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There's this idea that in some countries/cultures you're supposed to haggle over all prices; this creates the wildly false idea in some people's heads that if they don't haggle... or if they don't haggle successfully... they're being "ripped off" and taken advantage of. I have a little sympathy for that, it's not that different from the confusion that people visiting the US have with our bizarre tipping culture. That is, of course, not an excuse for refusing to pay for something. You didn't get the price you haggled for? Pay what they're asking, or don't have the goddamn tea. You don't get to just commit theft. Obviously.
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Aug 7, 2020 18:50
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AHH F/UGH posted:Sorry if this was discussed already No. In addition to the locals needing the income, the state also really wants the income from the permits; and, China has a side of the mountain, they'd simply capture most of the tourist trade lost by Nepal.
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Nov 3, 2020 23:46
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Since it's the offseason, I propose we use the Everest Megathread to give money to Sherpas in need. I did some googling, here is an article from National Geographic published in 2014 that lists five charities that were helping out specifically Sherpas: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/4/140424-sherpas-avalanche-help-donations/ Keep in mind that the world has mostly stopped thinking about that particular disaster, but that it takes decades for the impoverished communities in countries like Nepal to rebuild and recover from disasters. Some more: Mitrata-Nepal Foundation for Children https://www.mitrata.org/ Sherpa Future Fund https://www.adventureconsultants.com/specialty-services/sherpa-future-fund/ Apa Sherpa Foundation https://www.apasherpafoundation.org/ Sherpa Foundation https://www.sherpafoundation.org/ Sherpa Family Fund https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/sherpa-family-fund/ US Sherpa Foundation https://www.ussherpa.com/us-sherpa-foundation.html Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation https://www.alexlowe.org/ Save the Children Nepal https://www.savethechildren.org/us/where-we-work/nepal If you prefer a larger organization, consider UNICEF, CARE, doctors without borders, etc. Donations to these orgs are usually not earmarkable for a particular country unless there's been a recent disaster they're specifically targeting with a limited campaign, but you can often see stuff about what they're doing in Nepal. For example, CARE Nepal: https://www.carenepal.org/ I'm particularly interested in Apa Sherpa Foundation. https://kutv.com/news/local/legendary-everest-climber-partners-with-google-for-charity quote:At just 12 years-old, Apa's father died. He says he was forced to become a porter and later a guide on Mt. Everest, in order to help provide for his family. {}"Sherpa die every year, because they take a risk, because they have no choice, they have no education," he said. The money is directly disbursed by Apa Sherpa, which... well, not much oversight I guess, but it's also not a lot of money being handled.  I submit to you that this thread is not, actually, appalling but is actually, in fact, cool and good, and I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I challenge the rest of you to do the same.
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Dec 8, 2020 21:42
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We're up to $60 for sherpas. Yes, I'm gonna keep track.
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Dec 9, 2020 05:54
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PittTheElder posted:It's among the worst mysteries out there. Like maaaaaybe he made it to the summit but almost certainly not, and ultimately it doesn't much matter. But if anyone ever finds that camera they'll be able to sell the photos for the cost of like, at least one Everest expedition! Except they won't, there's no way the film is recoverable anymore, right?
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Dec 10, 2020 01:06
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Azathoth posted:it just won't give them the first successful summit/ascent/whatever of everest even if they were the first people to actually stand on the summit Mountain-climbing associations and officials wouldn't give them the summit, but the mainstream media absolutely would, and everyone in the world who doesn't care what mountainclimber associations think would too. The most rigorous journalists might mention way down in the article that "technically" it doesn't count according to how these records are normally tracked; the vast majority of the press wouldn't even bother to mention that.
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Dec 10, 2020 08:39
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I like the idea that oxygen is "cheating." Are synthetic fibers cheating? How about polarized lenses? How about using a radio? At exactly what technological line does it stop being cheating, and start being properly hardcore?
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Dec 21, 2020 21:46
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I'm thinking losing your thingy to instant frostbite, while you gasp for air with every sad attempt at thrusting your rapidly blackening wanger into a supposedly consenting (but so brain-damaged from altitude that nah not really) fuckpal is probably not worth it even if you got some bragging rights for doing it. Plus you just know Hillary or someone in his party was probably the first anyway.
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Jan 7, 2021 08:04
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I ain't gatekeeping or nothing because this is GBS and there's lots of folks here who never venture beyond this hallowed hall, but: we do have an entire outdoors subforum, complete with literally tens of goons who know all about winter camping and would be happy to recommend you a 4-season tent or argue the merits of different brands of snow shoes... The Great Outdoors
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Feb 4, 2021 04:14
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Azathoth posted:It really makes me wonder how many bodies the search teams literally walk right past because of some quirk of geography or something else equally mundane. I've spent some time hiking in Yosemite, and some other big parks in california and elsewhere, and it's 100% this. Search & rescue for an alive human relies heavily on that human hearing people nearby and responding, or lighting a fire, or staying right on a trail. You can walk 20 feet off of a well-traveled trail and completely disappear from view. And when people are searching a large area of dozens (or worse, hundreds) of square miles, they cannot look under every rock and behind every tree. Sight lines can be severely restricted. And flights overhead aren't great either, you can miss someone because they're in shadow, or there's any kind of foliage, or just because the angle you flew past was slightly wrong. And, bodies do not always last long in the wilderness. Once someone dies in a place where there's coyotes, bears, mountain lions, or even just like foxes, their remains can be scattered. If they're in a spot with some slope, they can be tumbled downhill mixed with dead leaves and eroding earth. Bones exposed to weather that includes rain and snow decay, they don't just bleach and turn into perfect white skeletons like you might see in the desert. People disappear into yosemite because it's huge, the terrain is extremely severe, there are active predators and scavenger animals, there's lots of trees, lots of weather including dozens of feet of snow in the winter, and it's impossible for S&R people to explore every nook and cranny. And it's an incredibly popular park that in non-covid times attracts around 4.5 million visitors annually. If even 0.001% of those visitors do something stupid enough to maybe die off-trail, that amounts to 45 idiots a year. And based on my own experiences in the park, the rate at which people do stupid poo poo off-trail is probably more like .01%. At least. And that's only that low because the large majority of Yosemite visitors drive into the valley, walk on paved trails for a while, and then drive home.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:12
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Platystemon posted:It also works in reverse, too. Yeah that story I've read about a few times and it's fascinating. She believed she was doing the right thing, staying in place, that's what people used to always say: wait to be rescued, stay in one spot. And she was drinking untreated water and suffering from severe intestinal distress. But even so, if she'd simply spent some time over the first week of her isolation walking straight away from her camp and then straight back, learning the area, becoming more familiar with her surroundings, she very likely would have eventually found the trail again. Her decision to hike alone wasn't that absurd given how heavily-traveled the AT is, but she compounded errors by getting lost and then spent a month dying 600 yards from help and the remains of her camp weren't found for years.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:15
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Haifisch posted:If you're into search and rescue stories, some teams like the RMRU have publicly available mission logs. (although a lot of them are pretty short and boring, short and boring is good when the goal is finding people and getting them to safety) One of the things I always do is leave a little note in my car with my exact plans. Since sometimes you arrive at a place you intend to hike and a lot is full, or there's a little road closure, or whatever and you decide at that moment to like, maybe change to a different trailhead or whatever. I just figure if I go missing, they're going to find my car immediately, and a note on the dash (writing-side down, you have to break glass to get it) that says like "we intend to hike up x trail, stay at y camp area, return on day z, we have 1 extra day of food, we will not voluntarily stay out past such-and-such date no matter what") takes two minutes to jot down and someday might save my life. That's on top of sending our plans before we head out, to at least two family members. A lot of these wilderness survival/death stories begin with the victim(s) deciding to make a fateful change to their plans that leaves rescuers looking in the wrong place for them. And we've had multiple occasions where circumstances pushed us to make some probably harmless alteration to our original plans.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:08
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I can understand the yearning for true solitude. I might do that kind of thing myself if I didn't have a wife and family who would be really pissed at me for doing it. But it really doesn't interrupt your solitude and sense of self-reliance and so forth to leave a note where people can find it if you don't turn up alive when you're supposed to. And, of course, then not wildly deviate from your plans on a whim. Even if what you're planning to do is go off-trail (where that's permitted of course) and explore some remote area, you can carry a transponder and leave behind info about the area you intend to explore and when you intend to return.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:19
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That article is worth looking at, basically he was negligently killed by idiot fuckers being stupid in his immediate chain of command.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:35
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Do the people on that show cooperate or are they all individually alone? Because the best piece of advice I ever heard about wilderness survival is that the #1 best most effective tactic is to not be alone, and the less alone you are, the better your survival chances are.
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Feb 10, 2021 21:13
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Pyrotoad posted:I don't know why people default to fish as the easy pet for kids nice bombina orientalis there in your av, pyrotoad my last firebellied toad is like 15+ years old now and refuses to die, you picked a good toad I like that a toad av guy has stuff to say about water quality. amphibians are a canary species when it comes to water quality so it fits. Also here in california you don't drink even high alpine spring water untreated because of the giardia risk, but that definitely does not mean that stagnant water is better, and you'd drink that untreated spring water if your other option was dying, for sure. Although in a survival situation, getting severe diarrhea can also kill you even faster, so... it's a rough choice to have to make. The moral of the story is to have a good filter with you when you go wandering around in the mountains, idiot
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Feb 12, 2021 08:35
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Having a partner in the wilderness is partly about that social contact, but that's not the whole story. It's also a lot about having someone to say "hey what are you doing" when you're about to make a careless mistake, perhaps due to fatigue or dehydration or starvation. Having someone to plan with makes you both make better plans (often), and avoid horrible ones (often). Often enough to make a difference in survival, anyway. The multiplicative aspect of cooperative work is there, too, of course. There are some tasks for which two sets of hands are more than twice as easy as for one set of hands. And, if two people are both hunting/gathering, they have the potential to cover twice as much area, and thus double their chances of happening across a resource; some of those resources supply needs for both people for multiple days, whether that's noticing a fruit tree or ambushing a deer. Not to discount the psychological effects of solitude, of course. I'm just saying, there's more to it than that.
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Feb 16, 2021 04:30
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Outrail posted:According to Google you need 5 pounds of jerky a day to hit your needs. That seems like a lot, but food is expendable so you're losing 10% of your potential survival poo poo for a few days of food. An all-meat diet requires a hell of a lot of meat. You need carbs.
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Feb 16, 2021 20:18
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Roll Fizzlebeef posted:Pemmican is made with meat and fat in a 1:1 ratio so it is actually quite calorie dense. Yeah. Antarctic explorers lived for months on pemmican. I was referring to the beef jerky suggestion above my post. You really don't want to try to live on 100% meat. The Lewis & Clark expedition had to do that for extended periods and they consumed an enormous amount of meat daily to survive. You really really want some carbs to provide energy, protein alone is rough. Fat is also very energy dense and so you want that too, and your body can convert either into energy. Ideal would be a mix of both. If I was choosing survival food I'd want a lot of flour and a lot of fat, but only if I'm confident I can keep the flour sealed and dry. Rice and pasta both need to be boiled and take a lot more water, which is why I'd favor flour over them. For fat, something solid at room temp is easier to manage but a bottle of oil would be OK too. This is anecdotal, but: for a few years a family friend operated a free waystop on the pacific crest trail. Through-hikers stop every few days to resupply and rest, and so he'd have a few of those folks showing up at his cabin through July. By the time they got to his place at Donner, they'd already hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles over the previous month or two, in very rugged terrain. Those people absolutely wolfed down fat and carbs. I was there once and I saw a woman just eat half a stick of butter with a fork. Trail food is about weight and compactness and calories, but the hikers' bodies told them what they really needed via craving. That crew could put away a hell of a lot of ice cream, too. Lean, fat-free bodies, not especially muscular, and really craving carbs and fat, described about 90% of the through-hikers of all ages that would show up there. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Feb 16, 2021 |
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Feb 16, 2021 21:43
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Uncle Enzo posted:I think the pro move would be to set it out as a salt lick to attract animals (that you then shoot and eat) I think salt licks don't like, "attract" animals unless they're familiar with the salt lick's location? It's not like they can smell the salt from miles away? I assume your normal salty rock that animals come and lick has been there for generations...
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Feb 16, 2021 23:10
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Uncle Enzo posted:This bunch of bowhunters claim that deer find their salt blocks within a few days of placement. I don't know if 3 pounds is enough, or if that's legal in the areas they film the show in, but it seems like an attractive idea. A quick skim says they're also tearing up the ground around the lick, and using flavored licks with scents in them rather than just a block of salt. But I would say anyway that some sort of deer bait could be a viable option if you know you'll be in an area where there's lots of deer, and if you intend to try to hunt deer.
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Feb 16, 2021 23:49
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My list. 1. Mosquito repellant 2. Nokia N-Gage 3. 8 watts of solar panels 4. Low-power laptop, so I can shitpost 5. Wal-mart three-wheeled cart, as cheap as possible 6. Sunscreen 7. A rain coat, for in case if it rains 8. $25 wal-mart sleeping bag with Dora the Explorer on it 9. Ninja stars, for personal protection 10. I dunno, some raisins probably, that should hold me over for a few days
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Feb 17, 2021 00:08
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HugeGrossBurrito posted:those are clearly not on the webpage relevant to this discussion https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3714480 e. goddamn, I forgot about The huge fuckin' burrito in a Pelican case lmao Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 00:30
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Zero One posted:I still don't understand why his journey cross country started in the woods when his plan was to follow roads (and stop for meals at McDonald's). Stress-testing his equipment and plan, I think. Which was actually sort of a reasonable idea? But his plan was to wheel a wal-mart cart around on hiking trails, and survive entirely on raisins because he was also a picky eater also I forgot a bunch of the details, lol he was gonna bring an airsoft gun to scare enemies with, had no plan for getting his bipolar meds filled, and was not planning to bring a way to cook food
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Feb 17, 2021 01:15
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Caesar Saladin posted:I heard that polar bears are some of the few animals who see humans and wanna eat them. Like, they kill us with the intent to actually eat all us instead of just protecting the cubs or just beating the poo poo out of us or whatever. most other bears are omnivores who have specific prey animals they will bother to hunt, but polar bears live where there's long stretches of the year where meat is the only option and they're absolute apex predators (well unless you count orca competing for seals but they don't really compete exactly) so I would guess that's why. If it's lean times and a polar bear sees a human moving around they gotta seriously consider that might be the only meal for the next week or five. Also it's totally loving heartbreaking the way climate change is starving all the polar bears to death because the sea ice melts too soon/doesn't form till too late and they can't hunt seals without the sea ice. Polar bears outside captivity probably gonna be extinct this century.
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Feb 20, 2021 02:52
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the thing about survival shows like bear grylls' shows and survivorman etc. is that the charisma of the host is far more important than their survival skills so much so that bear grylls gets away with telling people to rappel down cliffs, explore caves, and swim across icy rivers, even though all of that is the worst loving advice for normal people at least survivorman is more about like, trying to fish, or making differnet shelters, but even there, his show would have bombed if he was just some typical survivor skilled type, it works because he's fun to watch and listen to
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Feb 22, 2021 22:02
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George H.W. oval office posted:lol if you're not fashioning your own axes and knives out of flintstone gently caress yeah phil harding my wife and I have nearly finished watching 20(!) seasons of Time Team and he and Tony Robbins are the stand-out stars of the show.
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Mar 5, 2021 03:47
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Time Team came to my university once when I was in grad school. They were looking for new field techs, but found the general shovelbum population of Bournemouth to not be attractive enough for TV. It turns out archaeologists are not a well-groomed lot, who coulda guessed? Given the level of grooming, or absence of it rather, of everyone on the show anyway I'm amazed at how shabby your bournemouth trowelscrapers must have been! like phil is never not wearing some variety of ugly shorts, usually ripped jean cutoffs, and just take one look at Mick lol.
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Mar 5, 2021 21:35
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yeah haha I wonder haha I bet that footage is out there somewhere heh lmao someone probably uploaded it on some site right hehe
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Mar 7, 2021 00:12
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that's the most realistic thing about his show really surviving on your own in a harsh wilderness is awful, and only just barely edges out the alternative
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Mar 7, 2021 03:44
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:My dream is to summit Everest while simultaneously being the first person in history to steal Space Force valor. there will never be any Space Force valor to steal
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May 4, 2021 02:36
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There is extensive speculation and just a little research about the two notches, called a "cho" or some variation on "charda." One intriguing answer I've heard is that gurkhas used to carry a pair of thin stones used for sharpening the blade: the notches are shaped to re-shape the stones, by drawing them through the notches. However, the notches then morphed and became more of a decorative element over time. Another idea is that they're a form of religious ornamentation, some significance to the shape being speculated (such as a cow's foot, or udders, or a lingam), but they're inconsistently shaped and nobody seems to agree on what actual symbol it's supposed to be, so I'm not sure if this makes sense or not. I've also read that the notches are simply there to stop the sharpening stone from hitting your hand while you use it, but I don't buy that one - the handle broadens just behind the end of the blade, and you can push your stone along the blade from the handle forward, so there's no need for a hard stop. I like the idea is that the cho allows you to tie a ribbon or cloth around the blade without severing the ribbon. This might be used outside of actual combat/practical use, maybe for some kind of dance or display? Of course, you could tie such a thing to the handle instead... Ultimately, the practice of cutting that notch was not documented when it started, and we just don't know and probably never will.
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May 9, 2021 02:17
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The himalayas are rising at a rate of around 1cm a year, which is faster than the rate of sea level rise. However, the steeper they get, the faster erosion happens (that's just a mechanical fact of how water and wind erosion works) and I can't find a specific rate of erosion for the tallest peaks in the himalayas. It might well be enough to put uplift vs. sea level rise back in favor of the sea?
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May 14, 2021 19:23
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nomad2020 posted:I'm slightly more willing to try my odds at not freezing to death on an 8,000er than I am to doing that sort of caving. I'm exactly the same willing, which is zero. Zero willing, for either things.
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Dec 3, 2021 22:03
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I've driven to the top of a mountain, they're not all unreasonable to go up.
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Dec 3, 2021 23:36
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Dik Hz posted:You're deliberately missing the point: You said "reasonable people don't climb mountains" which was not exactly a nuanced or reasonable statement to make, so I pointed out the absurdity of it. This, here, is a much more reasonable point to make, but it's still specifically about the more dangerous end of a broad spectrum of going up to high places that can be called "mountaineering." Beginner-level mountaineering, done sensibly and with proper preparation and equipment, is no more dangerous than, say, riding a bicycle in traffic. Kids do it. It's fine. But there's a slippery slope (haha) towards more and more risky endeavors, and some people seem to be temperamentally unable to resist it; and then you can also just skip that entire deal and go straight for the "like five percent of people die attempting this" poo poo like Everest, which super dangerous and there's nothing you can do to lower that danger to a reasonable level.
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Dec 6, 2021 23:14
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how do they know the racial backgrounds of all six thousand previous climbers
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May 16, 2022 16:22
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I doubt anyone knew that Everest was the tallest mountain even in the local region, much less the world, until people showed up with modern technologies capable of measuring altitude. So the theory would be more like "every peak in this area was summited at some point before westerners arrived" rather than just Everest, and that's even more crazy. We'd also probably have found more freeze-dried bodies of dead people stuck in nooks and crannies near the tops of Himalayan mountains.
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May 26, 2022 06:52
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I had a friend like that. His first traumatic brain injury removed most of his sense of danger, and while he had chronic migranes he also became very care-free toward injury. He was physically extremely fit and believed he could heal from anything (when I pointed out the chronic migranes from the head injury as evidence that wasn't true, he'd just nod and laugh but not change his belief at all). So he refused to wear a helmet while riding his bike recklessly for years, and suffered two more head injuries from falls/accidents. Now he's got the emotional maturity of a child, can barely talk straight, has double-vision due to one of his eyes not lining up right any more, is prone to wildly impulsive behavior, and last I heard he was homeless and living in a tent somewhere in hawaii. I had to cut him off completely because he couldn't control his impulse to spam my email, phone, etc. with nonsense all day every day. Really sad. Anyway the point is I wish we didn't just enable people who engage in this sort of behavior, although taking away their freedom also seems like a really harsh thing to do. I guess just shrug and feel bad for their family and especially kids who are gonna wonder when they're gone why climbing was so much more important than getting to experience the lives of their family and see their kids grow up. The dude's skills are incredible though.
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Jul 14, 2022 17:40
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Nocheez posted:I don't think that is quite true, considering the results. I meant Honnold's skills Epitope posted:I suppose it would have been better if this article said that "Ryan Hawks, age 65, slumped over at his desk and died in his cubicle after 40 years of faithful service to Acme Incorporated. He was just five years away from a meager pension that would have allowed him to eke out his sunset years living like a dog. He leaves behind a wife who hasn't slept with him in 20 years and a couple of kids who were too busy with their own problems to care about what he was doing." I understand. Most people are incapable of internalizing the difference between, say, a 1/10,000 chance of dying (like from skydiving or something) and a 1/100 chance of dying (like from freeclimbing a cliff or something). They both just seem like "very risky" or "not very risky" and our brains aren't well equipped to grok that one of those things is a hundred times riskier than the other. It's also really hard to compare two different exciting activities on some kind of qualitative scale of fun. Is skydiving a hundred times less thrilling than freeclimbing? Well, obviously that's subjective. Nevertheless, I think it's reasonable to say that risks should be commensurate with rewards, and it also sure seems like there must be ways to find excitement and adventure in your life that don't constantly kill a huge percentage of everyone who does them. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jul 14, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 18:33
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