Almost every climbing season, people die trying to scale Everest. On Friday, a group of Sherpas were swept away by an avalanche. Rescuers had recovered 13 bodies by yesterday morning, with three more still missing. This incident marks one of the worst tragedies on the world’s highest peak, but it also exposes another problem. Since Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first conquered the mountain in 1953, Mount Everest has become a tourist destination, not just for serious climbers, but for enthusiastic, well-intentioned amateurs – and that has to change.
More than 4,000 have scaled the peak over the past 60 years. Each year, an estimated 230,000 people arrive in Nepal to trek in the Himalayas, and more than 800 try to scale Everest. About 90 per cent of the latter category are amateurs, rather than those who have spent years training and progressively scaling higher and more difficult peaks.
In addition, one of the unfortunate side effects of this influx of visitors is for Everest to have been transformed into “the world’s highest rubbish dump”. The enormity of the environmental damage, which researchers believe is partly caused by increased tourism activity, is even more disconcerting. Everest’s glaciers have shrunk by 13 per cent over the past 50 years.
At the heart of the problem is ignorance. Even though the Nepalese government has long urged climbers to clear their waste, it neither has any mechanism to check what people bring down, nor does it exercise much control over what happens at extreme altitudes and in remote areas. A recent report by Reuters says that Nepal is planning to reduce climbing fees to entice more tourists. That will surely be a recipe for further disaster and is utter folly in the light of last week’s tragedy.
Everest is the jewel in Nepal’s crown, which is why it needs to be both protected and respected. To do so, the country must limit the number of climbers, more rigorously regulate tour operators and ensure that the people who use their services better understand the risks associated with high-altitude challenges. It might even consider increasing prices, to deter all but the most committed climbers.
That might sound like constructing barriers, but protecting the mountain requires both a reduction in tourists and an increase in revenues. Higher prices would accomplish that.
