Death zone

This is my dry run, and I've got to complete the blood, breath, cognition, and tissue sampling fast.

If it goes wrong on Mount Everest in what's known as the Death Zone, and I'm there for too long, it could very well be catastrophic.

First thing we do is going to be application there.

[sniffs] Then that's to take two minutes.

The sky is a clear cerulean blue, and the white gold daylight illuminates a scene of snow and stone and peaceful emptiness.

Today, the ridges and rock faces of the topmost section of the mountain, the upper three thousand feet known as the Death Zone, are strangely devoid of climbers.

This hotspot is often overburdened with individuals keen to reach the world's highest point, but right now it stands quietly, gloriously empty.

Well, almost.

So Mount Everest, it's highest mountain in the world, twenty-nine thousand thirty-five feet.

So one of the, the fourteen eight thousand meter peaks in the world.

Anything above eight thousand meters or twenty-six thousand feet is considered the death zone.

There's only a third of the air, a third of the ozone, so you cannot survive.

I think the, I think the key thing you just mentioned there, I think for me, was, uh, this education piece was brilliant.

So the classroom being the death zone up Everest.

So talking to people from the death zone, kids around the world, dare I say it, was, was quite unique and I think is, is a, is a special thing.

So we'll hear about that during this.

Yeah.

It's gonna be different.

So I thought of four things that I would really touch on, um, heading up.

So I'm sitting in the death zone, um, seven and a half thousand meters up, tied with a rope around my waist and an anchor in the ground so I, I wouldn't slip off the mountain.

So, you know, Camp 4 on the south side of Everest is 26,000 feet, sort of depending, you know, where exactly your tent is.

But we are now in what's called the death zone, which is the elevation above which things, you know, people die.

don't survive or certainly do not thrive.

And so the emphasis now has to shift from prevention to operating within that margin and to really relying on good decision-making, which is why we go back to having that ratio of one Sherpa per climber and having an IFMGA guide on the mountain and having me at base camp and Tracy just a phone call away.

And we want to give full credit to that interview, which you can also find link in the show notes below.

Just to quickly recap the sheer terror of that initial story before we jump into the new details, we were looking at a 57-year-old guide entirely alone in the Everest death zone at 24,600 feet.

Yeah,

just completely isolated.

So let's unpack the beginning of his account, because right out of the gate, the narrative we all consume from the media was, well, it was completely wrong.

Entirely wrong.

When you hear summit guide stranded in the death zone, you automatically picture an elite, highly paid mountaineering professional whose sole job is to drag clients to the top of the world.

Yeah, but that was not Dawa's job description at all.

There were no satellite weather forecasts, GPS or high altitude helicopters for rescues.

The most dangerous area sits at about 26,000 feet, or 8,000 meters, which is called the Death Zone.

At that elevation, there's not enough oxygen to sustain the human body for very long.

It was here that Frank became separated from his team.

That was Rokhaya Shemsedine reporting for The Electronic Intifada from Lebanon on Wednesday.

We've published many features in the last week, but today we're highlighting excerpts from Our Land is Now in a Death Zone by Saeed Al-Salul, writing from Gaza.

I live on the western edge of Al-Megazi refugee camp, central Gaza, a few meters from the Salahuddin Highway, which runs the length of Gaza, bisecting its east and west, Saeed writes.

Before 2023, our neighborhood was mostly calm.

Soon, the yellow line swallowed our land.

That same month, our land was almost an entire kilometer behind the yellow line.

What was once a source of life is now a death zone.

Those are excerpts from Our Land is Now in a Death Zone by Said Al-Salul.