There has recently been a lot of new stories about changes to Nepal’s rules concerning climbing Everest. I’m here to tell you that (unsuprisingly) the press doesn’t know what they’re talking about. First lets look at cost:
Nepal Slashes Everest Fees – screams the headline from one “respectable” magazine (shame on you – National Geographic). They say that the cost of climbing Everest has been reduced from $25,000 per person to $11,000 per person and they expect the numbers of climbers to increase and crowding/dramatic news stories to increase with it. In reality this change is a price increase. Let me explain: under the old system it was $25000 for a one person permit, but no one ever used this. Instead companies would share permits. You could buy a $70,000 group permit that was good for 7 people. So if I had 5 climbers on my expedition I would sell the other two spots on my permit to solo climbers for $10,000 each. So everyone paid $10,00 for their permit. By scratching the $25K fee and making everyone pay $11k, Nepal has just earned themselves another $1,000 per climber or about $450,000 for the season.
Now lets talk about rubbish. The press loves to write garish stories about how much rubbish is on Everest, that the mountain is really just a big pile of garbage. This is just not true. There are a few areas on the mountain that are dirty; camp 2 and the South Col are probably the worst, but climbers have been generally good about helping to clean up Everest for 20+ years and they’ve had an effect. Most of the rubbish at C2 is from expeditions past. Its stuck in the ice and every year lots of it is revealed. I found an oxygen bottle from a 1975 expedition there a few years ago. A lot of the rubbish at basecamp is equally old, sometimes in the form of bodies that were dumped in crevasses many years ago and are now melting out. The South Col has shredded tent pieces and lots of empty cooking gas containers, but there are no oxygen bottles strewn around – there’s been a bounty on those for years. Now nepal has a new rule that all climbers will be required to bring down 8kg from above EBC. This sounds like a good idea and the majority of climbers will help out and try to do this, but if Nepal thinks this will solve the problem – whatever that is – they are mistaken. Teams can just divide up the rubbish they create at C2 and give it to climbers to bring down instead of Sherpas. There will be as much fudging on this rule as there already is on the garbage deposit rules. The truth is that Everest with 600 climbers per year is cleaner than it was twenty years ago with 100 climbers. The problem of rubbish is not solved (human waste is the next challenge), but asking climbers to bring down 8kg is not going to fix it.
So Everest is actually more erxpensive and a mountain that is cleaner than some would have you believe, is now more highly regulated to achieve very little.