Most mountaineering is not an adrenaline fueled pursuit and many adrenaline junkies would find it’s often non-technical tactics boring. Is it an egotistical pursuit? Sure. Objectively hazardous? Yes. But distance cyclists and runners have more in common with mountaineers than base jumpers.

There’s class 4 mountaineers, and WI6 mountaineers. It’s often hard to tell where any one person falls on that continuum.

The latter are generally called alpinists.

Would we group private pilot / recreational flying in that category?

It’s massively more risky than commercial flight travel and seems to serve no practical utility.

If you break down the stats, a significant fraction (if not most) of the fatal accidents in GA are in experimental aircraft like kit builds and exotic stuff like fighter jets, despite accounting for a small fraction of the total flight hours. Most of the rest are due to preventable human error like misjudging your ability to fly in bad weather or miscalculating fuel and running out mid-flight.

It’s like driving: it’s usually very safe if you don’t speed and drive tired or drunk.

With the distinct difference that driving isn’t at all like flying for very obvious reasons.

Miscalculating range in a ground vehicle typically has the somewhat less than fatal outcome of being at least somewhat embarrassing.

Misjudging driving ability is largely a characteristic attributed to male drivers under the age of 25, and the overwhelming majority of incidents are more costly and ego injuring than fatal.

Last time I checked, the average driver can expect to be involved in a fatal car accident every 200 million kilometres or so (Australian data).

While general aviation appears to have a fatality rate of around 10 per million flight hours.

Average speed in a car is typically well under 100 kilometres per hour, making general aviation fatality rate 10 to 20 times higher.

Having said that, the law of small numbers informs that the average general aviation pilot can expect to be involved in a fatal incident approximately never.

~10x as dangerous checks per km checks out if you assume the same distance is traveled either case. (1 fatality per 100k flight hours * 200KPH would be 1 fatality per 20 million km.)

However people who fly regularly tend to have crazy high total mileage compared to the ~15k miles/year of a typical American. Which is why so many general aviation pilots die relative to car crashes, it’s just inherently a very dangerous hobby.

In that particular story, I understand the daughter and son were already adults.

They were not. The daughter is 31 and her father went missing 22 years earlier.

No, according to the article, she was already 31 in 2002.

> In 2002, at age 31, she'd gotten her degree to teach music around the time that Bill announced to the family that he was going to try to climb Huascarán.

> Doing this stuff when you have kids though is negligence

Obviously there’s a middle ground but nobody says that giving up the thing that you love because you have kids is negligence.

I think having a commitment that strong to a dangerous activity should factor into whether you have kids in the first place. Maybe it doesn't make the answer an automatic "no", but I think one has to really think through one's decision to create a person who will have a disproportionate risk of major trauma in their early life and should have an extremely clear contingency plan for the child's care by someone who is genuinely psychologically and materially prepared for that eventuality. I think that to do less than that would be negligence—it might be a common type of negligence, easily obscured by romanticism about bold endeavors, but it is certainly not taking care.

Everybody’s life sucks in some way. Some kids have parents who die rock climbing. Some kids have parents who hate their lives. You can’t prevent trauma in a kid’s life.

Telling people to think more about having kids is a clear waste of breath. Whatever amount they think about it they’ll (almost always) rationalize that as the correct amount.