Think he died up there did he not?
You’re thinking of McDonnell I’d say? He died on K2. This fella made it and lived to tell the tale.
Ger McDonnell from Limerick after becoming the first Irishman to summit K2 was killed on the way down. That was about 10 years ago. He was a very experienced climber. You don’t set foot on K2 without serious elite climbing pedigree.
I’d had a few emails with Ger not long beforehand. A mutual friend connected us, and he had invited me to stay with him in Alaska (I only got to the bottom of Alaska so never got up to Anchorage). I had pitched a piece to a few publications (I used to do a bit of writing) about doing a story about his prep for K2 etc. at the time
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This is the lad I was referring to.
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There was a documentary about it. Yeah the traffic on mountain slows it all down and people then die.
Tell us more about this Geoff. Was this hard? How long did it take? Local guides? Did it involve much proper climbing or is it just a big hike? How dangerous was it?
Very conflicting views on all of this. As stated, why you’d do something so dangerous with a young family.
But this ties in with charity fundraising on special events. This climb was being done for Barretstown, but the terms of it was you pay the fundraiser and once all the costs for the trip were covered, the remaining money goes to the charity. As it stood, just over 8k was raised, so nothing going to charity. But now there is over 122k already raised to send out a search team.
Whatever about being young and adventurous with no ties, but family should take priority. Bucket list stuff that potentially ends your life.
Tragic case all round tho, he obviously never intended on not returning, very sad on the wife and not being able to locate him.
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People who do things under the guise of charity need to be called out.
You have these chancers who look to get sponsored to go and fuck off to Africa for the summer under the guise of charity. There are plenty of ways to raise money for charity without indulging and financially aiding the pursuits of the “volunteers”.
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Unfortunately it’s win win for both parties. That’s why it works. I considered doing it myself at one stage years ago. A walk in Peru for the Mater Hospital. I think I needed to raise about £10,000 at the time. The Mater then looked after everything else.
There are certain things which are fine, there are walks, matches, cycles, runs etc which don’t take much money to organise but when it goes to the point of paying for someone to have a holiday or follow their own pursuits and its masquerades as volunteering, that really gets up my back.
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‘Gets up your back’? That’s very Fergus there…
I hate to say it but this rescue isn’t going to happen. I’ve read a good few books on the top ten summits and once you go into the death zone (above 8000 metres) you look after number one. You just don’t launch a recovery mission out of camp 5. There just isn’t spare bodies up there. Everybody up there already has a job. A rescue/recovery mission would take months to organise. Well past the summer climbing window.
Even next year whose going to take responsibility for €750,000 to send a team up Everest with the chances of success virtually zero. He’s either stumbled upon in the next few days or that’s it I’m afraid and sorry to say.
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That’s the main reason I didn’t go.
Took 16-17 days. Most of that given over to acclimatization time. I climbed it from the North side which is non-technical and essentially a hike to the summit. Ascents from the South side are technical. The two biggest variables are the weather and dealing with the altitude. Aconcagua is so much higher than all the peaks around it, nothing to shield it from elements. When we started out, nobody had been able to summit in 6 weeks due to bad weather.
You do really start to notice the altitude from 20,000 feet up. Didn’t suffer from altitude sickness but loss of appetite, shutting down of taste buds, dulling of the mind and reflexes. That’s still 3,000 feet shy of death zone and you’re not going to fall over the edge or get hit by an avalanche like can happen on Everest.
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Absolutely savage. Did you try drugs for the altitude?
Yeah. Have heard all this before.
You would wonder in recent weeks before he set off, did he discuss with family the reality of what would happen if he had an accident on descent before getting back to camp 5.
Hopefully I’m wrong and there might be some chance of recovery by a team before the annual weather window shuts. You’d imagine it’s made even harder to do on an already overcrowded mountain at this time of year.
Did you give her a good belt of 5 across the eyes for such an action towards you?
No, didn’t take anything. Just the old tried and trusted method of a long time at high altitude - over 15,000 feet before tackling summit. You get to base camp which is at bottom of Aconcagua. There’s three camps on the mountain itself. You climb up to Camp 2 first, then back down to Camp 1 to sleep for a night, then all the way back down to base camp. Up the mountain again to Camp 3, back to Camp 2 to sleep a night then all the way back down. Few rest days at base camp doing nothing in between, climb a neighboring peak, back to base camp then up Aconcagua properly for summit, sleeping at Camp 3 (roughly 20,000 feet) night before summit.
It’s a selfish enough business even on what’s not really a life or death climb. There were four of us, one of the lads starting to really struggle on summit day and fall behind. It was getting to stage where that was going to scupper it for all of us as you’ve got to be on the summit and off it by about 3pm. He did the decent thing, held his hand up and called it a day and one of the asssistant guides brought him back. We were probably about 10-15 minutes away from an intervention to send him back.
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