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Bolting Mt Everest 14-May-2005 At 11:26:31 AM Romfrantic

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On 14/05/2005 anthonyk wrote:
>hundreds in the alps each year?? are you serious? i checked it out a
>bit, this: http://www.wemjournal.org/wmsonline/?request=get-document&issn=1080-6032&volume
>012&issue=02&page=0074 gives some scary numbers..
>
>i've never been there to see first hand but those numbers give an average
>of more than one per day, with that sort of thing you would know nothing
>about the people or the incidents, they would just be collected together
>as statistics, i'd find that pretty sad. but i guess its a different climbing
>world over there hey.

It issad. But, Tony, I don't think is the 'difference' in climbing at all....is just a numbers thing. Western Europe has an enormous population density, Germany alone has something like 85-90 million people, and so the proportion of alpine climbers in the W.European population is also much much bigger than what we're used to seeing here in AU/NZ ....I would think that the proportion of accidents per people climbing would be somewhat similar to us here, is just that the numbers there are proportionally much much bigger. Another thing to consider, is altitude. AMS plays a bigger role in some of those accidents/fatalities where mountains reach higher than 3,500-4,000 masl, something we don't see over here.