[pitdesi]

FYI - the overall rate is ~9% but has been declining significantly in recent years...

http://www.mounteverest.net/story/MountEverestKillerMountain...

"To date, there have been 1,924 ascents of Mount Everest (more than 1,300 different climbers), and 179 people have died. The overall fatality rate is thus about 9% (fatality rate is defined as successful summits compared to fatalities). However, since 1990 there has been an explosion of summiteers and fatality statistics have changed. Up to 1990, the Everest fatality rate is a whopping 37%, with 106 deaths and only 284 summits. Yet from 1990 until today, the rate has dropped to 4.4%; 73 people have died, and 1,640 have summited. Thus, the rate decreased to about eight times less than the pre-1990 fatality rate!"

[gamble]

Everest may be statistically less dangerous, but I suspect that's because the vast majority of climbers today (really, all except a handful of Sherpas at the start of the season) are climbing with fixed ropes on guided ascents. Everest today is still a dangerous mountain, but the dangers are themselves statistical (bad weather, illness, etc) more than technical.

[aplusbi]

I think the the fact that the dangers are mostly statistical is what makes Everest so dangerous. Not to make light of the difficulty in summiting Everest, but you can literally just hike to the top. This invites a lot of amateur climbers who lack the experience to even recognize dangerous situations, much less deal with them.

[dp1234]

One of the guides in a documentary on it said that if Everest was at sea level, you would take your kids to summit it. But the altitude makes it a completely different animal. I wonder what the statistics are on frostbite and amputated body parts (fingers, toes). All of the documentaries I've watched seem to include a pretty high rate of some kind of frostbite in many of the climbers.

[hugh3]

Interesting. Though I imagine that a lot of people who die climbing Everest die because they did something stupid. What's the death rate for people who are sensible? (This guy doesn't seem to have done anything stupid, his brain just didn't like the altitude).

I wouldn't do it. But I do want to climb Mt Kilimanjaro sometime (much less dangerous).

[scott_s]

What's the death rate for people who are sensible?

Sensible how? Like not climbing Everest? Be careful how you define it, because there's the danger of saying that everyone who lived was sensible. Anyway, that's kinda like saying that drunk driving is only dangerous if you're not sensible when you're doing it. We can't survive that long that high, and our judgement becomes seriously impaired, similar to being drunk.

[bhickey]

Dying on Everest isn't a matter of sensibility. Most people who die are stricken with altitude sickness[1]. HACE and HAPE move fast, and the only effective treatment is reduction in altitude. Hyperbaric chambers can buy time, diamox isn't shown to be effective for HACE and HAPE.

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) can strike even lower. A friend of mine was in Nepal with the Discovery Channel this past Fall. One of the producers was evacuated due to AMS when they were under 6000m. Altitude is a lottery. For my part, there's plenty of climbing near sea level that kicks my butt.

[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Leading-Causes-of-Death-In-th...