[imagesource: Nimsdai Project Possible]

Hike around Cape Town often enough and you’re going to pass a group of people with a speaker listening to beats.

It’s not my style, but whatever it takes to get people enjoying the outdoors, I guess.

Mount Everest suffers from the opposite problem, embodied in the above infamous 2019 photo showing the long queue to the summit.

What was once an incredible feat of endurance tackled by a select few has turned into a bucket list tick and a massive ego boost.

The son of Sherpa Tenzing (also known as Tenzing Norgay), who famously summited the mountain with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, tells The Telegraph that Everest has been ruined by “overnight mountaineers”.

“I think my father would be shocked at what Everest has become,” [Jamling Tenzing] said.

“He would be shocked by the number of people going on the mountain, by how the mountain is being treated, and what type of people are coming to climb here.”

Image: Premium Speakers

…The boomboxes and disco tents of Basecamp are the reality of what Tenzing calls “overnight mountaineers” who arrive at the foot of the world’s tallest mountain in droves in the spring…

“I believe all these ‘rockstars’, or whatever they are, are doing it for their own benefit. It’s a self-driven, ego-driven exercise. It’s mainly for their own purpose, to gain economically from it,” says Tenzing.

The sheer number of permits being given out by the Nepalese government has come under scrutiny after a slew of deaths in 2019.

One report likened the crowded, unruly scenes towards the summit as “reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies at 29 000 feet”. While climbers wait, the risk of hypothermia, as well as high-altitude sickness, dramatically increases.

COVID-19 saw the number of climbers plummet in 2020 and 2021. The Nepalese government seems keen to make up for lost revenue and has already issued around 360 permits this year:

Unlike in the 1950s, when his father finally made it to the top of the world, after years of planning and six previously failed attempts, “it has become so convenient to go on these mountains,” Tenzing adds.

“Now it’s the business people who have money and think ‘I want to give it a try, it looks like an easy mountain.’ Whereas it’s not – they take it for granted…  They come here, they’ve never been on a mountain ever in their life, they’ve never even put on a crampon, and they want to climb Everest.”

Unlike those who climb for the right reasons, like Alex Honnold and Marc-André Leclerc, Tenzing says the majority of those tackling Everest today are “on an ego trip just to get a selfie”.

It was always going to happen.

In an unrelated matter, 56-year-old South African adventurer Pierre Carter is reported to have paraglided off Mount Everest this week. He’s on a mission to climb to the summits of the highest mountain on each of the seven continents and paraglide off them.

You can keep up to speed with his exploits via his website, 7 Summits 7 Flights.

[source:telegraph]