"Dude, you're screwed!" - an appreciation

One of the great features about American cable TV used to be that there were so many channels, and so few shows worth watching, that you'd be forced to channel-surf until you came across something vaguely appealing on a channel that you'd likely never visit deliberately. Thus, new shows entered the American consciousness.

Now Netflix is near-ubiquitous... the same thing is happening there. It's astonishing how big the Netflix catalogue is, but less astonishing how much of it is crap. Still, there are some gems buried in the ordure, and I stumbled across one of them with a most unpreprosessing title: "Dude, You're Screwed!"

The premise of the show is simple but brilliant. There are 5-6 hosts of the show, all with a background in wilderness survival. In each episode, one host is "abducted" and dumped in the middle of the wilderness, with no idea where they are, given a survival kit with items of varying helpfulness - a giant teddy bear and a Viking shield, in one case - and have 100 hours to find "civilization" which might be a main road, houses, or just stumbling across other people. For the viewer's benefit, a suitably well-equipped cameraman accompanies the victim but cannot help them in any way. Presumably they would intervene if things went very pear-shaped, but you get the idea.

Is is staged? At least some of the takedown-and-transport parts are; if you were a Costa Rican immigration official, would you let a party into your country with one member flex-cuffed and with a bag over his head? but I think most of it is real. The victim might know what country they're in, but not where they are or where to go. But I think this misses the point, in any case. This show is fascinating in how you get an up-and-close look at wilderness environments, and how they try very hard to kill you.

Some of my favourite episodes were Iceland (Jake), Tanzania (Matt), Namibia (Jake again) and Utah (John). In all of these you get a really good look at wilderness you'd probably never see, and its peculiar wrinkles. Of all of them, the Namibian desert / Skeleton Coast was probably the best. Jake - a former Navy SEAL - fights his way through the desert only to end up on the shore where there's still nothing to eat or drink, a whole bunch of dead wildlife testifying to the hostility of the land, and the only plants are poisonous. The legendary SEAL determination shows - in the closing hours, despite being dehydrated, starved and vomiting, he's still doggedly hiking down the coast looking for civilization. Had the others not intervened, he'd have certainly died - but even then I'm still not entirely sure it would have stopped him.

What makes the show for me, though, is the interplay between the core characters: the aforementioned SEAL Jake, Green Beret Terry, wilderness survival and atlatl master Matt, and UK military SERE instructor John. They're all very different personalities but bounce off each other well in cameraderie, perspectives, and the balance between wanting to make the situation challenging while being concerned for the victim's well-being. Jake's a balls-out "beat this in the fastest time" guy, Terry is more cerebral, Matt just seems to like making things out of trees, and John is a phlegmatic Mancunian whose early priority seems to be to find something to make a hot cup of tea. There are other hosts, but these four really stand out for me.

You can probably find this on Netflix, or maybe Discovery Channel on cable. It might also be titled "Survive That!". Go take a look, you'll enjoy it. Also, stay the heck away from the Namib.

Tanya Gold on mountaineering

Alas, Tanya Gold of The Guardian has descended to clickbait headlines to keep up interest in her articles; her latest on the Everest avalanche that killed thirteen Sherpas is particularly painful:

As commercial climbing has exploded, Everest has shifted from an explicit wasteland to a moral and internal one which also serves as a perfect metaphor for the contempt in which we hold the planet.
It is not simply the ordinary exploitation of the Sherpas, which is soothed away with the knowledge that in Nepal, where the average annual wage is $700, a Sherpa can make $5,000 in a two-month season – although it is impossible to imagine this kind of death rate being tolerated if the dead were rich and white.

The fall of a serac in the Khumbu icefall was tragic, but by no means a bolt from the blue. Jon Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster that killed eight climbers (which Tanya references) describes how perilous the icefall can be - falls of huge, building-sized chunks of ice can happen without any more warning than a "look out!" from your companions, and even an injury such as a broken leg can prove fatal in the perilously hazardous conditions of 18000+ feet altitude where simply being there can provoke debilitating or fatal altitude sickness.

The Everest climber fatality rate between 1922 and 2006 is about 2% overall, and about 1.4% if you exclude porters (Sherpas and others). Certainly, being a Sherpa is more dangerous than being a paying climber, but as a Sherpa you're still about the fatality rate of an astronaut and your relative compensation is better - if a Sherpa makes 7x the average annual wage, look at a top-end salary for an astronaut based in Houston, TX which is about $141K, or about 2.5x the mean US wage. This is not comparing apples to apples, but at least gives you a ballpark picture of how well Sherpas are compensated. Sure, they have a dangerous job, but no-one is forcing them into it and they probably have a better understanding of the dangers than most of the climbers. So when Tanya says:

...although it is impossible to imagine this kind of death rate being tolerated if the dead were rich and white.

it turns out we actually tolerate this death rate already, even though the dead are moderately well paid and mostly white. Perhaps Tanya doesn't have a great imagination.

Looking at Tanya, I think it's safe to say that she's in no danger of attempting to summit Everest (or indeed any peak more challenging than Brown Willy) any time soon. Perhaps then she cannot appreciate what drives people to push themselves to their physical and mental limits to overcome the imposing challenge of high altitude mountaineering, and we should not blame her for that. We should, however, nail her to the wall for comments claiming that money trumps humanity for climbers:

But more tourists claim "tunnel vision" and "summit fever". They do not pause; they are slaked on their own fantasies; they paid too much. Madness indeed.

At Everest summit altitudes, even a very fit climber has to draw on all their reserves of strength to survive the Death Zone. Even a small amount of additional exertion in aiding a fellow climber can cause them to collapse and double the number of people that need help. When you're on a climb to the summit of Everest, your survival is your own responsibility; it's unlikely that anyone will be able to help you; trying to help someone else can make you pay much, much more than just your climbing fees. All climbers who have reached the final base camp will know and understand this, much more than someone like Tanya can even strain to appreciate.