Adventures too close to the edge Would a modern Sherpa remember a commercial-expedition client in those terms? A vital respect has gone. The mortality rate suffered by the Sherpa community over recent years through the shattered, perilous maze of Everest's Khumbu ice-fall adds to a litany of loss sustained through 90 years, and a consequent tragic resentment. Yet one irony of the present situation is that the European trio who became the object of Sherpa animus are exemplary in their attitude towards the Sherpas. Here's Jon Griffith in a post from Everest base camp: "Sherpa Tenji was booted out from a commercial expedition last year, as it was decided that he wasn't needed. Ueli [Steck] offered to partner him, as Tenji's aim had always been to summit Everest without oxygen. Tenji was part of our team this year. Simone [Moro] has done 43 trips to Nepal. If you talk to Sherpas at base camp, they have nothing but good things to say about him... Both Ueli and Simone have a long history of respect and friendship with the Sherpas. Not all Westerners are so enlightened. Once at Tapovan, the sublime meadow high above the source of the Ganges that serves as a base camp for attempts on some of the world's most beautiful mountains, our expedition took in the Hindu liaison officer to a Czech team. He had been taunted with beef in his rations every day, left, joined us, climbed the mountain and formed enduring friendships. You can behave well towards people, or you can behave badly. It may be that rich clients who are incapable of reaching their goal without assistance have been too involved in their own egos to remember their manners or to respect those who help them attain it. Steck, Moro and Griffith clearly suffered from the others" legacy. The second use of the "wrong place, wrong time" phrase that came up last week was by the chief inspector of Greenland Police, in reference to the death from exposure of Philip Goodeve-Docker, a 31-year-old comedy promoter and "rookie to the Arctic" from west London who, with two companions, had been participating in a commercial trek across the Greenland ice-cap to raise funds for the Queen's Nursing Institute. He has been widely characterised in the British press as an "explorer," in disregard of the facts that his itinerary was first completed by Fridtjof Nansen and his team in 1888, has been followed by hundreds since, and 30 traverses are planned for this year alone. So, to cross Greenland in the manner of Goodeve-Docker - a likeable and altruistic character in the accounts of all who knew him - stands in much the same relationship to exploration as those wealthy clients on commercial Everest climbs do to the true practice of mountaineering. I am reminded in all of this of the jury's findings at the inquest into the deaths of six schoolchildren on a Cairngorms outdoor-activity expedition in November 1971. That jury's collectively prudent Scottish voice deserves to resonate down the decades and remind people that, as they stated, the supreme mountaineering virtue is that of experience - and clearly there is only one way to acquire that. It is a view at odds with the public's insatiable appetite for frequently suspect mountain-disaster narratives, with their self-mythologising subtext. It is no accident that the best-selling mountaineering titles these days are written by non-performers: Mountains of the Mind, The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine, Into the Silence... At odds, too, with the YouTube generation's fixation on sensation-seeking, so-called "X-treme sports." It argues for rigorous apprenticeship, long assimilation of knowledge, and recognition of primacy for experience and those who possess it. Its implied philosophy is set against nannied achievement that can be bought in the marketplace. Yet even that, as the mountaineer Jon Krakauer argued in Into Thin Air, his personal account of an Everest disaster in 1996 when eight climbers died, comes with no guarantees, given the environments where the challenges lie. We cannot but feel sympathy for the Goodeve-Docker family in their loss. But perhaps it is time to feed in some anger against the old, heedless colonial imperatives of entitlement and conquest that underpin these ersatz versions of adventuring, so tied up with cash, status or even the more honourable fund-raising. One report on the Goodeve-Docker disaster noted that the "team had met requirements on food, drink, clothing and equipment set by authorities," carried satellite phones, and were suitably insured against the possibility of rescue. Perhaps in future, those same authorities could ask if awareness of risk is properly attuned, and the participants" sense of reality about what they are undertaking is more than merely virtual. In doing so, they might begin to address a sickness not just in the present vogue for "adventure travel," but at the heart of modern society. Jim Perrin is a rock climber and a writer. His latest book, 'Shipton & Tilman" (Hutchinson), is available from Telegraph Books at £23 + £1.35 p&p.