American Dies on Mt Everest

[Anomalocaris]

IIRC Everest isnt even a very hard one. Amongst the famous 8000ers (meters of course) there are a buncha much harder ones. Particularly K2 seems to be a real bitch, and its like only 200m less than Everest. Who cares if you are operating on 39% oxygen or 38%?  This is clearly a *wannabe climber* problem.

Just because the top 0.001 percentile is much harder still doesn’t mean the 0.01 percentile isn’t even very hard.  Something like 5 out of every 6 efforts to summit fails and 1 out of every 6 who try dies while failing.

For a discretionary activity that only those who are within top 1% of capability might entertain an attempt that record might suggest it is hard.