Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome back to another episode of the Code 321 podcast. I apologize that we're a little bit late this month. I had a big life change and my son was born. Everyone's doing well. We're back home and excited to be back at it. So today we are going to talk a little bit about mountaineering and a lot about human behavior. My favorite thing, if you've been listening to the Code 321 podcast for a while, you've probably figured out that really anything related to psychology, human decision making and human behavior is really right up my alley. I want to welcome again our medical director, Chance Sullivan to the show. Chance, how are you?
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Good, buddy. Thanks for having me. And congrats on the new addition to the family. Yeah, it's super exciting time.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. My wife have gone from zone defense to one one on one. So we're doing good. We're figuring it all out day by day.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: I'm sure you're crushing it as always.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And so in conjunction with that, one of the reasons I want to talk about this today is I had to go out to a conference in New York State and I had to go out and back because I have a newborn at home. And I listened to Into Thin Air by Jon Krakar. Great book from, I believe it was written in 1996 and it was about his Everest summit with his group in 1996, also called the Everest Disaster. There's a movie about it. It's got some famous actors in it.
And as I was listening to the book, I literally was like almost running out of gas because I didn't want to pull over and stop listening to it. It's just an incredible, an incredible story written through his eyes as a journalist while he was on this climb and a mountaineer. And I couldn't think of anyone better to talk about this book with than you, Chance. So I want to talk a little bit about the medicine they talk about in that book and a lot about the human behavior.
So one of the first questions I have is can you give the listeners just like a very quick description of when people talk about the death zone, these 8,000 meter peaks and greater. I think there's about 14 of them in the world that are pretty aggressively climbed by the best climbers in the world. Why are these so challenging and why are they so sought after by these elite climbers?
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So I guess first just take a step back. Super stoked to talk about this book for anyone who hasn't listened to it before.
I Think it's a great kind of analysis on human behavior like you so greatly introduced into the beginning of this podcast. And I think even if you don't have interest in mountaineering or medicine, wilderness medicine in general, it's just a great kind of foray into kind of how people adapt to making mistakes, which I think kind of leads us into being at altitude in general.
And as you mentioned, kind of these elite level peaks or super high peaks, 8,000 meters and above, they'll call it, entering into the death zone. And the reason for, for that is because essentially at that elevation, 8,000 meters or kind of 24 to 26,000ft, your body just starts to shut down and it can't acclimatize.
Other peaks, high elevation. You know, out here in Colorado where I'm at, we have a lot of 14,000 foot peaks you can acclimatize. Like, for someone like me who's been living at Colorado to go and summit a 14er is not nearly as big of a physical feat as if you, Nick, came from sea level, Burlington, Vermont and came out here. That's going to be a lot harder for you to be able to do. You don't have the same amount of hemoglobin circulating in your body, the same amount of physical adaptations where you're offloading oxygen much easier, much faster than someone who over days to weeks to months has started to make some of these adaptations.
All of this though, completely stops past kind of that 20,000 foot or 8,000 meter spot, essentially. There's just the amount of oxygen that's in the air is so low that there's no physiologic way to adapt to that. And because of that, you're on a ticking clock, essentially. And even on supplemental oxygen, like you are just on borrowed time in that space. And that's why on these peaks you have to be so dialed and somewhat fast because you are slowly dying. And if you run into these issues, you know, holdups like Everest, you've all probably seen the photos of now, these like Disneyland like lines, you have gear failure, you have a health issue that comes up. Like all of that is using up more of that time, that precious time that you don't have.
And that's why I think so many people are drawn to those peaks, because like any sort of hobby, when you get to those extreme ends, especially when you're kind of on that, that kind of cutting edge or literal death zone, if you will, people are just drawn to that ability to kind of play with fire and try to come out on top.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's fascinating because obviously a lot of these are located in Nepal and Tibet and some of them are in Pakistan and in those areas. And a lot of these climbs, they're reliant on Nepali Sherpa. And Sherpa is just a group of the population that is from Nepal and Nepal. One of the reasons they're so effective is because some of the villages that they live in are already at, you know, 13, 14,000ft. You know, that's where they grew up and were born and raised. And so they acclimatize to these different environments and they're really, really effective. And it's fascinating to hear about, you know, how these Sherpas. There was a Sherpa, Nims Purja, I think he climbed all 14 peaks. He was a pretty famous climber.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Met him in person.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, wow. Really cool. That's interesting. Yeah, he seemed like he was really ready to rock and roll.
And one of the things that a big debate in the climbing world, correct me if I'm wrong, is there's a group of people who are really insistent that true, you know, alpine climbing, true alpine style, is without any supplemental oxygen, just going to the top of Everest and back down, just raw dog in the air the entire time and hoping that you don't pass out in environments which, you know, 99% of the population would be unconscious in. And then you have other folks, like in this particular expedition, they do use supplemental oxygen and they have some parameters about when they use it. Like for example, in the book, they talk about, you know, using supplemental oxygen in the death zone specifically, but not during the additional parts of the climb. So can you talk just a little bit about how oxygen is or isn't used and maybe how people choose when to apply it and what they're looking to do with that?
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So it brings up a great topic in general on kind of the controversy in mountaineering and alpinism and what is considered a clean climb and what's not.
So, I mean, oxygen in general is essentially just giving you more of that bought time that we talked about earlier.
Just because your body is not getting enough of the oxygen it needs to meet its metabolic demand on supplemental oxygen, that's going to be able to kind of bump up that ability. It doesn't completely negate it. Like, you can't just live at the top of Everest with a unlimited oxygen cannoneers and be fine. Like you're still going to have hypoxia and kind of go down that downward spiral that Spiral is just much slower on the oxygen.
So, yes, there is that kind of controversy on. Well, if you're using oxygen, you have like this crutch.
You know, there's other crutches that exist. People can take dexamethasone, a steroid that can kind of reduce some of the symptoms of high altitude. It doesn't do anything for your acclimatization.
There are medicines like acetazolamide that can help with that. So some people will be on that. Some people will take sildenoville Viagra, which is a pulmonary vasodilator. So there's like ways of doping, if you will, performance enhancing drugs. Who would have guessed that you could take Viagra and that would be considered ped?
But it exists and there's different circles that say if you use that, it's not a true summit.
There's no regulatory body that says these are the people who have climbed Everest without any sort of aids, and these are the people who have an asterisk next to their name.
You know, a really fascinating thing that's really just hitting the scene now is xenon gas, where I haven't really read into it a whole lot because it is just coming this climbing season. So as of this year, people have summited using, I believe it was energas, one of the kind of inert gases where essentially they'll breathe it in ahead of time and through some sort of physiologic sorcery, it really helps speed up your acclimatization process and really shorten the duration of how long it takes you to acclimatize. Because, I mean, a lot of these people who summit Everest, you gotta be up at like base camp for a couple months, slowly acclimatizing, because again, it just, it takes time to build up that hemoglobin to build up those kind of cellular adaptations. And xenon gas has that ability to kind of speed up that process. And so now people are climbing Everest in a much faster time. You could be some, you know, tech bro from the Bay Area and have a month off and be able to go bang out Everest. And I think that's going to open up a whole new can of worms for people who are summiting these 8,000 meter peaks.
So it'll be interesting to see kind of how that plays out with these various international agencies on what's kind of accepted. But as of now, there's really no regulation. You know, if you have the cash, you can get a permit, you can hire a guide and you can go Try to summit Everest and what you decide to use as kind of your own bridges, whether that's oxygen, whether that's steroids, whether that's xenon gas, like that's kind of up to you. And I guess what you kind of feel comfortable with and what you want to use.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty wild. If you listen to John Krakauer's book, he talks a lot about how they have this ragtag group of climbers. You know, you have these really elite world renowned mountaineers and alpinists from around the world that are guiding the expedition. And then you have John Grekar, who's been a mountaineer and has done some pretty significant climbs, Devil's Thumb, you know, and things like that.
And then you have like Beck Weathers and like these other folks that are on the team that are not traditionally known as world renowned alpinists, they haven't dedicated 30 years to climbing, kind of like you mentioned. And I think you see that as the groups start to interact with one another. You know, you have Ian Woodall I think was leading another competing climb from, I think it was South Africa, don't quote me on that. But you have a bunch of other groups that are starting to share base camps together and you start to hear like, you know, oh, the, the Taiwanese climbers aren't ready for this. Like they're slowing us down. You're a liability up there, you know, and then you kind of have this weird where you have folks who are bankers by day and then summiting these huge, you know, 8,000 meter peaks, you know, once or twice a year as, you know, a thrill ride. And so that's kind of a dynamic for discussion too is now you have these really significant challenges and it's, it's medically significant too. I think people think of it as, it's not like riding your bike in the Tour de France. Like there's actual physiological problems where, you know, climbing that high you might discover that your retinas don't work. There was a climber who had a surgery and was totally fine up into Camp 4 and then started summiting and couldn't see, lost his vision. And it's like those things just happen, you know. So as we dive into this a little bit, I want to talk a little bit about the mentality that climbers have and how we as, as emergency responders and as climbers and anybody who does a high risk, high reward activity, how do we set ourselves up for success so that we don't get ourselves in trouble like what are some things that you've seen that are successful and what are some things that you've seen that aren't successful in terms of planning for a high risk, high reward event?
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah, great question. So I mean, I think when thinking about like the climbing, mountaineering, like backcountry skiing community, one of the things that we've talked about is kind of the recognition of how problems come up. Like what can you fall into as these like mental shortcuts or a word we use as heuristic traps and like sending you down this pathway towards mayhem and catastrophe, if you will.
And this Everest disaster, this 1996 Everest summit attempt is a perfect case study on how these issues come up. And that can be in mountaineering, that can be in medicine. And some of the issues that they ran into are things like this expert thought, concern of expert halo. So you're surrounded by these other experts, these world class mountaineers who you're next to, and they're, and you're thinking, all right, they're still going up. Like if they're going up, I must be safe because I'm surrounded by these experts.
Other issues that people run into are like familiarity. That's another of these like heuristic traps. So some of these climbers, this was their like multiple a second, third attempt at Everest or a lot of these guides obviously have been up dozen times.
So just because you've done something before, you think, all right, I can, I can do it again, I can. Even though this like certain factor, parameter has changed, the weather's different, my gear is different, I can keep going.
And there's like seven different of these heuristic traps that we talk about in kind of the mountaineering skiing community. And I think that can exactly be applied in medical communities as well. Like you can pick any situation and you can, you can kind of think of how you can fall into these logical fallacies. Like, all right, you know, I've taken care of a COPD exacerbation before. These are the meds I gave and it worked. So I'm just going to stay the course and follow this protocol and not deviate.
Or I'm surrounded by this nurse who's been doing this for 20 plus years.
Like they're not saying anything, so things must be fine.
That's why I think like topics like this are just a great case study because even though like day to day on shift, you know, we might not be on the summit of Everest, but we run into these like, issues all the time just on our day to Day life.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's super pertinent. I know in the fire department and EMS and helicopter medicine, especially with the, you know, aeromedical crew, resource management stuff we do in the helicopter, it's really, really prevalent. I mean, we make weather decisions, and there are times where, you know, we. Everything looks good on the radar, we take off, we're ready to go. Help, somebody. We come over the crest of one of our ridge lines, and you go, okay, that's a thunderstorm. And it's not on radar, but it's there. And it can take a little bit of effort to say, yep, let's turn it around. Let's go by ground. And it sucks. Like, it sucks. It is going to quadruple the amount of time it's going to take to get to the patient, you know, and 99% of the time, nothing bad happens. But, like, we're really told that every time something like that happens, turn the helicopter around, land it, and, you know, that's the safest way to do things. And I know in my service, when you make that decision, especially if you're the one that speaks up, most of the time you're met with relief from your other colleagues and the pilots. And a lot of the times after I do something like that and we land and we have a cup of coffee and we're chilling, or someone puts Netflix back on, you know, the pilot will come in and be like, hey, that was the right call. Sorry about that. You know, I just was thinking about it and, you know, thanks for doing that. Like, I've never had one person be like, oh, you. You didn't want to continue. Like, it's always, hey, that was the right call. And now that I've had time to sit with it, that was the right call. And so I think that that's unique to aeromedical. I haven't had as much of that in the fire service specifically, but I.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Don'T know, it's like the kind of the summit fever in mountaineering, where you're the closer you get, the closer you are, and you think it's right there. Like, even though we're past the turnaround time, there's a storm coming in. It's right there. Let's just keep going. Like the spilled milk fallacy.
And I think you have that same issue in flight medicine, where you're like, all right, we're already in the air.
It's a scene call. They're 20 minutes away. Let's just land the bird. Even though this wind's Coming in. Visibility is terrible.
Same issues with mountaineering. And if you don't have that kind of recognition, like, you might be able to escape with it. There might be times where you get away with it. And I think one of the quotes I've heard from one of my avalanche instructors was kind of at the end of a mission, whether that's a ski mission, a mountaineering mission, or a flight medicine mission, you should ask yourself, all right, did we get that done or did we get away with it? And I think there's times where you're going to get away with it. You get away with those mistakes, those shortcuts, but there's times where you know that. That bad luck's gonna run out or that luck's gonna run out, and. Yeah. Yeah, you're not gonna get away with it.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: No, for sure. No. It makes a lot of sense. I was thinking a lot about, you know, after the 1996 Everest disaster when, you know, specifically when, like, Rob hall was trapped up on the Southern summit and everyone was trying to figure out a way to get to him. The storm was really bad. He was hunkered down up there. He kept trying to descend, but he kept saying he was going to descend, and he never did. He ended up dying up there. And all of these crews were thinking about how to get up there, how to get him help, who's nearby, who can get up there and give him, like, some oxygen or some assistance or whatever.
And there was a lot of really powerful emotions that were related to people who were too tired to go versus people who kept continuing to try to go but kept getting turned around. You know, I think it was like Anatoly was one of the climbers, and he kept trying to make his way up there and kept getting turned around. And. And so I think about this in the fire service specifically because there are times where, let's say, someone's trapped in a building and you're there putting out the fire, and you. You literally cannot get to that person the way you're going because you're. You're gonna die. The fire is too hot. You don't have enough water. Maybe you don't have water yet, but you really are trying to make that rescue. And it's hard because your brain wants you to just run into the fire tornado and pull them out at all costs, because that's what your whole, like, internal mind has been teaching you for decades about why you exist on this planet. But, like, logically and.
And, like, in terms of physics, you just can't do that like that. You just can't do it that way. And so I keep asking myself, like, I was listening to this book and I was like, if I was a firefighter and I couldn't, let's say I couldn't advance the hose line anymore and I couldn't get to that person, how would I convince my crew members to either turn around or stop advancing when everything in our body and everything about our identity is screaming to continue? Because that's what we're built to do. And I guess where I landed was, I would never say that we can't do it. I would never say we're quitting or we're retreating. I would frame it as we're going to try something different to accomplish the same goal. So, you know, if you told the firefighter, you got to quit, you got to turn around because you can't do it, it's going to, like, trigger this part of your brain that's going to make you go insane. And I think that same is true with, with climbers. But I think if you were to say something like, we're going to turn around and we're going to wait for the storm to pass and then we're going to try again, or we're going to try it from a different angle, or we're going to radio a team from the northern summit and see if they can traverse around. Like, things about it's not about quitting or continuing, it's about making sure we have the right tool for the right job. And I know what your thoughts are.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: About that, but I think that's a great assessment.
You know, I think about it all the time in these, like, wilderness medicine, search and rescue situations.
And I think it boils down to the only thing worse than one victim is two victims. And if you as a rescuer put yourself in a situation where you're.
You're going to be a liability potentially. Like, all of a sudden, your crew is at risk now because not only are they down a person because, you know, you're now a victim, but now they have two people to rescue.
And I think, like you said, that's such a hard thing to wrap your mind around as someone who trains so hard for moments like these, but I think reframing it exactly like you said of all right, like, this approach is not the way we have to do something else. Whether that's waiting, whether that for time, for weather windows, for more resources, for different resources, and just recognizing, like, that if you become a liability, that's just making it that much harder for, you know, your.
Your teammates, your brothers, sisters, whoever's with you out there in those situations and putting them at risk. And that's the last thing that you would want to do.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it's like, it's so hard mentally to work through this. If you. If you listen to that book by Jon Krakar, he talks about Beck Weather specifically. I'm sure you're familiar with him. You know, he. He wasn't able to continue on his descent, and they left him because he couldn't. They couldn't. Everyone's like, oh, he's dead. We can't do anything about it. It is what it is. You know, being above 8,000 meters, being in the death zone, it's kind of like every man for himself. Once you can't move your own body, like, no one's going to carry you down. It's just, like, not feasible to do that in that environment. People can barely lift their legs up, let alone another person. You know, you can short rope if they can walk. But, you know, hearing about this, where they look at Beck Weathers and they go, oh, my goodness, this is terrible. Like, he's dead. This is horrible. You know, there's nothing we can do. We have to retreat. They go, and then Beck Weathers gets up and makes it farther down the hill, and then they go out to find him, and they. They locate him again and they go, oh, man, he's still alive, but he's gonna die. He's so sick. He's got terrible frostbite. Like, you know, there's. There's nothing we can do. We're gonna try to regroup and get him up here later. And then he stumbles into camp and, like, he's alive today. And like, just the psychological injury that you as a fellow mountaineer must have, knowing that you not only left a guy once, but twice, and then he ended up coming into camp against all odds, like, there's probably 20,000 incidents like that. And 19999 stayed right in the snow where they were. But this one particular person, and it's Beck Weathers from Texas. And he talks a lot about, like, you know, even years and years afterwards, like, the psychological journey of living, reliving that, you know, at night and when you're. When he's napping and stuff, like, just these thoughts coming in his head about what it takes as a climber to look at someone who's maybe still alive and say, I can't get you down. And I don't know if you have any, you know, experience working with climbers who have dealt with this or anything, but, like, how do we.
Is there a way that we can communicate what that potential is? Like, that feeling, that risk when climbers are getting ready to go up in these climbs, like, how do you even mentally prepare for that type of event?
[00:22:48] Speaker A: I think it's so hard, but just recognizing that you are voluntary, voluntarily putting yourself in a situation that, you know 1% of people are going to die. Like, that's the death rate on Everest. And there's other mountains that have even a higher. Much higher death rate than that.
No one's. It's not a forced march, though. You know, these people sign up for it.
So I think recognizing that is kind of the first step of. Of knowing, like, kind of what you're entering into.
And I think this, you know, this. The Beck weather situation, it's just so tough. I couldn't imagine being like, a medical provider in that situation. But they essentially black tagged him as if this was an mci. And they thought, all right, with the resources that we have, we unfortunately are so strapped, and if we commit to trying to bring him down the mountain, like, with the energy level that we have at, you know, 26,000ft, like, there's a high percentage that one of us is going to die because of, like, we're using up the rest of our oxygen or we're spending more time in the death zone. And, you know, it's. It's super easy to Monday morning quarterback what happened. But I, you know, you hate to. You hate to say that, like, they made the right or wrong decision, because at the end of the day, like, none of us were there except for the, you know, those four. Three or four people that were in that decision. And I think that's kind of what you have to be able to do when you walk away from those situations is just at the end of the day, say, I made the best decision that I thought was the right move with the resources I had at the time. And I think at the end of the day, if you can say that that's like, really your ultimate goal, I.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Think you're 100% right. I think the interesting thing is, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Back Weathers, you know, John talks about in his book Beck Weathers and him met, and Beck was like, yeah, you guys did the right thing. Like, if I was in your shoes, like, I would have done the same exact thing. Like, don't worry about it. It's the climbers that left him behind that were like destroyed emotionally and psychologically. And Beck's the one being like, dude, it's fine, guys, it's fine. Like, it is what it is. Like, I was up there too. Like, you know, I would have made the same call. And he was very pragmatic about it. End up getting.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: And I think that's why, like, some of the other people that ended up dying did die. You know, you look at some of the guides who were staying up there with some of the other clients trying to push them through, and that's why they didn't make it. They were up there too long and got exposed to the elements and situations where normally if they were just climbing on their own, they obviously would have made it. But sometimes when you fall into those traps and kind of recognize the, the problems in front of you, that's, that's when mistakes are made. And I think, you know, if people would have moved a little bit faster, they wouldn't have run into that.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think you brought up a good point there. Like, one of the things that was very sobering for me in this book particularly was that two of the people that died, Scott Fisher and Rob hall, were really, really experienced, elite mountaineers who had multiple summits of Everest and had a ton of experience and they still both died, you know, on this particular attempt. And I think it's like, I know for me, whenever I hear about a line of duty death in the fire service and it's a experience, you know, 22 year lieutenant on a busy fire company, to me it's like, oh my goodness, like what possibly happened in there that caused someone with that much experience, like 22 years of busy firefighting and to die in a fire, like, man, it's just really sobering. And it's a very sobering reminder of it really can happen to anyone, no matter how many times you've been doing it.
And I think you kind of mentioned that in some of your, you know, those mental walls that we have. It's like, you know, you might be like, I was here three months ago, I can do this again. And it's like, no. Every single time is this unique event with its own factors that have to independently be analyzed and decided on to make sure we make the best possible case we can. You can't just say, I'm experienced. So it will go well. It's too, it's too simple.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, it's easy to say bad luck is a huge component of these things. You know, you're in a fire and you fall through the floor or you're on a mountain and you get hit by rockfall, like that's just bad luck. Like, you know, you can't dodge a rock when it's, you're walking down and, you know, it breaks through. But the majority of these deaths on Everest, I can't say anything to the statistics of firefighter deaths, but the majority of deaths are not these bad luck deaths. There are these little mistakes that add up to, you know, catastrophe. And I think recognizing how those mistakes are made ahead of time and then having a plan to address that when it comes up and sticking with that plan, that's what kind of forces you into good luck is you make your own luck in these situations. And I think you can extrapolate that into this. You know, a lot of these other situations. The, the fire, the EMS is all right, what is going to be our move? What's our plan when shit's hitting the fan, you know, when the fire gets out of control, when we have multiple victims on scene, what is the plan that we're going to stick to? And obviously we can adapt and adjust, but not just trying to completely go cowboy and deviate 100% from what that, that plan is and then expecting it to work out.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think you're, I think you're right. We talked a little bit in the pre show about the 2pm turnaround rule. You know, obviously the climbers typically leave somewhere between, you know, 11pm midnight, 1am ish. They leave, you know, they leave their camp to head up and complete that final leg of the summit. And a lot of climbers have this rule just knowing the weather and Everest and the weather patterns that, you know, if you don't make it up there by 12:00 clock in the, in the afternoon, 1:00pm, 2:00pm, like, we really gotta start thinking about turning around. And a lot of these climbers that died, you know, they weren't on the summit until, you know, three, four, five o' clock at night, you know, sometime even later. And, and John talks about, in the last chapter's book, he talks about, I think it's like maybe a couple weeks or a couple months later. There's another climber who was there at Base camp during the 1996 Everest disaster. Heard about all these people died. He literally, he describes it as this climber must have stepped over Scott Fisher's body and Rob Hall's body on the way to the summit. And then he got to the summit at 5pm like very experienced climber knows what the turnaround time is. Walked over climbers who died from not turning around got to the summit at 5pm they ended up calling base camp to report the summit, interfacing him with his wife who was in London. They patched him through the radio and his wife was like knowledgeable enough about climbing to be like, it's five o', clock Nepal time. Like, what are you doing on the summit of Everest? Like, it's five o', clock, you are too late. You missed it by three hours.
And he ended up dying, you know, and it's one of those things, it's like, you know, like you said, these really experienced people just passing ominous sign after ominous sign after ominous sign. And in recognizing that, one of the things I love about the Everest climbing situation or anything about this human behavior is that the only way to prevent that is to create a system where it's incredibly difficult to do the wrong thing and incredibly easy to do the right thing.
Because if you're asking someone to make a good decision when they're breathing 7% oxygen, a third of what they're supposed to be getting, and they have summit fever and they're within 300ft of the summit of the thing they've been chasing since they were a little kid, we know that human beings, they're just not going to make the logical call in that environment. So we can't expect them to. And so I think what you and I talked about is the big question is with an experienced climber like Rob hall, who has been beating the drum of the 2pm turnaround time for months during their acclimatization process, why did he summit after 2pm that's the question.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, I think there's literally been books written about this, in fact, great ones like we're talking about now. And you know, I think one of the big issues that they, they've kind of found is that there were essentially these two competing, if you will, friendly competition guides between Rob hall and Scott Fisher. And I think they're both under a lot of pressure to complete this objective. And Rob hall, the super experienced guide who's brought up people who have no business being on Everest, successfully brought them up and safely down Everest many years, but was kind of starting to lose out to this up and coming successful guide, Scott Fisher.
And they had some, both had some high profile clients that were trying to summit and it's easy to fall into that. One of the traps that we've talked about where, all right, like, you know, this other Guide is about to make it up. And even though we're behind, like I would hate it for my business to not be able to successfully summit. So I'm going to kind of audible that, that plan and you know, scratch that out and we're going to push it back just so I can get this client up. And it's tough. I feel 100% for those guides. You have clients who are paying, you know, 60k, 100k to climb this peak and expecting you to get them up there safely and to turn them around is like so hard. I mean, I've, I've worked in, certainly not in the Himalayas, but in other high altitude peaks where I've had to turn people around.
And it's, it's heartbreaking for you as a provider or a guide to say like, hey, you're, you're not in the position to do this is one of the hardest things to do. But I think just like recognizing that it's the right decision and sticking to your guns and saying like, this just doesn't make sense for reasons X, Y and Z. But we gotta time out, we gotta stop. The mountain's always gonna be there. You know, you can come back tomorrow, next year, but we wanna make sure that you're gonna be in that position to be able to do that.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's tough, man.
It's a big topic. It's a big topic. So we will jump into, bring Prescott back on the show and get his Fire Chief S.L. prescott expertise on human behavior. I know he's got a lot to offer. So Chance, I want to thank you for joining me from the great Rocky Mountains. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure as usual. I want to wish all the listeners a very happy Thanksgiving. We will do one more episode before the end of the year. Maybe we'll do a holiday theme. We don't know. But Chance, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. And I hope you stay safe out there in Colorado.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: You bet. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate you having me, Sam.
