Kerre Woodham: Unfair to blame Inglis for death

Never before have so many people talked in so much detail about a subject of which they know nothing. The decision by 40 mountaineers to leave a dying Englishman to his fate in the snow has prompted huge debate as to its rights and wrongs.

Given that there are very few people who have climbed Everest or indeed climbed anything higher than a sand dune, it seems extraordinary that they are certain they know what should have been done.

According to the armchair summiteers, Mark Inglis and the 39 other climbers involved should have shared their oxygen with the man and carried him back to the safety of civilisation, where he would have been lovingly nursed back to health. Or, alternatively, they could have sat there holding his hand until he slipped gently from this life and then made their way to the top of Everest.

The critics believe it's all about money and those who aspire to a big-picture view see this incident as an indictment on the value of human life in the modern age. They point to the grand old man of the mountain himself, Sir Edmund Hillary, who was trenchant in his criticism of the climbers. In his day, it simply wouldn't have happened that a member of the expedition would have been left to die. He thinks it's appalling that the man was abandoned - and admittedly, it makes for a gruesome image.

But we're not talking about leaving a man to die on the street while people in a position to help walked past with their heads averted. At 8000m, as Inglis says and as mountaineers know, it's phenomenally difficult to keep yourself alive, far less rescue others. The first rule in search and rescue is look after yourself first. Would it appease those bleeding hearts if 10 men had died trying to save one who'd made poor decisions?

This was a man who chose to summit Everest alone. His trekking company took him to base camp only, and he didn't hire a Sherpa. He'd made two previous attempts to scale Everest and chose to make a third with low oxygen supplies. His oxygen failed him on the way down and he was discovered slumped under an overhang, frozen solid, next to another corpse from an earlier failed summit.

He was a goner and to suggest that he could have been brought back to life is absurd. I heard one idiot suggest helicopters could have been brought in to rescue him. Helicopters have only ever been used at Camp I - 2000m below where Sharp was lying. To put it in perspective, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia are 452m high; the Sky Tower is 328m. So the climbers would have had to attempt to carry an incapacitated man across rope bridges, ravines and down sheer cliff faces at -30C in winds of up to 150km/h. Yeah, right.

Others said they would never leave a human being to die on their own and, in most situations, neither would I. But Sharp wasn't dying at a hospice. He was dying on sheer bluff in a place they call the death zone because of the extreme weather conditions.

Again, as Inglis said, the best comparison might be seeing someone floating in the water at the Huka Falls. They look dead, but they might not be. Do you jump into the falls after them? I don't think so.

Mountaineering's a dangerous business. The mountaineers know that. And Everest is one of the more treacherous. The odds are 1 in 10 that you won't make it down from the mountain alive.

In terms of fatalities, the 2006 Everest season is now second only to the 1996 season when 12 people died.

The deaths will continue, partly because mountaineering is inherently risky and because many commercial trekking companies continue to allow climbers who lack the requisite skills to believe they can ascend Everest.

The story of David Sharp is a sad one but he died doing what he loved. He knew he faced the very real possibility of dying the moment he committed to climbing the mountain. He'd previously attempted Everest and must have seen at least some of the 150 corpses that litter the slopes of the mountain. David's mother, Linda, was reported as saying that your responsibility is to save yourself - not somebody else.

And if the man's mother is unwilling to point the finger of blame, who are we to do so?