The Tragic End of Natalia Nagovitsyna's Ordeal on Pobeda Peak | Hacker News Reader

The Tragic End of Natalia Nagovitsyna's Ordeal on Pobeda Peak

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50 pointswslh41 comments

Eesh, the person who went up to give her supplies died on the way down too.

Also her husband died a few year ago.

These people want to do things that they know are extremely dangerous, and some times die. I don't empathize. Compare to those people who die by no fault of their own. Drunk driver, war, etc. Am I callous to believe that the two are not equally deserving of our empathy?

I think making a point broadcasting that one doesn’t care if other people who weren’t harming anyone die is callous, yes. Doubly so when one does it on a news story about people dying.

The thing is, they can and do harm others. Not just family and friends when they perish, but rescue workers who risk their own lives to save people who get into trouble. The article talks of 2 people who delivered her supplies, one died, the other has gone to Germany for frostbite treatment - as fellow climbers maybe they don't count in quite the same way, but rescue workers do die or get injured as well.

Rescue workers do their job willingly. No one really forces them to (usual exceptions for North Korea et al. apply here). I know an old emergency doctor who once survived a helicopter crash. He still walks with a limp and still flies missions with a helo, even though he is pushing sixty.

It is a specific sort of mentality on their part and frankly my experience with them is that they neither need nor appreciate any white-knighting for their safety. If they wanted a safe job, they could easily switch to pushing papers around, there is no shortage of such jobs in the modern world.

According to the article, the person who died bringing her supplies was a member of her original expedition group, not an unrelated rescue worker.

TBH daily, about 150 000 humans die, and I don't have the capacity to mourn them all.

That said, as you say, broadcasting that one does not care without even being asked is already an attitude and I wouldn't like to be in any sort of relationship with a person which spontaneously emits such messages.

Hmm. I don't know. I am glad they're not harming anyone else, but also -- like, I have kids. And if they were to get into this sort of thing, I'd at the least be like "Well, that's STUPID. Why put yourselves in harm's way deliberately like this. Stressing me and mom out. Do something that helps someone else instead."

My uncle promised his kid $10k if he did not buy a motorcycle he was planning to buy

Gos bless your uncle. Smart man. Did it work?

It did. The kid went on to spend the $10k on a new motorcycle.

That’s fair, but there’s a way to say that without bringing “deserving” into it. As you did.

For my part, there’s a big part of me that still is moved by Tennyson: “As tho’ to breathe were life!”

Drunk driver, war, etc. Am I callous to believe that the two are not equally deserving of our empathy?

I've always thought that a good comparison was drug addiction. Ultimately, what's the difference between someone who engages in high-risk extreme sports and someone who just sits at home doing meth in the basement?

They are both doing dangerous, unnecessary things to manipulate their brain chemistry, without creating or learning anything useful or affecting anything in the larger world around them. Why is one considered heroic and adventurous, and the other criminal or at best pathetic?

I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?

In general I agree with you, but a counterexample to our rejection of their supposed heroism (and ascription of it to brain-chemistry-seeking identical to heroin addiction) is Alex Honnold [0], famous for his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite. There's an excellent documentary on him, Free Solo [1], where it's very clear that he's neuro-diverse and that extreme climbing efforts put him into the zone, calming and focussing him. There's zero machismo to it. For him, it's an act of supreme, extended concentration.

I suppose in some sense it's still just manipulating one's own brain chemistry, but it seems a very distinct kind from adrenaline junkies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Solo

You didn't say it outright so this is not me correcting you specifically, but there's this semi-myth that "Honnold doesn't feel fear because that region of his brain is smaller than everyone else's". He, at least, disputes this. He feels fear but he knows how to focus it, and it's a combination of some kind of innate talent and conditioning as he's put himself in scary situations before

Not quite the same, but Youtuber Ally Law (known for climbing cranes and tall structures) started doing it specifically because he used to be terrified of heights and now seems to not have a problem with it

I do tend to agree that Honnold is an exception to the "why don't they just do drugs" argument. He's teaching us that we can do things we didn't think we could do, and I have to believe there's real value there. He's genuinely inspirational.

Climbing some random mountain in Russia, though... that's not "Holy fuck, what's this guy made of?!" but "Yeah, a bunch of other people already did that, and it was cool, I guess, except for the ones that died."

>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?

the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.

I'd be willing to buy that if she had died while diving in an unexplored cave system, for instance, working to bring us knowledge and insights about nature that we didn't already have.

But there was nothing left to discover on that mountain peak, except how much frostbite sucks.

I suspect high risk extreme sports are in fact worse, as they seem to require a constant ramp-up of the risk, and there does not seem to be any detox mechanism (other than old age) that would allow one to reset the required risk.

There is an appalling number of people in these sports who die young, e.g. Ueli Steck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueli_Steck), recently Felix Baumgartner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner). Many of them had already see friends and family die in these sports (as had Natalia Nagovitsyna), so it's not like they were not aware of the dangers.

Life is for living silly bear. I cannot imagine anything worse than getting to the end of your life and finally realizing you never lived it. That you wasted this once in a live time experience. But that is just me.

are you planning to try meth before you die?

Right before.

I find the analogy quite apt. I have known drug addicts who I thought were recovered, but who could not fathom simply going to work and then going home to their families every night. They thought that was an incredibly boring life. Predictably, they relapsed. They could’ve caused significantly less stress to their families and loved ones by having more socially acceptable thrillseeking methods.

There is not caring about an unknown person which is default stance. And then there is going out of your way to make everyone know other people do not deserve empathy or whatever and how worthless they are to you. The two are not the same.

Why do you want us all to compare them to other people who died? You are not callous. You are angry and emotional over others having interest in the story.

That is a path towards a more boring humanity.

Did you mean sympathy rather than empathy?

The unusual thing about this particular tragedy is the existence of the drone footage. If you search in the internet, there exists a footage of a flyover around Everest, but at those altitudes it is really uncommon. The technology is very new and almost NASA-grade: Ingenuity was a successful proof of concept, DJI is now showing modified commercial drones. It looks like those currently available drones won’t be able to get there any meaningful payload, so we can only watch people dying in high resolution, but not save them.

Wow, I didn't realize helicopters can't go that high. I was wondering why it wasn't a simple helicopter extraction job, there you go.

Yes, helicopters can't fly at extremely high altitudes because their rotor blades need dense air to generate lift, and the air becomes too thin at high altitudes. This decreased air density requires the rotors to spin faster and the engines to work harder, ultimately limiting the aircraft's ability to maintain sufficient lift and power

> Yes, helicopters can't fly at extremely high altitudes because their rotor blades need dense air to generate lift,

On Mars atmosphere is about 1%, or close. Still helicopter did fly. Correctly saying 'helicopters designed for dense atmosphere cannot fly in thin'.

It is possible to build a drone specifically for these cases. Which will be able to lift 200kg off Everest. With long, wide blades. It's not that expensive and not a rocket science onymore.

It's about 22 thousand feet above sea level. It has been done before, but only very rarely, and only during the rare occasion that the weather would permit it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Delsalle

> part of her quest to complete the Snow Leopard challenge by climbing all five 7,000m peaks in the former USSR.

I just don't understand these challenges but at least it's a self resolving problem.

It's not. There are people with an adventure-dimension in their personality and that's a good thing. Otherwise we wouldn't be typing here and still be sitting in a cave somewhere.

She died while doing what she loved/ was obsessed with and there are certainly worse deaths.

> There are people with an adventure-dimension in their personality and that's a good thing

The funny thing is this behavior was observed in animals (rats, as they are commonly used in experiments) in labs. So, it's not human specific.

Without death, there is no life.

Climbers know they risk death in pursuit of their accomplishments. I am positive it is one of the ways they challenge themselves.

These aren’t kids you are talking about. As the article says, this climber’s husband died while she was climbing with him in 2021. She absolutely knew the risks. I do not believe she would have wanted sympathy. “Normal” people can’t relate, and have “normal” responses. I’ll imagine my own eulogy for her, but this article isn’t it.

Some kinds of drama are important for the spiritual/emotional health of humankind. The climbing of difficult mountains, as well as the occasional desperate rescues, are all part of fully inhabiting life.

Is it known how she broke her leg?

There’s unverified information that her guide slipped and dragged her down, at which moment she broke her leg. However I won’t trust it, because most news outlets telling this also mix up other facts and don’t mention the source. It just happens there, on one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. There were other deaths this year, the only difference is that she didn’t die within hours and was stuck there for a while.

Is that important? One misstep. She broke her leg half a year before.

The article implies she is stranded due to the broken leg - I think HOW the leg was broken would be relevant to the post. Are you intimating that she was camped halfway down a summit for another reason?

No, I'm saying she broke her leg again. Likely it wasn't fully healed from previous brake. That's all. Nevertheless she decided to go, which is challenging even for best and well prepared climbers. In other words it's not a big surprise. BTW, she is confirmed dead.

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