So a guide survives a fall on Everest, and now the British climbers are demanding safer mountain regulation. How terribly predictable. The same nation that once sent men to die for the Empire in the Hindu Kush now whines about the risks of a hobby.
The Everest guide’s survival is indeed remarkable; a feat of endurance and luck that would have been celebrated as a heroic adventure in the days of Mallory or Hillary. Instead, it is seized upon as a pretext for more regulation. We have forgotten what mountains are for.
They are not theme parks. They are places where human frailty meets nature’s indifference. The call for regulation is a symptom of an intellectual decadence that sees risk as an anomaly to be eliminated, not a fundamental part of the human experience.
One might as well regulate the sea because ships sink. The British climbers, with their pamphlets and petitions, remind me of the late Roman senators demanding more laws to prop up a collapsing empire. The mountain does not care for your safety briefing.
It never has. And if you cannot handle that truth, stay in the Cotswolds.
