No Time To Help

Edmund Hillary reacts to the decision of Mark Inglis and forty other people to walk past a dying man on Mount Everest:

The first man to the summit of Mt Everest cannot understand how New Zealand climber Mark Inglis and others on the mountain left British mountaineer David Sharp to die.

"All I can say is that in our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," Sir Edmund Hillary said yesterday.

The renowned adventurer was reacting to the decision by double-amputee Inglis, who was one of many who passed the dying Briton near the summit without trying to rescue him.

Sharp died on the mountain.

This is a further example of why Edmund Hilary has retained his stature as authentic hero while other people are just guys who climb a mountain. It's interesting that Mark Inglis is alive today because some people carried him down from Mount Cook.
He wasn't the only one who didn't help, though. As I gathered from Into Thin Air, a modern-day Everest expedition is a concentration of some of the most self-absorbed people on the planet. It would take more than one dying man to keep most of them from obtaining their personal goals.