Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

You're probably right about those little ant people.

Climbing Mount Everest is more dangerous than attempting suicide!

Not quite but closer than I would have suspected:

   Suicide attempt fatality rate: 9%
   Everest attempt fatality rate: 2%

Sources:

    Climber fatality from attempts through 2006:
    http://www.adventurestats.com/tables/EverestAgeFat.shtml

    Suicide estimate from NIH:         
    http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml

Actually, Everest is considered as on the easier side for an eight-thousander [1]. Annapurna got %38 (2007 figures) [2] and K2 got %25 [3].

For some interesting discussion on Everest fatalities, try this one [4]. "No shortcuts to the top" by Ed Viesturs and the well known "Into thin air" by Jon Krakauer are two good books on the subject, if you want to read more.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2 {4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295

Yup, I've read that. The account by the reporter from Outdoors (?) was extremely graphic in detail (but disputed by others in the party). Sad all around, but through those deaths came better regulation which has led to a 1:7 ration of attempts/deaths vs. 1:4 in previous years.

Some more stats I put together awhile ago:

http://andrewwooster.com/everest.html

This is very good visualization. It brings out the fact that number of summits have exponentially increased by number of death only linearly and with very slight slop. This means w have gotten exponentially better at summiting over time.

I am sure that I read an article a while ago that claimed that climbing Everest was more dangerous.

I guess I'm wrong. Thanks for the correction.

And I suspect that suicide fatality rate isn't 100% correct either. It's hard to really tell, if someone really failed trying to commit suicide, or if they just 'attempted' to get more attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com