Not sure if you'rer being serious, but the air is too thin for helicopters to fly up there. Otherwise, you'd have helicopter rescues of climbers.

Didn't know that. Makes sense though.

I heard something about one landing/hovering there a while back and checked it out on google and it looks legit enough from 5 years ago. The highest rescue apparently is around 23k on another Himalayan mountain which is hardly close to the summit.

Yeah, that's still quite a gap to the summit of Everest.

I suppose once more copters have the same power, we'll see less people dying up there.

Or maybe when morons stop going up there, we'll see less people dying up there.

I think the chance of Xenu coming to take us all away tomorrow is higher.

bury them.

How?

There's a project in the works called the Alpine Wasp, specifically for Everest rescues. It's an unmanned helicopter that can go over 30,000 feet. Although, all the news about that I can find is from 2007, so maybe it ended up not working.

... and it's a pretty interesting blog. The one about the jelly fish... makes me think twice about...

Krakaurs "Into thin air: really got me mesmerized by the stories, i have read several other books including "the climb" by Anatoli boukreev and a couple others by Brashears and viesturs. One amazing thing is Ed Viesturs (arguably the most accomplished high altitude mountaineer in history) sits 3 rows behind me at Seahawks games. First time I saw him i couldn''t help but tell him how amazed and impressed i was with his feats. He seemed suprised to be recognized.. pretty cool

This whole everest thing amazes me for some reason..

Reinhold Messner might have an argument with that.

BTW, I'm not arguing with that. Just saying the argument is there to be made.

Pretty much here sans the great Ed Viesturs anecdote. I have a Brashears book sitting on my bookshelf that I have been intending to read and read the Krackaur ones a while back. Any particular ones you can recommend I read first?

Have you read boukreev "the Climb"? It's the 96 debacle from anotoli's viewpoint. Pretty interesting. " No shortcuts to the top" by viesturs is also pretty fascinating, that dude came close to dying several times.

No doubt.. I'm kind of a homer...