A2 · Elementary
8 min
mountain safetyclimate and environmentpublic healthemergency medicine
Seven Bodies in Twenty-Four Hours
Mont Blanc cobra siete vidas en un día
Seven hikers were killed in separate avalanches on Mont Blanc in less than twenty-four hours. Fletcher and Octavio dig into why the highest peak in the Alps is becoming more dangerous, not less, exactly as more people want to climb it.
Siete excursionistas murieron en avalanchas separadas en el Mont Blanc en menos de un día. Fletcher y Octavio exploran por qué la montaña más alta de los Alpes se está volviendo más peligrosa, no menos, justo cuando más gente quiere subirla.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| la avalancha | avalanche | La avalancha es muy rápida y peligrosa. |
| el rescate | rescue | Los equipos de rescate trabajan en la montaña. |
| el hielo | ice | Hay mucho hielo en el Mont Blanc. |
| subir | to go up / to climb | Muchas personas suben la montaña cada año. |
| esperar | to wait / to hope | Espero el autobús. / Espero que no llueva. |
| peligroso | dangerous | La montaña es muy peligrosa en junio. |
Seven people died on the same mountain in a single day.
Not in one accident.
Seven separate avalanches, seven separate groups, all on Mont Blanc, all within twenty-four hours of each other.
Sí.
Yes.
Siete personas.
Seven people.
En un día.
In one day.
Es mucho.
That is a lot.
And the thing that stopped me when I read this was the date.
June.
That's not deep winter.
That's practically summer.
People think of avalanche season as January, February, maybe March.
En junio hay mucha nieve en el Mont Blanc.
In June there is a lot of snow on Mont Blanc.
Y el sol es fuerte.
And the sun is strong.
That's actually the crux of it, isn't it?
The sun is the problem.
Warm days, melting, refreezing at night, and then the whole thing becomes unstable in ways that are genuinely hard to predict.
El hielo se mueve.
The ice moves.
No está fijo.
It is not fixed.
Es peligroso.
It is dangerous.
Mont Blanc sits right on the border of France and Italy, and it is the highest peak in the Alps at just over 4,800 meters.
I want to make sure listeners have the geography fixed in their heads.
Sí.
Yes.
Está en los Alpes.
It is in the Alps.
Francia e Italia.
France and Italy.
Muy alto.
Very high.
And I covered a story out of Chamonix years back, which is the French town at the base.
Even then, guides were telling me the mountain felt different than it had a decade earlier.
Looser.
More unpredictable.
Chamonix es un pueblo famoso.
Chamonix is a famous town.
Muchos turistas van cada año.
Many tourists go there every year.
And that word, tourists, is doing a lot of work there.
Because Mont Blanc has this reputation as a technical mountain that experienced alpinists climb, but the reality is increasingly different.
Ahora mucha gente sube.
Now many people go up.
No todos tienen experiencia.
Not everyone has experience.
Roughly twenty thousand people attempt the summit every year.
Some of them are serious mountaineers.
But a significant portion are people who just want to say they climbed the highest mountain in the Alps and underestimate what that actually means at altitude.
El cuerpo cambia con mucho frío.
The body changes with a lot of cold.
Y con menos aire.
And with less air.
Less air, exactly.
At the summit of Mont Blanc you're breathing air with roughly half the oxygen content you'd get at sea level.
That's not a minor inconvenience.
That's a genuine medical event for an unprepared body.
La gente tiene dolor de cabeza.
People get headaches.
Está cansada.
They are tired.
Está mal.
They feel sick.
That's acute mountain sickness, AMS.
And what's particularly treacherous about it is that the symptoms can feel like a bad hangover, and people push through thinking they just need water and a rest.
Meanwhile their brain is starting to swell.
Sí.
Yes.
Es muy serio.
It is very serious.
A veces la gente muere por eso.
Sometimes people die from that.
But these seven deaths, from the reports coming out of ANSA in Italy, appear to be avalanche deaths specifically, not altitude illness.
So we're looking at a separate problem, though the two often stack.
Una avalancha es muy rápida.
An avalanche is very fast.
No hay tiempo para huir.
There is no time to run away.
One of the emergency doctors I interviewed in the Chamonix story described it to me as being hit by a concrete truck traveling at highway speed.
And if the snow doesn't kill you instantly, you suffocate in minutes inside the compacted snow.
Los rescates son difíciles.
Rescues are difficult.
Los helicópteros no siempre pueden volar.
Helicopters cannot always fly.
And there's a cruel irony here.
June conditions can actually make helicopter rescue harder in some ways.
Thermal air currents from warmer temperatures, wind patterns shifting.
The same warmth that draws climbers up the mountain complicates the effort to bring them off it.
El Mont Blanc es peligroso en verano también.
Mont Blanc is dangerous in summer too.
Siempre.
Always.
Always.
And the numbers bear that out.
Over the lifetime of serious modern mountaineering on this mountain, somewhere north of eight thousand people have died on Mont Blanc.
It has a fatality rate that, if it were a surgical procedure, we'd have banned it decades ago.
Ocho mil personas.
Eight thousand people.
Es mucho.
That is a lot.
Es terrible.
It is terrible.
And France has actually tried to address this, at least partially.
There was a real attempt a few years back to require climbers to register, carry rescue insurance, and deposit a bond of something like 15,000 euros before attempting the summit.
The idea being that if you're going to make risky choices, you cover the cost of rescuing you.
Es una idea interesante.
It is an interesting idea.
Pero muchos alpinistas no están de acuerdo.
But many climbers do not agree.
Of course they don't.
The mountaineering community has a deep, almost philosophical commitment to individual freedom in the mountains.
The argument is that adults should be able to accept risk for themselves.
Which I find genuinely compelling up to the point where rescue workers are risking their lives to recover someone who went up in running shoes.
Los equipos de rescate también arriesgan sus vidas.
The rescue teams also risk their lives.
Eso es importante.
That is important.
That's the piece of this that I think gets lost in the personal freedom argument.
The choice isn't purely individual.
Every unprepared person on that mountain creates downstream risk for the people whose job it is to go in after them.
Sí.
Yes.
Y los rescates cuestan mucho dinero también.
And rescues cost a lot of money too.
Millions of euros a year, and France and Italy split a lot of that cost publicly.
But climate is now adding a layer that policy alone can't address.
The permafrost in the Alps, the frozen water deep inside the rock that holds everything stable, is thawing.
That changes the mountain itself, structurally.
El Mont Blanc cambia cada año.
Mont Blanc changes every year.
El hielo desaparece.
The ice disappears.
The Mer de Glace, which is the famous glacier that runs below the summit, has retreated something like three kilometers over the last century and a half.
Parts of the classic summit route that were considered standard twenty years ago now cross genuinely destabilized terrain.
The mountain the guidebooks describe no longer entirely exists.
Los glaciares son más pequeños ahora.
The glaciers are smaller now.
Todos en los Alpes.
All of them in the Alps.
And that's the health story buried underneath this tragedy, I think.
It's not just that seven people died.
It's that the risk profile of a mountain millions of people aspire to climb is quietly, steadily increasing, and we don't yet have a clear public health framework for managing that.
Es una pregunta difícil.
It is a difficult question.
¿Quién decide quién puede subir?
Who decides who can go up?
That question has no clean answer.
But seven people in a day forces it back onto the table.
And my honest guess is that within ten years, access to the summit of Mont Blanc will be formally regulated in a way it currently is not.
Quizás sí.
Maybe yes.
La montaña no espera a nadie.
The mountain does not wait for anyone.
Actually, can I ask you about something you just said there?
You said "La montaña no espera a nadie." I know "esperar" usually means to wait, but I've also heard it used to mean to hope.
Are those really the same verb?
Sí, es el mismo verbo.
Yes, it is the same verb.
"Esperar" tiene dos significados.
"Esperar" has two meanings.
One verb doing two completely different jobs.
That genuinely surprises me.
In English those are "wait" and "hope," totally separate words.
Give me an example of each?
"Espero el autobús." Eso es "wait." Y "espero que no llueva." Eso es "hope."
"I am waiting for the bus." That is "wait." And "I hope it does not rain." That is "hope."
So context decides which meaning you get.
"Espero el autobús" is waiting for a bus, and "espero que no llueva" is hoping it doesn't rain.
The verb is the same;
the situation tells you which direction the meaning goes.
I have to say, that is elegant in a way I did not expect.
Sí.
Yes.
Y los dos son importantes en la montaña.
And both are important on the mountain.
Esperas el buen tiempo.
You wait for good weather.
Y esperas volver a casa.
And you hope to come back home.
You wait for good weather and you hope to come home.
That's about as fitting a way to close this one as I could have asked for.
Seven people didn't make it home from Mont Blanc this week.
The mountain is more dangerous than the guidebooks say, and the climate is making it more so.
Worth sitting with that.