Help Build a Record of Fatalities on Colorado’s 14ers

[Timmy]

Based on the amount of positive replies, community assistance, and DM's that have offered support -- I get the impression that there's a small minority of miserable people who have nothing better to do except be negative.

[CarpeDM]

Based on the amount of positive replies, community assistance, and DM's that have offered support -- I get the impression that there's a small minority of miserable people who have nothing better to do except be negative.

It should be clear to someone who has climbed 57 14ers and been on this site since 2005 that climbing accidents is a touchy subject around here. You should not be surprised that some people have strong reactions. A little sensitivity is called for. Attacking those who disagree with you as 'miserable people' is not likely to help your cause. And the laughing emojis don't help as much as you think they do.

[d_baker]

Based on the amount of positive replies, community assistance, and DM's that have offered support -- I get the impression that there's a small minority of miserable people who have nothing better to do except be negative.

It should be clear to someone who has climbed 57 14ers and been on this site since 2005 that climbing accidents is a touchy subject around here. You should not be surprised that some people have strong reactions. A little sensitivity is called for. Attacking those who disagree with you as 'miserable people' is not likely to help your cause. And the laughing emojis don't help as much as you think they do.

+1000
Timmy seems very dismissive of people that don't agree with his motivation.

I haven't seen from the website how it teaches anything other than, yup, people can fall off and die. Or die of other causes.

[josephnephi]

I think the reason for many people's objections is that the site is trying to be both a memorial and a useful database. In splitting the difference, it doesn't do either very well.

If you want to make it a memorial, additions should probably only be at the family's request with biographies written by the families that celebrate the life of the deceased. Currently it's usually just a name with a short blurb that feels like it reduces an individual their (often violent) final moments.

If you want to make a database, it has to be useful and somehow prescriptive otherwise it's just morbid.

This is kind of hamstrung by the qualitative nature of a lot of these fatality reports (this isn't really your fault btw). CAIC or UIAA accident reports have a lot more quantitative numbers and are treated a lot more like forensics reports so that future accidents can be avoided. A CAIC report will include things like crown height, time of year, time of day, aspect, etc so that future avalanche reports can more accurately reflect conditions. UIAA reports often focus on modes of failure and how to prevent them in the future. Currently, this database is limited to things like "fall", "lightning", etc which are terribly helpful and don't help develop future models or climbing practices. Looking the website, it does seem like not falling is the best way not to die but that is also fairly obvious to everyone (including probably every single person who died this way). Similarly, we could certainly just ban climbing on all class 3 and 4 peaks and greatly reduce deaths but that would greatly reduce the allure and challenge for many, many people.

Another thing is that expanding the scope to include all people who died near a 14er instead of just actively climbing it kind of erodes the usefulness because a plane crash and a climbing fall are very different.

Further for a database type website, I think including names is kind of unnecessary to the mission and just serves as a painful reminder for those who might feel sad about losing their dad, sister, friend, etc.

I personally understand just wanting to make a database because you can (see my many many spreadsheets) and I commend you effort, but I think keeping it totally anonymous without the blurbs would be more respectful and would probably keep most of the detractors at bay.

[ekalina]

Based on the amount of positive replies, community assistance, and DM's that have offered support -- I get the impression that there's a small minority of miserable people who have nothing better to do except be negative.

It should be clear to someone who has climbed 57 14ers and been on this site since 2005 that climbing accidents is a touchy subject around here. You should not be surprised that some people have strong reactions. A little sensitivity is called for. Attacking those who disagree with you as 'miserable people' is not likely to help your cause. And the laughing emojis don't help as much as you think they do.

Well said.

Timmy, you're not cataloging marmot sightings or peaks that have bristlecone pines on them. If you got negative feedback from people over that, then sure, maybe you could get away with calling them miserable. But you're cataloging people who lost their lives on the peaks. Each entry in your database was a special person who left behind friends, family, and a lifetime of unique ambitions and interests. To categorize someone who doesn't support such a recording project as miserable, and then use laughing emojis to make fun of their perspective, is incredibly callous. What if they're still grieving the loss of someone in your database? Is that how you would respond in person to someone who was grieving and didn't like some action you were taking that was related to their loss?

While I didn't state it in my earlier post, this is another reason why having this project depend on a single individual is undesirable. Presumably, if it had been undertaken by a public or private organization, there would be a group of people involved and hopefully they would preemptively come to the conclusion that laughing emojis would be a poor response to the criticism they were receiving. Instead, the success of the current project depends entirely on the personality and decision making of a single person and their ability to convince the community, on balance, that the effort is worthwhile. This is a big ask for any single person to accomplish given the subject matter. I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

[Timmy]

I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

[d_baker]

I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

Really?
Tone deaf.

[ekalina]

I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

1) All of the governing decisions are made by you, are they not? Sure, you're soliciting feedback and crowdsourcing data, but at the end of the day, it's up to you what you do with that feedback and data. There is no board, formal review/decision making process, or public relations department to prevent the type of knee-jerk reactions that are occurring here, right? If there are, they aren't doing their jobs.

2) What do you mean, cowards? Cowards because they won't tell you their names when they give you negative feedback? They're under no obligation to do that. Their opinions still represent how they and others feel, and I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them simply because they're anonymous. And many of the folks I've seen reply, including myself, are not anonymous. We have our photos and/or names attached to our profiles. It would be trivial to identify us. But again, that's not the point.

[CarpeDM]

I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

Really?
Tone deaf.

Yeah, this reaction tells us all that this kind of project isn't in the right hands.

[Mtnman200]

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

Really?
Tone deaf.

Yeah, this reaction tells us all that this kind of project isn't in the right hands.

+1

[d_baker]

I'm not sure you've fully appreciated or anticipated this difficulty.

Two things,

1) I'm not doing this alone.

2) I don't have any issues with feedback What I took issue with is the personal attacks from anonymous people. And furthermore, it's not what they accuse me of or call me, it's that they are on a climber's forum in a section dedicated to the memory of those who have passed, and they are doing this. They are cowards!

1) All of the governing decisions are made by you, are they not? Sure, you're soliciting feedback and crowdsourcing data, but at the end of the day, it's up to you what you do with that feedback and data. There is no board, formal review/decision making process, or public relations department to prevent the type of knee-jerk reactions that are occurring here, right? If there are, they aren't doing their jobs.

2) What do you mean, cowards? Cowards because they won't tell you their names when they give you negative feedback? They're under no obligation to do that. Their opinions still represent how they and others feel, and I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them simply because they're anonymous. And many of the folks I've seen reply, including myself, are not anonymous. We have our photos and/or names attached to our profiles. It would be trivial to identify us. But again, that's not the point.

It appears on this site that Timmy is anonymous. Interesting. I'm not going to dig into his death site if his/her name is available/public there.

[hellmanm]

Really?
Tone deaf.

Yeah, this reaction tells us all that this kind of project isn't in the right hands.

+1

+2. If I died in the mtns, I wouldn't want to be on this list.