Thread: Plowing GTS
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Old 05-29-19, 12:16 PM
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autonomy
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Originally Posted by seeker333
Selfie tourism evidently is the new thing to do. Listening to NPR program this morning, I heard some National Park visitation has increased dramatically due to folks making their way there for the "selfie" opportunities. I thought this theory a bit unlikely until five minutes later when I saw this news headline "Mandy Moore celebrates reaching Mount Everest base camp", (see attached selfies):

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/29/enter...est/index.html

Granted the multi-day backpack into EBC would be a significant accomplishment, but compared to what Everest climbers undertake, it would be like driving to a trail head, parking, snapping pics of yourself with trail sign in background, then leaving without undertaking the actual hike.
This is going to get offtopic, but what you're talking about really is a thing. I've seen angry threads on Instagram with people berating the author for not sharing the exact location of the photo. Look at all the articles about the superbloom in California and massive crowds of people flooding tiny towns after seeing Instagram pictures and wanting to replicate them. The social media effect has been an ongoing theme in rescue threads on VFFT (e.g. see top post https://www.vftt.org/forums/showthre...silaukee/page2). People see all these fantastic places and want to replicate the experience/pictures often without any understanding of the dangers/conditions.

And Everest climbing... plenty of pictures and videos of the human traffic jams up there; someone even called it DisneyWorld for the rich (too many guided trips), from your own link: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/asia/...ntl/index.html
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