Mount Everest is melting fast due to climate change and an influx of tourists (Picture: Wikicommons)
If you’re a rich thrill seeker, there’s never been both a better or worse time to climb Mount Everest. There are more opportunities than ever to try to reach the summit. The drive behind the race to the top of Everest isn’t just the desire to have bragging rights at the next board meeting or polo match. It’s that everyone, even the super-rich, are running out of time to do it at all.
Climate catastrophe is taking place at such a pace that it’s threatening the mountain itself and making the journey increasingly perilous. Everest’s glaciers have lost around 2,000 years of ice in just 30 years. As this year’s climbing season draws to a close, it’s set to be one of the deadliest years on record, with 12 dead and a further five missing.
Yuba Raj Khatiwada, the director of Nepal’s tourism department, was explicit about what he thinks the root of the problem is. “The main cause is the change in the weather. This season the weather conditions were not favourable, it was very variable. Climate change is having a big impact on the mountains.”
Warmer temperatures are causing huge sheets of ice to melt and crash down in deadly avalanches—but it’s not just climate change that’s having an impact. In virtually every year for the last 30, the Nepalese government has granted a record-breaking number of permits for tourists to ascend.
As a result, business is booming. Ang Norbu Sherpa, president of the Nepal National Mountain Guide Association, said the expansion of the Everest market meant less experienced tourists were making the journey. “The climbing pattern has changed. It used to be hardened climbers but now there are a lot of novice climbers who want to get to the summit of Everest,” he explained.
This puts themselves, as well as guides and Sherpas—the native locals—at risk. Mountaineer Love Raj Singh Dharmshaktu said, “The whole process of climbing Everest or for that matter any other peak in Nepal has become totally commercialised which has taken over the basic foundations of mountaineering.
“Once I was shocked to see amateur people at the base camp learning how to wear climbing boots, just three or four days before the ascent. These days, people are doing six-seven peaks in Nepal in a one-month period.”
Everest is not only crowded with novice climbers queueing to navigate dangerous passes, but littered with discarded equipment and human excrement. Some efforts have been made to tackle the problem of pollution.
But for the super-rich who fork out tens of thousands of pounds to climb the mountain, a £3,200 “garbage deposit” is chump change. It’s a horrendous example of how our natural world is plundered for profit, at the expense of human safety and protection of the environment.
At the heart of all these adrenaline-fuelled pursuits of the rich is a dangerous reality for the workers tasked with providing them the luxury experience they’ve paid for. Each expedition is supported by teams of local guides who ferry the tourists’ luxuries up and down the mountain.
These Sherpas are local people who live in the Himalayan region and depend on the tourism industry. It’s dangerous work. They maintain the ice ladders and hundreds of miles of ropes that criss-cross the mountainside.
But more than supplying the bare essentials, Sherpas are increasingly forced to cart about the luxuries that travel firms promise their well-heeled clients. Tourists are offered evening entertainment, massages, and private helicopters to base camp.
By ferrying up equipment so the rich can approach the ascent refreshed and refuelled, Sherpas increase their time on the most dangerous parts of the journey. For example, the Khumbu Icefall is one of the most dangerous parts of the mountain. Rich clients might pass through it two, three or four times.
But in a typical season, a climbing Sherpa is forced to make a dozen round trips through it. The death rate for Sherpas on Everest between 2004 and 2014 was 12 times higher than for US military personnel in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. The deadliest day for Sherpas was 18 April 2014, when some 16 of them were killed by a single avalanche.
Sherpas have fought back, with repeated strikes at their treatment. In the event of a fatality, families are presented with a small lump sum, but it’s often not enough to pay for a burial and body retrieval. Many more have been injured by rockfall, frostbite or altitude-related ailments like strokes or heart attacks.
Just last week, Gelje Sherpa saved a shivering climber clinging to a rope he came across in an area known as the “death zone.” He hauled the climber some 600 metres down for six hours, where Nima Tashi Sherpa joined in the rescue effort.
“We dragged him on the snow or carried him in turns on our backs to camp three,” said Gelje Sherpa. Every grinning selfie taken at the summit was only made possible by the sacrifice, hard work—and sometimes the lives—of the Sherpas.
Ecological crisis is providing fresh market opportunities for capitalists unwilling to turn down a profit‑making opportunity. For example, it’s possible to go and see the rapidly melting ice sheets of the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Tourists invariably make the trip in ocean liners pumping out fossil fuels.
They are able to gawp at the “white thunder” of icebergs crashing, forever lost, into the ocean. Researcher Rachael Carver said there was a rise in “last chance tourism” at the glaciers, with people identifying that they knew they were running out of time to visit.
“Many people are aware that glaciers are melting and that ski resorts are disappearing. They want to see these sites before they vanish completely,” she says. But far from putting off travel firms from organising expeditions, it provides a novel angle to market their trips.
“The effects of climate change on tourism assets, such as biodiversity, coral reefs, glaciers and cultural heritage, are leading to an increase in ‘last chance’ travel to destinations before they are further degraded,” explained the Journal of Travel Medicine in 2019.
The Times newspaper helpfully provides a list of “last chance travel,” recommending destinations that “may lose their appeal in five years”. The list included a camping trip in Kenya, a cruise on the Rhine and a £8,224 Antarctic voyage. It said the Caribbean was particularly vulnerable to increasingly severe tropical storms.
“They’ll need billions to insure and protect their tourism infrastructure, but increasingly aggressive coastal erosion will destroy beaches and thus reduce desirability. Expect some islands simply to drop out of the brochures,” the newspaper warned.
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