Nepal's mountaineering community is celebrating the 73rd anniversary of the conquest of Mount Everest amid growing concerns about overcrowding, rising temperatures. Nepal has issued a record 494 permits for foreign climbers, with the number of people who reached the summit believed to be more than 900. Questions are growing over whether the world's highest mountain is becoming too dangerous, and too commercialised.
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TRANSCRIPT:
In the Nepali capital of Kathmandu, they're holding a festival to mark 73 years since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first climbed to the summit of Mount Everest.
Since then, thousands have reached the top of the tallest mountain in the world - among them 18-year-old Bianca Adler.
She has told SBS Nepali getting to the summit was not the ending people imagine.
“I think a misconception is the triumphant feeling of getting to the top of Everest. I think it's not as incredible as many people think, because for me the hardest part of the climb was coming down, so yeah, I had to stay so focused, and that's when most of the accidents happen, so it's not as sort of euphoric as a feeling as people think, because we get to the top, it's really, really cold. It's dark. For me, it was, I was like, "Oh, great, like I'm halfway now, I have to go all the way down what I've just climbed up."
The Melbourne student became the youngest Australian to climb Everest after reaching the peak in the early hours of May 20.
But even then, she says the danger was far from over.
And she's not alone.
This year’s Everest climbing season is believed to be the busiest in the mountain’s history, with Nepal issuing a record 494 permits for foreign climbers, with the number of people who reached the summit believed to be more than 900.
But for many climbers, reaching the top is only half the challenge - because on Everest, the descent can be even more dangerous than the climb up - as Ms Adler would know.
“We took a helicopter from Everest base camp to Kathmandu, but it was quite a long few days getting back to base camp, because I had summited from camp four and then gone back to camp two, and that was a 23-hour climbing day, and then a few hours later I slept for a few hours, and then I had to go back through the ice wall from camp two to base camp, and that was extremely tiring as well.”
As the number of climbers has grown, questions are being asked over whether the world's highest mountain is becoming too dangerous, and too commercialised.
Critics say social media and commercial expedition companies are drawing inexperienced people onto the mountain, sometimes without fully understanding the risks involved.
Nathaniel Douglas is an American climber from Seattle.
He says he regularly meets people chasing Everest without mountaineering experience.
“Because of the social media stuff I run into a lot of people who have never climbed a single mountain, but they really want to go climb Everest. So they don’t really understand like what mountaineering is and what it actually takes to summit Mount Everest and get back down safely.”
That experience can prove vital in such a brutal environment.
Above 8-thousand metres lies the so-called 'death zone', where oxygen levels are too low for the human body to properly survive.
Climbers are exhausted, dehydrated and often running low on oxygen after hours of climbing in freezing conditions.
It is also where overcrowding can become deadly, with climbers sometimes forced to wait in long queues near the summit.
At least five climbers and mountain workers died on Everest this season, most while descending from the summit.
Everest summit record holder, Kami Rita Sherpa, says he has noticed more people making the attempt.
“This year’s expedition was a bit more crowded because, compared to last year, the number of clients increased significantly. The government should regulate this to some extent.”
The government has responded to the growing demand for climbing Everest by weighing up a tightening of the rules around who can attempt the summit.
Officials are considering tougher regulations that would require mountaineers to prove previous high-altitude experience before receiving a permit.
But expedition operators argue the overcrowding concerns are sometimes overstated.
Rishi Bhandari from the Expedition Operators Association of Nepal says climbers are spread across different camps and routes, rather than gathering in one place.
"I disagree that there were more climbers because Everest is (around) 8,000 metres and people are climbing from 5,400 metres to 8,800 metres, so they are not gathering, they are distributed in different camps and parts. So there aren't that many climbers in Everest, according to the size and the distance of the mountain."
Still, even expedition operators who defend the current system acknowledge there are limits to how many people the mountain can safely handle at once.
"In one day, (it is ) better to not move more than 250 people (towards the summit) in a day. This is our experience. And we are going to control on this in future expeditions."
Yet even when climber numbers are controlled, Everest itself remains deeply unpredictable.
This season, climbers were delayed for weeks by a dangerously unstable ice formation hanging above the Khumbu Icefall, one of the deadliest sections of the route.
The icefall is a constantly shifting maze of ice towers, ladders and deep crevasses.
And navigating it safely often falls to Sherpa climbers, who guide expeditions through some of the mountain’s most dangerous terrain.
For Ms Adler, one of the biggest lessons from Everest was learning when not to continue.
Last year, she turned around before the summit because of dangerous weather conditions - and she says that decision may have helped her survive to climb again this year.
“In high altitude mountaineering there's a fine line between pushing yourself to your limit and then also knowing when to turn around and when it's not safe anymore and when you are yet in danger and I think yeah last year I turned around because I felt unsafe and I felt like the weather was going to cause me to lose my hands or toes, and so did a lot of, a lot of other people made that decision to turn around as well, and I'm really happy with the decision that I made."
