UKC

In reply to UKC News:

Is this really news?

In reply to Jay Mowat:

Of course it is. There are no other 65 year olds in the world active in the mountains.

For example, this stuff about Jim Donini must be fictitious. No guide, no sponsorship by Land Rover: can't possibly be true ...
https://www.americanalpineclub.org/news/doninibagsthree
http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web07-08w/newswire-patagonia-frenzy-weather-win...
http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/coloradans_bag_fa_of_south_avellano...

In reply to UKC News:

Yawn

In reply to jazzyjackson: yawn...??? ihope when you get to 65 you can do a quarter of what this man has done in his life and think yourself lucky...i think a great achievement for anybody of any age

In reply to Paragonthewise:

Yawn, yawn...

Please see other thread, we've been through all this before

In reply to jazzyjackson: Can't we have one thread for the climbers and one thread for the boy scouts?

In reply to tobyfk: I've climbed with Donini. It's a lie, he can't be in his sixties, he's still running around like a youth and leading 5.11 on a bad day.

In reply to UKC News:

If it hadn't been Sir Ran on Everest and just some random 65 year old, doing the same charity work and with the same medical history who had summitted, would the vitriol and yawning and all the negative comments be as active on this forum, I wonder?

I'm commenting here because the last thread was just getting ridiculous.

In reply to Tom G:

If it hadn't been Sir Ran but just some other random 65 year old, would it have appeared as a news item? What do you reckon Tom?

Tony

In reply to Tom G:


Personally I would like to see no coverage of Everest at all on this site unless of an ascent that is genuinely ground-breaking in some way ie a new route or an ascent in especially good style (of which un-guided should be obviously a minimum requirement).

There was a letter in a US climbing magazine a year or two ago that summed up the sad status of the mountain to me: in one of the recent climbing seasons - 2007 as far as I remember - three sherpas died in the Khumbu icefall at the start of the standard route on the Nepal side. In the days when Everest was still a bona-fide expedition objective, the icefall crossing, which has to be re-pioneered each year, would be fixed by the climbers themselves. Now that commercial climbing dominates, the various guide operators find it more efficient to pool costs to get the icefall equipped before the paying punters arrive. But as the ideal climbing time window is relatively short and the number of punters joining the queue swells each year, the pressure to equip the icefall as early as possible grows. The conjecture in the letter was that that season the sherpa team were pushed into the icefall to begin equipping when conditions were still too dangerous - and died as a direct consequence.

In reply to Steve Long:

A friend and I - actually the same guy I was with when we ran into you and your son on the Cloggy path a couple of years ago - were "overtaken" by Donini and his partner on The Titan in the Fisher Towers in Utah in 2004. We were camping nearby, had stashed our gear under the route the day before, and had made an early start. Unfortunately they'd driven up in the night, started the approach straight away and were in situ on the route by the time we arrived. We took the morning off and went back at lunchtime assuming they'd be a couple of pitches up. Instead we found them making their descent, having completing the route that still takes most teams two days in under one ... I guess he was merely 60 then.

In reply to UKC News:

Well done Ran, loved the book too.

For all those people knocking, give him a break eh?

In reply to TonyG:


Er - gee Tony I guess it would. The guy would still have been the oldest Briton to summit. It would've at least appeared in the Alpine forum. To me, I believe that anyone who summits Everest (even in its current commercialized state) must have some story to tell. But that's just me...

Tom