EVEREST DEATHS PILE PRESSURE ON NEPAL
As news of a successful ascent of Mount Everest by a rope-fixing team spread around Kathmandu on May 14, Khem Raj Aryal, a junior officer at the Department of Tourism, was assessing an application for a permit to climb the 8,848-metre peak.
“We accept applications for climbing until the end of the season,” he said in his second-floor office in a rundown government building, referring to the period between March and the end of May when favourable weather conditions allow climbers to attempt the summit.
The application, from Himalayan Guides, a local expedition organiser supporting a 38-yearold French woman, was one of hundreds filed each year on behalf of climbers seeking to conquer the mountain, which plays a major part in Nepal’s US$1.6-billion tourism industry.
Tourism is the impoverished country’s second-largest foreign currency earner after remittances. But a string of recent deaths has brought accusations that the government is not doing enough to improve safety standards, while natural disasters have led to the cancellation of entire climbing seasons, disrupting a vital source of funds.
Nepal has issued permits for 375 climbers from 42 expeditions for this season — a record number. With an $11,000 fee for each climber, the mountain has already generated more than $4 million in revenue. Everest’s smaller neighbour, 8,516metre Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak, draws the second-highest number of climbers for peaks above 8,000 metres — 113 so far this season, generating $200,000 in royalties. Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 tallest mountains.
But the climbing fees are just the start. Everest sits atop an industry that sustains a vast network of businesses in Nepal and across the world. While top commercial guiding companies are based in Western countries — mainly the US, New Zealand and the UK — their clients span the globe. In Nepal around 35 guiding companies serve as expedition organisers and local operators for the western companies.
TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES
Every climbing season on Everest brings triumphs and tragedies. But in recent years, the mountain has also been rocked by natural disasters, leading to cancellations of the seasons in 2014 and 2015. An avalanche on the treacherous Khumbu Icefall in 2014 killed 16 guides and prompted a call for safety reforms. It was followed in April 2015 by a powerful earthquake, which caused death and destruction across the country, and triggered an avalanche that killed 20 climbers at Everest base camp.
The climbing season resumed in 2016, when 289 climbers scaled the mountain. Six lost their lives. Hopes for this year were shattered early in the season when Ueli Steck, a 40-year-old Swiss alpinist known for his speed ascents, plunged to his death while acclimatising on Nuptse, a nearby peak.
That accident was followed by the death of Min Bahadur Sherchan, an 85-year-old Nepalese climber who was attempting to break an age record set in 2013 by Yuichiro Miura of Japan, who climbed Everest aged 80. On May 21, as dozens set out for the summit following a good weather forecast, three climbers from the US, Australia and Slovakia died in an area above 8,000 metres called the “Death Zone”.
Rescuers later found the body of an Indian climber who died after disappearing on May 20 during his descent from the summit. On May 24, four bodies were found inside a tent at the highest camp on Everest, although it is still not clear what year the climbers had died. In late April, a Taiwanese trekker miraculously survived after being stranded for 47 days in a remote mountain region in central Nepal. But his girlfriend died three days before rescuers found him.
These incidents have increased pressure on the government to tighten up on safety, not least by placing an upper age limit on climbers in addition to the lower limit of 16. The Taiwanese man’s ordeal has revived a call to enforce the hiring of professional guides in rugged terrain.
Freddie Wilkinson, an American mountain guide and author, said the government’s response was woefully inadequate. “They’ve paid lip service to enacting better search-and-rescue response for foreign trekkers and providing more financial and social support for Nepalis working as guides and porters in the mountains,” he told the Nikkei Asian Review.
Sherpas are major beneficiaries of mountain tourism. The 113,000-member community dominates mountaineering. Every spring season on Everest, hundreds of Sherpas make multiple sorties up and down the slopes to haul food, oxygen cylinders and other supplies.
In early April, an elite group of Sherpa climbers known as “Icefall Doctors” opened the route from base camp at 5,364 metres to Camp 2 at 6,400 metres, forging a path lined with ladders and ropes on the perilous Khumbu Glacier. Though they earn a paltry $2,000 for the gruelling task, the money means a lot in Nepal, where average annual income is around $700.
HIGH-ALTITUDE WORKERS
More than 50,000 people, including high-altitude workers, porters, tour operators, managers and teahouse owners benefit directly from the spring climbing season, according to Ang Tshering Sherpa, founder of Kathmandu-based Asian Trekking, one of Nepal’s leading tour operators. In good years he has employed up to 700 people for expeditions on Everest.
At the bottom of the Everest supply chain are porters who carry loads of up to 30 kilogrammes each from Lukla, the nearest airstrip, to the base camp for about $85. Above them are high-altitude porters who earn $30 a day. A Sherpa sirdar, or head guide, earns between $5,000 and $6,000 per season. Cooks and kitchen boys make about $3,000 per season.
At the other end of the industry are clients with varying degrees of skill and stamina. They pay anything from $20,000 to $120,000, which also includes climbing fees and the airfare from Kathmandu to Lukla.
Expedition companies run by Nepalese charge between $20,000 and $50,000 per climber. Western guiding companies charge between $60,000 and $120,000. Climbing Everest is all about logistics, and rates reflect levels of comfort and services. Climbers spend roughly $10 million on supplies and logistics alone, according to Ang Tshering Sherpa.
Setting up an army of professional mountain rangers modelled after the US National Park Service, which works with volunteers in popular areas, could be a game changer for the industry in Nepal, says Wilkinson.
The rangers would be trained Nepalese citizens “with strong mountain knowhow and communications skills, whose job it is to engage foreign trekkers, educate them, help them make informed decisions, and also be in place to act as medical first responders and rescue coordinators when disaster strikes,” he said.