p.s. did not really know where to post this, so forgive me if its innapropriate.

Tino