Destinations known | When overtourism turns deadly – why Everest should be off-limits to casual climbers
- At least 11 people have been reported dead or missing this climbing season, making it one of the deadliest in Everest’s history
- Veteran mountaineers and guides point to overcrowding and an increase in inexperienced crowds as reasons behind rise in fatalities
On March 18, 1923, The New York Times published an article with the headline, “Climbing Mount Everest is work for supermen”, in which British mountaineer George Mallory was asked, “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?” Mallory – who had made two failed attempts to summit the world’s tallest peak and was preparing to try again the following year, an endeavour that would take his life – responded, “Because it’s there”.
Since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first successful ascent, 66 years ago today (May 29,1953), more than 5,000 people have reached Earth’s highest point, 802 of whom touched the top in 2018 alone; 266 foreigners from the Nepal side and 130 on the Tibet side, according to the website of mountaineer Alan Arnette. This year, Nepal granted a record 381 climbing permits, according to the BBC, and Arnette estimates that more than 825 people have already made it to the peak.
Dozens of Everest aspirants were captured by climber Nirmal Purja in an image he posted to Instagram on May 22, one of the few days on which the weather cleared sufficiently to allow summit attempts. The queue looks as though it belongs on China’s Great Wall, on Labour Day, rather than on the approach to one of the hardest to reach destinations on the planet. The line of brightly bundled bodies snakes along a ridge towards the apex; imagine the cold and it doesn’t look like much fun.
High-altitude guide David Hamilton, who was on the mountain that day, spoke to the BBC’s Global News Podcast about his experience: “We were coming down against that wave of people going up, which wasn’t very pleasant.” He explained that the team he was leading was delayed for two hours at the top of the Hillary Step, a steep rock face in Everest’s “death zone” that becomes a bottleneck on the mountain’s busiest days, and setbacks such as that can be dangerous. “Everyone is carrying a finite amount of oxygen and the people at the back of the queue, they might have enough oxygen for a 16- or an 18-hour day, but if they’re delayed and that becomes a 20-, 22-hour day without supplementary oxygen, that’s when people die.”