A5RP wrote:Could of, should of and all that stuff for the rest of one's life aint gonna bring em back. Never.
First of all, you or anyone has any real idea what happened on Shasta. You were not there. You nor anyone else has any true right to judge anyone if you were not on that party and present on the scene. Period.
Until anyone here has first hand experience of losing a partner and/or a client, they will never be able to understand the reality of emotions that one who has, goes through. Fact.
Eric Willhite's flaunting of the message from Tom's mother is absolutely disgusting, IMO. Very shallow and misleading of what he is inferring. Such feelings are not representative of most of Tom's friends and family. Feelings from them are far more complex and diverse. I feel I know a fair amount more than Eric does from his trophy e-mail, since I left my job and spent a month with them during the memorial service and such, and I am still in regular contact with most of them.
For some reason, the people least judgmental and most supportive, and reasonable in true 'lessons learned' in this area have been those on SAR, friends of mine who work with SAR and other emergency services (my WFR classmates & instructors included), and climbers who have also lost loved ones in the mountains. Perhaps this is because it is harder for those people to fall into HUBRIS and it is harder for them to lack EMPATHY.
I'm sick of arguing about Shasta to people who were not there who try to turn the conversation into a 'he said, she said' argument. Tom was as fit & experienced as I was, if not more so, yet one detail some people like to throw in my face is claiming, based on nothing, that Tom was inexperienced and that I lured my best friend to his death for my own personal, selfish reasons, even though I nearly killed myself staying with Tom, and I still suffer from the immersion foot injuries as a regular reminder every time I go hiking and climbing - it is a pain that I don't think will ever go away. Imagine how such claims make me feel, and consider the character of those who like to throw around these baseless accusations (Chad).
I still see Tom dying in my mind's eye every day, and I am not satisfied at all with what was learned from the tragedy (very hollow feeling there), so perhaps I feel entitled to not tolerate people like Chad casually tossing insults and, baseless claims, and absolute judgments around about Mt Shasta in an infantile way to win an argument by making a cheap emotional jab and attempting to divert any argument into a "Mark & Mt Shasta" DEFAMATION rant.
Fine.
If you don't believe me and want the professional, impartial judgement of the accident and what the true critical factors and lessons were, refer to the 2011 Accidents in North American Mountaineering. The findings there were written by the journal author, and the head of the SAR effort, Eric White. Now if there was anyone who would be in a knowledgeable position to pass judgment on what happened, and who would be motivated to report lessons learned to discourage a repeat of such a tragedy, it would be Eric White.