Is it OK to Kill Your Kid?

7 Summits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Summits ) Not a bucket list but a climbing goal for the young and strong.




Thirteen-year-old Jordan Romero is attempting to be the youngest person ever to climb the summit of Mount Everest. Robert Siegel talks to Jordan about his journey.

Jordan has had a dream since he was 9 years old of climbing Everest. His father started him on a path to make that happen through training and climbing. Now he, his father and his father's girl friend ate going to climb Everest.




Earlier I blogged about cancer and reading Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer
This was at a time that I was recovering from chemo. I felt so fatigued and exercise made me feel oxygen deprived. I could relate to the oxygen deprived thinking and feeling as I read Jon Krakauer's book version of the original article that appeared in Outside Magazine.

The thought of climbing with or sending a 13 year old up Everest strikes me as too much to expect and dangerous. Dangerous for the kid and dangerous for the team.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Thin_Air )



Into Teen Air




http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/201004/jordan-romero-teenager-extreme-adventure-everest-1.html

"All this kid stuff is raising eyebrows in the adventure community—and sometimes the legal community as well. Polling a number of well-known Everest climbers and guides, I couldn't find one who thought that leading a 13-year-old up the world's highest mountain was a particularly good idea. Though a climber that young might possess the necessary stamina, most had serious reservations about a teen's emotional strength, psychological awareness, and plain old know-how. "I do not see how young people under the age of 18 can gain enough experience about mountaineering or themselves to undertake such a project safely," said Russell Brice, one of Everest's most successful guides. ...Aside from Jordan's age, the most controversial aspect of Team Romero's Everest attempt is this: They'll climb without a guide. ... The combination of record setting and high altitude could make for a similarly tragic mix. Age records have a built-in deadline: Either you grab the ring by a certain age or you don't. That's precisely the wrong attitude to take into the Death Zone."

There it is - the Death Zone. If physical preparedness is not enough to survive Everest without mental maturity to evaluate and judge situations under duress then can a teenage brain ever be ready without a large portion of luck and guidance?

"Few studies have been done on kids at altitude, but what science can tell us is this: The teenage brain works differently. In the past decade, MRI technology has shown that the adolescent brain is only about 80 percent developed. The areas that control spatial, sensory, auditory, and language functions are mature, but the frontal lobe, which handles reasoning, planning, and judgment, isn't fully grown until a person's mid-twenties. ... Their parents will think, They've done this and that—they're ready for the much bigger challenge. But the kid's brain is still developing.
The other issue is the effects of altitude on those maturing brains. "Thirteen-year-olds on Everest are guinea pigs," says R. Douglas Fields, chief of nervous-system development at the National Institutes of Health. "The combination of factors experienced in mountaineering hypoxia—dehydration, exhaustion, cold, lack of sleep, and all the rest—make it difficult to say how a child's brain would be affected.""

http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_into_thin_air_1.html

Jon describes his condition at Base Camp - remember this is a grown man who has been in excellent physical condition his whole life:

"Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing to catch my breath. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. I developed a dry, hacking cough that would steadily worsen over the next six weeks. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. I was rarely hungry, a sign that my oxygen-deprived stomach had shut down and my body had begun to consume itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to toothpicks, and by expedition's end I would weigh 25 pounds less than when I left Seattle. "

He was not even at the Death Zone, above 25,000 feet. The summit is 29,028 ft above sea level. In the death zone you are too high up to count on rescue. Your would be rescuers are barely surviving, too. Plenty of people have reached the summit only to be left for dead on the way down.

"Climbing mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise. It is an activity that idealizes risk-taking; its most celebrated figures have always been those who stuck their necks out the farthest and managed to get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of common sense. And that holds especially true for Everest climbers: When presented with a chance to reach the planet's highest summit, people are surprisingly quick to abandon prudence altogether."

People on their way up don't easily give up the summit in excahnge for saving a life. Do you want to rationalize your kid past someone dieing just to set a record? Do you want your kid left for dead? Do you want to kill your kid? Men and women have died on this mountain. Kids will now get that chance, too, before their lives have started.


Nova - Everest Death Zone - scientific look at high altitude sickness

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1788082149157525822#