From Reuters comes this story:

Naked on Everest: a peek on the peak?

The head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association urged the government Saturday to take action against a sherpa who reportedly stripped on top of Mount Everest.

The Himalayan Times had reported Friday that the Nepali climbing guide, whose name it gave as Lakpa Tharke, stood naked for three minutes in freezing conditions on the 29,035-foot summit of the world’s highest peak.

If confirmed, he would be the first person known to have stripped atop Everest, considered by Nepali Buddhists as a god.

[The] climb’s organizers seemed happy enough with Lakpa Thaeke’s strip.

“We are planning to file his extraordinary feat for the Guinness Book of World Records,” the paper quoted an official of the hiking group that employs Tharke as saying.

By itself, just a harmless “boys will be boys” story, but then there’s this more sinister story from the Associated Press via ESPN.com:

As others pass, climber dies alone on Mount Everest

The story, an open secret in the crowded nylon city of Mount Everest base camp, trickled out from the high Himalayas: A British mountaineer desperate for oxygen had collapsed along a well-traveled route to the summit.

Dozens of people walked right past him, unwilling to risk their own ascents.

Within hours, David Sharp, 34, was dead.

The tale was shocking, an apparent display of preening callousness. Sir Edmund Hillary, who was on the team that first summitted Everest in 1953, called it “horrifying” that climbers would leave a dying man.

Sheesh, let a man die because you’re too busy achieving your hobby?

Tags: blog | weblog | climbing news | mountaineering | life is cheap | life | news