I don't disagree that there are worse places to be buried, but as I noted in the first posting, there are other human costs. This poor man's family does not have his remains to grieve over. Also, someone had to bury his body up there, and I don't imagine that was too pleasant.
Timothy Egan posted the opinion piece below in today's New York Times. I would be interested to hear what other folks on VFTT think on this issue.
BJG
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July 9, 2008, 9:33 pm
Mountain Madness
Mount McKinley. (Michael DeYoung/Alaska Stock)
For nearly two weeks, a friend of mine had been trying to reach the roof of North America, a place no bigger than a dining room rug, about 200 miles south of the Arctic circle. He’s a restless soul, briskly roaming the world in search of thin air before he gets too worn and cautious in late middle-age.
Last I checked, he was pinned at high camp by the kind of storms that keep nearly half of the 1,400 people who attempt to climb Mount McKinley from succeeding. Winds, 60 to 70 miles an hour. Temperatures, even in the first weeks of summer, hovering near zero.
Then came sudden news –- a 51-year-old man had died on Denali, as most Alaskans call the mountain. He made it to the top on the Fourth of July, and then collapsed –- the first climber ever to die on the mountain’s summit. He was buried in a frozen grave at 20,320 feet.
It took a few hours before I confirmed the name of the dead climber. I was relieved, of course, that it was not my friend, but I found no comfort in the details of the death.
The victim, James Nasti from Naperville, Ill., was an experienced mountaineer, with no history of heart trouble, and had shown no signs of altitude sickness. He belonged to a club whose members try to reach the highest point in all 50 states. For James Nasti, Denali was number 49.
Whenever anyone dies in the mountains, I have the same, inevitable conversation with climbing friends. It happened just a month ago, when a 31-year-old man died in a snowstorm during a day hike on Mount Rainier, a big volcano whose summit I’ve sworn off after a scary climb a couple of years ago.
We always start with this question: How did they mess up? We look for obvious mistakes and easy answers: a rope not properly attached, a crevasse that should never have been crossed and, most often, a weather forecast that went unheeded.
A wise group of Rainier climbing veterans, including some of the first Americans to make it up Mount Everest, have a saying whenever they tell war stories: There are old climbers and bold climbers, but no old, bold climbers.
With mountaineering fatalities, the cases without apparent human error are the most maddening, and troubling.
So it was on Denali. James Nasti was on a guided climb, led by world-class alpinists. By all accounts, he had been cautious, and was in great shape for his age. The weather was fine. He had done nothing foolish, taken no missteps. Having reached the highest point in North America, one of the premier mountaineering achievements in the world, he simply fell back and died, the 101st death on the mountain since 1932. An autopsy, if his body is ever removed, may yet provide some answers.
Then, on Monday, while people were still puzzling over Nasti’s collapse, came word of another sudden and seemingly inexplicable death.
A 20-year-old climber from Indonesia, Pungkas Tri Baruno, died near a 17,200-foot base camp while descending from Denali’s summit. He stopped walking, stopped breathing, fell to the snow and died, just like James Nasti.
These men, Baruno and Nasti, will soon join the other names on the granite memorial at Denali’s base. It doesn’t provide much of a consistent narrative, but it does give you a sense of the odds.
For every death on the mountain, about 500 people will make the summit. An 11-year-old boy and a 76-year-old man – the youngest and oldest summiteers – have looked out from that glorious place in the Alaska Range where you run out of earth.
Death can come from crossing the street, or eating a tomato. My first literary agent, a wonderful woman with a full life ahead of her, was killed by a bus in Manhattan. Why not experience the heightened sense of living that comes from getting closer to the edge – controlled risk, in the mountains or on a wild river? So goes my internal palaver whenever I think of what happened on Denali.
The other side of the argument is about loved ones, the people who are left behind.
In his book “Into Thin Air,” Jon Krakauer chronicled the deadly 1996 season on Everest, a story of hubris and tragic miscalculations that has since been told from multiple points of view, by various survivors. Climbing Everest, Krakauer wrote, is “an intrinsically irrational act.”
One of the dead was Scott Fischer, a guide from Seattle. Fischer was charismatic, with chiseled good looks that seemed to come from the mountain gods, an alpine stud in the eyes of his clients. He also had two young kids, who went to the same elementary school as my children.
When Fischer died I saw a mountaineering death, for the first time, from a different point of view: that of the surviving children.
In reading about Jim Nasti’s death on the summit of Denali, then, the thing that stayed with me were the details about his family. The calculus of risk is different for everyone. But on the Fourth of July, atop the nation’s highest mountain, one man’s personal glory was swiftly transformed.
He was mountaineer, a great one for a moment – and then he was a father of three boys gone, a husband no more.
