This morning I had a meeting suddenly get cancelled and I had an hour to waste and I read that several people had died on Mount Everest recently and decided to google it and after following several links I found out that over 275 people have died attempting to climb Mount Everest with about 4000 making it to the top. Before 1996, 1 in 4 people died that attempted it. That isn't people that gave up or turned around, 25% of the people that tried died. That is crazy. Apparently with all the tech advances in climbing it's now down to around 4.4%. Also, apparently many of the people that died they just leave their corpse on the side of the mountain. There was one dude who they weren't even sure who he was, they just called him "green boots" because he wore green boots. Each year, hundreds of people just walked by his frozen dead corpse and took pictures or whatever. The first US woman who reached the summit died on her way down and her corpse sat next to the main route for nine years before somebody went over and pushed it down an embankment. There was another dude who was dying next to "green boots" and apparently people thought he was "green boots" and then other people didn't want to give up their climb so they just let the dude die next to "green boots". Because most of the clothes they wear are bright colors, the area where a bunch of dead bodies in their shiny clothes has been nicknamed "Rainbow Valley".
It looks like nowadays it's just a massive cash grab (costs $65,000 (without tips) for basic climb and can go much much higher) and they have ropes set up for you in many places, so all sorts of people that have no business being up there are doing it (a 13 yr old US kid was youngest to make it to the top).
Does anybody have something crazy like this on their bucket list? Something I've always wanted to do is go visit the pyramids in Eygpt and then Petra in Jordan. Worried about getting my pasty white USA ass killed though...
Below are some photos of "green boots" and somebody else. Weird that people just walk by and snap a photo...