Ultrajoe said:
mshcherbatskaya said:
Oh dear, the cleaning lady in my office keeps looking at me because I am laughing so hard.
Another victory for science.
I'll make a deal with you Joe. If I ever go to Australia, I will go to the Reptile Park. If you ever come to the U.S., go the the Mt. St. Helens National Monument.
Deal, but if it even
twitches i'm going all Coober Pedy on it's ass. The dynamite thing, not the living under it thing.
If I wanted to talk about more common forms of death and the real danger on the mountain, I'd talk more about snow, about avalanches and whiteouts, and falling down a crevasse, which is a huge crack in a glacier, 40 or so feet deep. While we do not get instructed in snakebites, in my school, we did get instruction on how to survive being trapped in the snow. Broken bones, frostbite, and hypothermia, whee!
Every year, there are stories of mountain-climbers, hikers, snowmobilers, and skiers who die on Mt. Hood (Portland's big, currently peaceful, occasionally restless volcanic mountain) and Mt. Rainier (Seattle's currenty peaceful, occasionally twitching volcanic mountain) because they fell down in the snow and ice, or the snow and ice fell down on them, or they went up on the mountain in lovely clear weather and a storm blew in, trapped them in a whiteout, and froze them to death. A whiteout, by the way, is when there is so much blowing snow, everything but the hand in front of your face is an undifferentiated white blur. These can and do happen without warning. So, the sky wants to kill you too.
Now, they've had to pull so many people down off the mountains, you can't get a climbing permit unless you take a GPS transponder with you, because the mountain is just so damn big, they can fly helicopters over it for days and never see you. Even when people do take a GPS, that only gives you an approximate location, so they still have to search for hours or even days if you get hurt or lost. Or even if they know where you are, if it's a whiteout or high winds, they can't fly you out until the weather clears. That could be days. Days during which you are slowly dying of hypothermia and losing little bits of yourself to frostbite.
Since you were kind enough to cover death-by-spider, here's how hypothermia goes:
Your body temperature drops a couple degrees. You start shivering. At first, it's the kind of shivering that you in Australia have probably done on some winter evening, but it doesn't stop there. Your teeth start to chatter. If you've ever seen cartoons of that, it is exactly like that. The shivering slowly escalated to a bone-rattling shake that makes it difficult to move in any really controlled way.
Your fingers have already gone numb. Not a little insensitive, but numb like you could smash or cut them and not feel it. The are also waxy pale because your body is cutting off the peripheral blood supply and drawing everything it can to the center to keep the core warm.
You feel tired, you might be a little sick to your stomach. It might be hard to see. You can't touch your little finger and thumb together because now because the muscles in your extremities are starting to fail.
After a while, though, you begin to feel warm again. This is a BAD SIGN.
Your body temperature drops a couple more degrees. You get confused and your balance starts to go. You start going blue in your fingers, toes, nose, and lips - blue like a corpse or a drowning person, because your body has quit sending blood to those areas. Your skin and nerves in those areas start to die. This is called frostbite, and people sometimes have to have toes or parts of their fingers amputated because of it.
After a while, the shivering stops. This is a BAD SIGN. Your body temperature is now critical. Your cellular metabolic processes are shutting down. The nice thing is, you probably won't be aware of your impending death because your cognitive processes are also shutting down. You'll be incoherent, irrational, which does nothing to aid the rescue effort, by the way, especially if you start burrowing, which is exactly what it sounds like. The little animal brain you have left wants to get into a warm burrow, so you go crawl into snowbanks, wedge yourself between trees, or into crevices in the rock. Again, this does not help the people who are trying to find and rescue you. Or here's a fun one: because you feel so nice and warm and you have stopped shivering, and you are going a bit mad, there is a good chance that you will start taking off your clothes. This is really quite common. It is especially common in people who DIE of hypothermia.
One of the biggest reasons people get hypothermia is that they run out of food. No food, no fuel. No fuel, no heat. If you get stuck on the mountain, a candy bar in your pocket can save your life. You will get thirsty. DO NOT EAT THE SNOW FOR WATER. Putting frozen water directly into your core will only accelerate the progress of the hypothermia.
This doesn't only happen to people who deliberately go up on the mountain and then get stuck. If you are driving in the winter, you could find yourself stuck on the side of the road or in a ditch, getting hungry and thirsty and cold. Remember, they won't come looking for you until someone reports you missing. If they think you didn't show up because you turned back, and you may have 24-48 hours before someone even realizes you need help. You can't run the car heater for that long. Sometimes motorists go off the road in a snow storm and don't get found until spring. We got a lot of trees, brush, and deep ravines, and a lot of miles of road.
I suppose sliding into a ditch in the snow is kind of the equivalent of finding a spider in your shoe. There are things you can do to minimize risk, but when you get right down to it, there's ice on the road, there's a spider in your shoe, and at that point, you better get right with whatever you believe in, because the chances are, you will be meeting it soon.
