The Mountain Is Melting And The Bodies Are Climbing Down
The Mountain Is Melting And The Bodies Are Climbing Down
The boot is green. The body is frozen. The eyes are open. They have been open for twenty years. The climbers do not stop. They step around him. They check their oxygen gauges. They calculate the remaining distance to the summit. They do not look down. The dead are not victims anymore. They are landmarks. “If you reach Green Boots,” the guides say, “you still have a few hours to the top.” A corpse turned into a traffic sign. A human being turned into a kilometer marker on the highway to personal glory. And now, something worse is happening. The ice that preserved him is melting. Not with a dramatic explosion. Millimeter by millimeter. Drop by drop. Every summer a little more. Every decade a deeper scar in the glaciers that have kept their secrets for centuries. The secrets are coming up. First came the trash. Then came the bodies. What is emerging from the ice is not just frozen organic matter. It is an accusation. It is the physical proof that humanity turned one of the most sacred and extreme places on Earth into a commercial route with a thousand-dollar entry fee, sherpa included, summit almost guaranteed.
There is a number that nobody in the mountaineering industry wants to say out loud. It is not the death toll. It is not the price of a climbing permit—$11,000 per person in Nepal. It is a more uncomfortable figure. More impossible to bury under the snow. More than 110 tons of garbage accumulated on the slopes of Everest over decades of expeditions. 110 tons. The approximate weight of ten double-decker buses scattered across glacial crevasses, abandoned base camps, and climbing routes where the wind howls at 150 kilometers per hour and nobody, absolutely nobody, picks up what they leave behind.
To understand how we arrived here, we have to go back to May 29, 1953. That day, Edmund Hillary, a 33-year-old New Zealand beekeeper, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali Sherpa of Tibetan origin, stepped onto the summit of Everest for the first time. The world went mad. Front pages screamed the same message: humanity had conquered the highest mountain on Earth. Nobody talked about what that would mean decades later. Nobody imagined that first footprint was also the first step of a slow, systematic, irreversible destruction.
Expeditions began to multiply like cancer cells in an organism that has no defense mechanisms. In the 1970s, fewer than 100 climbers reached base camp per year. By the 1990s, the number exceeded 400. By the second decade of the 21st century, the number of people attempting the summit each season surpassed 800, grouped into commercial expeditions where the only requirement was having enough money in the bank and basic physical endurance. The mountain had become a product. Everest had become a brand.
H2: The Aluminum Teeth Of A Fallen Giant
Each expedition carries a colossal amount of material. High-altitude tents, fixed ropes stretching several kilometers, portable gas stoves, generators, sleeping bags, supplemental oxygen bottles, thousands of meters of cable, aluminum poles, technical clothing, freeze-dried food packaging, fuel containers. And when the expedition ends, when the climber returns home with their summit photo and their story to tell at gala dinners, most of that material stays behind. Not because of laziness or conscious indifference—although that too—but because removing one kilogram of garbage from the death zone above 8,000 meters can literally cost a life.
Empty oxygen cylinders are perhaps the most brutal symbol of this catastrophe. It is estimated that more than 14,000 aluminum bottles lie abandoned on Everest’s slopes. Each weighs about 3.5 kilograms. Do the math. Almost 50 tons of metal on a mountain sacred to the Sherpa people, in an environment that should be considered a natural heritage of humanity. Some are buried under meters of snow. Others protrude between rocks like the broken teeth of a fallen giant. The ones in the death zone, between 8,000 and 8,849 meters, are practically unrecoverable without risking the lives of anyone who tries to bring them down.
But the garbage is not just metallic. It is organic, textile, chemical. It is tents shredded by blizzards that no one removed. It is rotten ropes that were once lifelines and are now nylon snakes tangled in the crevasses of the Khumbu Glacier. It is food scraps, energy bar wrappers, rusted cans, fragments of technical equipment that broke during a storm and were dropped in whatever direction. And it is also—though this is the hardest thing to write and to hear—human feces.
Scientists from the Roorkee Institute of Technology estimated that at Everest Base Camp and its surroundings, between 12 and 15 tons of fecal matter have been deposited. With the progressive thaw, it is beginning to contaminate the water sources of the valleys that feed millions of people in Nepal. This is where you need to stop for a moment. Stop thinking of Everest as an adventure postcard and start thinking of it as what it is now. A natural system connected to fragile ecosystems, to glaciers that feed rivers, to communities that depend on that water to drink, to irrigate their fields, to live.
The Everest problem is not just aesthetic. It is not just the repulsive image of a mountain covered in trash. It is a public health crisis brewing at 8,000 meters of altitude that will eventually reach the valley floor.
H2: The Green Boots That Became A Landmark
There is a phenomenon that glaciologists call glacial flow. It is the slow, almost imperceptible movement of ice descending a mountain slope under the weight of its own mass. A glacier is never still. It moves between 2 and 5 meters per year under normal conditions, transporting inside it everything that was trapped. Rocks, sediments, fossilized pollen, microorganisms from other eras, and human bodies.
For decades, Everest used that mechanism as a perfect mass grave. What fell into its crevasses or was buried under an avalanche disappeared into the ice, and the world could pretend it had never existed. That tacit agreement between the mountain and humanity is now breaking, with global warming as an implacable witness.
David Sharp was 30 years old when he died in the death zone of Everest in the spring of 2006. He was a British climber attempting the summit solo and without supplemental oxygen—a decision many considered suicidal from the start. He was found alive but unconscious under a rock on the northeast route, above 8,400 meters. Forty expeditions passed by him that day. Forty groups of climbers saw a dying man and calculated that rescuing him was too dangerous, too costly in time and oxygen. David Sharp died alone, frozen, while dozens of people who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to be on that mountain walked past him looking upward.
His body remained there for years. It is probably still there, or whatever the glacier has decided to do with it.
Sharp is not an exception. He is the rule. On Everest, there are more than 200 bodies that were never recovered, distributed between the Nepali south side and the Tibetan north side. Some are so well known that climbers have given them names and use them as reference points during ascent. The most famous is Green Boots, an unidentified Indian climber whose body, with green mountain boots perfectly preserved by the cold, was visible for more than 20 years on the north route. Guides mentioned it in pre-ascent briefings. “If you reach Green Boots, you know you still have a few hours to the summit.”
A corpse turned into traffic signage. A human being transformed into a kilometer marker on a highway toward personal glory.
PART TWO: THE ICE IS GIVING BACK ITS DEAD
The preservation that extreme cold produces on high-altitude bodies is one of the most disturbing images in this entire story. At 8,000 meters, with temperatures that can drop to 60 degrees below zero and a dry atmosphere that eliminates moisture from any surface, bodies do not decompose. They mummify. Skin tightens over bones like cured leather. Facial features remain recognizable for decades. Clothing retains its color. Everything freezes in the exact moment of death, as if time had decided that moment deserved to be preserved forever, as a permanent accusation against those who kept climbing up and down without stopping.
They are involuntary sculptures of what it costs to reach the top of the world.
But the ice that preserved them is changing. The Khumbu Glacier, which covers much of Everest’s southern slope and through which all expeditions leaving the Nepali base camp transit, has lost more than 50 percent of its mass since the mid-20th century. Scientists from the International Glacier Research Project in the Himalayas documented that the melting rate has multiplied by ten in the last two decades. What used to take a century to melt now takes ten years. And that process releases not only water. It releases everything the ice held inside. It releases buried history. It releases the bodies.
In the spring of 2019, the Nepali government organized what was described as the largest Everest cleanup expedition to date. Teams removed more than 11 tons of garbage. But among the waste, they found something they did not expect to recover. Human bodies that had emerged from the glacier in areas where nothing had been visible before. They were not new. They were old. They had been inside the ice for decades, and accelerated melting had returned them to the surface like letters without an address that the mountain had refused to deliver until now.
Researchers could not identify them at the time. No one knows how many more are waiting their turn under the meters of ice that remain.
H2: The Cost Of Bringing The Dead Home
Here I have to ask you something that has no easy answer. When a body emerges from the glacier on Everest, what should be done with it? The families of missing climbers have been waiting for decades, paying investigators, sending DNA samples to laboratories, hoping that one day the mountain will give them back something. But recovering a body from the death zone costs between 30,000and70,000 and can cost the lives of the Sherpas involved in the rescue.
Does the world have an obligation to return those bodies to their families regardless of the human and economic cost? Or is there a point where the dead must stay where the mountain put them?
The case of Hannelore Schmatz shook the climbing community in a way that still resonates decades later. She was a German climber, the wife of an expedition leader, and she died of exhaustion and exposure on the descent from the south summit in October 1979, becoming the first woman to die on Everest. Her body remained sitting against her backpack on the south route, perfectly visible, eyes open, hair waving in the ridge wind. For years, it was the first body climbers saw when they began their descent from the summit. Two Nepali policemen died trying to recover her in 1984. Eventually, wind and glacial flow carried her down the slope, out of sight. The mountain solved the problem its own way, without asking anyone’s permission.
What makes the thawing phenomenon particularly cruel is its apparent selectivity. Not all bodies emerge in accessible places. Many appear where it is impossible to reach without risking additional lives. Some emerge in crevasses in the middle of the seracs—those enormous towers of unstable ice that can collapse without warning, crushing everything beneath them. Others emerge on slopes steeper than 50 degrees, where any recovery maneuver becomes a suicide mission. The mountain returns its dead, but it does not place them in a convenient location. It deposits them where it wants, when it wants, reminding us that here, the mountain sets the rules.
Beyond the emotional impact of seeing a frozen human being in the middle of a mountain route, there is a health dimension that scientists have begun to study with growing alarm. As temperatures rise and ice retreats to lower altitudes, decomposing bodies can contaminate the water sources that descend through the Khumbu river system. Bacteria and pathogens emerging from the thaw—from both bodies and accumulated organic waste—can reach valley communities within months or even weeks during the monsoon season. This is not alarmist speculation. It is the conclusion of several hydrological studies conducted in Nepal over the last ten years. What went up as an expedition may come down as an epidemic.
Everest always collected its debts in bodies. What no one calculated is that it would also collect them in time, and that time would arrive hand in hand with a planet warming at an unprecedented rate in recorded geological history. The dead are returning. And with them returns the question the mountaineering industry has spent decades trying to bury alongside them. Who is responsible for what happens when the mountain decides to return everything we gave it?
PART THREE: THE LINE ON THE RIDGE
In 1992, 16 people reached the summit of Everest in the entire spring season. That was a number the climbing community considered already high by the standards of the time. Thirty years later, in the spring of 2023, more than 600 people stepped onto the summit in a single month. 600 people in 30 days. That averages 20 people per day climbing up and down a ridge less than one meter wide at 8,800 meters of altitude, in a weather window that sometimes shrinks to 48 usable hours.
The image generated by that number is not heroic. It is the image of a supermarket queue on the roof of the world. Each person carrying between 30,000and50,000 of debt or savings. All looking at the same point. All pushing forward because turning back would mean admitting that the dream they bought was too expensive for what they received in return.
Adventure tourism on Everest is an industry that moves more than 70 million dollars annually in Nepal alone. That is not an approximate estimate. It is the figure the Nepali Ministry of Tourism proudly publishes in its annual reports, as if the money generated by the mountain justified any price it charges in return. Climbing permits represent the most visible part of that economy. 11,000perpersonontheNepaliside,approximately9,000 on the Tibetan side controlled by China. But that is just the beginning. When you add the costs of the expedition agency, specialized technical equipment, flights to Lukla, accommodation at base camp during the weeks of acclimatization, high-altitude Sherpas, supplemental oxygen, and medical evacuation insurance, the real cost of an Everest attempt ranges from 40,000to100,000 per person. And there is a waiting list.
H2: The Invisible Column Of The Economy
The democratization of high-altitude mountaineering—which is how the industry prefers to call this process—began to take shape in the early 1990s with the appearance of the first commercial expedition agencies. Rob Hall, a New Zealand guide who died tragically in the 1996 Everest disaster, was one of its main architects. His company, Adventure Consultants, perfected the model: you put up the money and the will; we provide the Sherpas, the fixed ropes, the oxygen, and the technical knowledge to get you to the top. You do not need to be an elite climber. You do not need years of experience on ice walls. You need money, determination, and enough lung capacity to survive the death zone. Everest stopped being a test of technical mastery. It became a test of financial endurance.
This model has consequences that go far beyond overcrowding at the summit. When elite mountaineering required years of progressive training, those who reached Everest had the experience necessary to make autonomous decisions in emergency situations, to assess risk with their own judgment, to know when to turn back without being told. The clients of modern commercial expeditions, in contrast, delegate that decision-making capacity to their guides and their Sherpas. They are passengers on a very expensive flight who trust that the pilot knows what he is doing. The problem is that at 8,000 meters, when the pilot is also at the limit of his physiological capacities and the storm arrives earlier than expected, the passengers do not have the skills to jump with a parachute. And the mountain does not give discounts for paid inexperience.
The Sherpas are the invisible backbone of this entire economy and also its most silent victims. Without Sherpas, 90 percent of commercial Everest expeditions would be impossible. They are the ones who install the fixed ropes that others will use. They are the ones who transport the heaviest loads between high-altitude camps. They are the ones who set up and take down the camps. They are the ones who prepare the food. They are the ones who guide disoriented clients through nighttime storms. And they are the ones who die with disproportionate frequency.
Statistically, Sherpas have a mortality rate on Everest between five and ten times higher than the Western clients who pay for their services. In the avalanche of April 16, 2014, 16 Sherpas died on the Khumbu Glacier while preparing the route for that season’s expeditions. Sixteen men with names, with families, with children. The industry lamented the tragedy, and the season continued the following year with the same prices and the same logic.
There is something morally unsustainable at the heart of this business that very few people want to name directly. The Everest industry is, in essence, a structure where people with sufficient economic resources pay people with fewer resources to assume the most lethal risks on their behalf. The Western climber arrives with their €20,000 equipment, their helicopter evacuation insurance, and their story to tell when they return. The Sherpa arrives with a family that depends on that salary to survive the rest of the year, with no safety net other than the hope that this season will not be their last. It is not a relationship of equality disguised as shared adventure. It is an economic transaction with a risk gradient that always points in the same direction.
H2: The Queue At 8,000 Meters
There is a photograph that circulated on social media in the spring of 2019 and generated more debate about the future of Everest than any scientific report published that year. It was taken by photographer Nirmal Purja, a former Nepali Gurkha known as Nims, during his ascent to the summit. It shows a line of more than 200 people equipped with colorful technical clothing, oxygen bottles, and harnesses, advancing single file along a snowy ridge less than one meter wide at more than 8,000 meters of altitude, under a cloudless blue sky that makes the scene look almost unreal.
There is no visible drama in the image. No storm. No avalanche. No corpse protruding from the ice. Only a line. An endless, absurd line. Impossible in the highest and most inhospitable place on the planet. That image went around the world because it was more eloquent than any argument. Everest was not being destroyed by a disaster. It was being destroyed by order. By normality. By the system working exactly as it was designed to work.
That 2019 season was also the deadliest in several years, with 11 confirmed deaths. Researchers who analyzed the cases concluded that most were not caused by avalanches, unforeseen storms, or technical accidents on the wall. They were caused by route saturation. Climbers who had been stopped for hours in the queue above 8,000 meters, consuming supplemental oxygen at a rate their bottles could not sustain during such a prolonged wait, reached the death zone with their reserves at the limit and had no margin for descent. They died of waiting. They died because there were too many people in a place where no number of people should be queuing as if waiting for the bus. The mountain did not kill them with violence. It killed them with patience. Letting the system that had brought them there finish the job on its own.
PART FOUR: THE GLACIER THAT IS DISAPPEARING
In the glaciology laboratories at the University of Leeds, a team of scientists published a report in 2023 that passed relatively unnoticed in mainstream media but caused the kind of silence in the scientific community that precedes bad news. The study, based on decades of satellite imagery and field measurements in the Himalayas, concluded that the glaciers of the highest mountain system on the planet had lost the equivalent of 16,000 cubic kilometers of ice in the last 40 years. To give that number some human meaning, it is enough water to fill 60 million Olympic swimming pools. And the process is not slowing down. It is accelerating. What took decades to melt could repeat itself in the next decade if global temperatures continue on their current trajectory.
The Khumbu Glacier, which descends from Everest’s South Col to the valley that bears its name, is one of the most monitored glaciers on the planet precisely because the amount of human traffic that crosses it each year makes it an involuntary field laboratory. Scientists from the Khumbu Glacier Monitoring Project have documented that its surface has descended an average of 50 meters in the last three decades in the areas of greatest thinning. Fifty vertical meters of ice that disappeared while the world organized commercial expeditions above them. The standard route to the Nepali base camp—the famous trek from Lukla to base camp that thousands of tourists traverse each season—has physically changed in entire sections because the glacier over which it ran no longer exists in the form it had when the first maps recorded it.
What melting does to the landscape goes far beyond reducing the volume of visible ice. When a glacier retreats, it exposes rock surfaces that were previously covered, which now absorb solar heat instead of reflecting it, locally accelerating warming and creating a feedback loop that glaciologists call negative albedo. It also creates glacial lakes—meltwater pockets dammed by unstable moraines of rock and ice in the high mountain valleys. When those moraines give way—and they give way with increasing frequency—they produce what is known as a glacial lake outburst flood: an avalanche of water, rock, and ice that can travel tens of kilometers in minutes and sweep away everything in its path. In Nepal, more than 30 such events have occurred in the last 50 years. The frequency has doubled in the last decade.
For the Sherpas living in the Khumbu valleys, climate change is not a political abstraction or an academic debate. It is the disappearance of the pastures where their yaks grazed in summer, now exposed to unpredictable frosts that come out of season. It is the growing instability of mountain routes that their grandfathers walked with certainty and that now change from year to year. It is the appearance of new crevasses in the glacier that modify the ascent route to base camp each spring, forcing Sherpas to re-explore paths they thought they knew by heart.
Ang Dorji Sherpa, a high-altitude porter with more than 20 ascents of Everest, described it in an interview with BBC journalists in a way that no scientific report could match in clarity. “The mountain is not the same one I taught my children. It is a different mountain every time I return.”
H2: The Seracs That Are Collapsing Faster
The serac zone—those colossal towers of ice that form on glaciers when the ice flow fractures its own surface—has become significantly more unstable on the Khumbu over the last two decades. The seracs are beautiful in a way that paralyzes. They are columns of blue ice, 20, 30, in some cases 50 meters high, sculpted by wind and temperature into shapes that seem impossible for such cold, rigid material. They are also time bombs. When the interior ice melts, when the base that supports them thins from accelerated melting, they collapse without warning and in unpredictable directions, launching blocks the size of automobiles at speeds exceeding 100 kilometers per hour.
The 2014 avalanche that killed 16 Sherpas was triggered precisely by the collapse of a serac on the Khumbu. Experts who analyzed the event noted that the instability of that zone had increased markedly compared to previous seasons, in direct correlation with the rise in recorded temperatures.
There is a brutal geological irony in this entire process that deserves to be named without euphemism. Everest expeditions contribute to global warming in direct and measurable ways. Each climber traveling from Europe, North America, or Australia to Nepal generates between 3 and 5 tons of carbon dioxide just in round-trip flights. The diesel generators that power base camps for weeks emit greenhouse gases continuously. The rescue and supply helicopters that fly over the Khumbu Valley several times a day burn fossil fuel at an altitude where their atmospheric impact is proportionally greater. Everest expeditions are, in a small but real and measurable way, accelerating the melting of the glacier that makes them possible. They are actively destroying the conditions that generated them. It is a form of slow suicide that the industry prefers not to calculate.
The question scientists have been trying to answer accurately for years is how much time remains before the thaw makes Everest technically inaccessible for commercial expeditions as we know them today. It is not a question with a single answer because it depends on global climate variables that no model can predict with absolute certainty. But the most conservative scenarios—those assuming the world will meet its 2015 Paris Agreement commitments and limit warming to 1.5 degrees—estimate that by 2080, the Khumbu Glacier will have lost between 30 and 40 percent of its remaining mass. Intermediate scenarios, considered more realistic by most climatologists given the current rate of emissions, place that loss between 50 and 70 percent before the end of the century. In the most pessimistic scenarios, the Khumbu as a recognizable glacial entity could cease to exist before the next 100 years are over.
What that thaw means for climbing routes is as concrete as it is alarming. The ice corridor connecting base camp to Camp 1 on the south route, which crosses the most dangerous zone of the Khumbu between the seracs, depends on the existence of a sufficiently stable ice floor to be traversed with ladders and fixed ropes. If the ice beneath that corridor disappears, the route ceases to exist. It does not become more difficult. It ceases to exist. Climbers attempting to follow the historic trace would encounter bare rock, open crevasses, and ice slopes with no solid base that no fixed rope would stabilize. The mountain would not close with an official statement or a government decision. It would close because the ice that made it passable would be gone.
PART FIVE: THE MORATORIUM THAT NEVER CAME
In 2019, a group of elite climbers, environmental scientists, and representatives of Sherpa communities signed a joint document that circulated for weeks through the offices of the Nepali Ministry of Tourism without anyone ever reading it aloud in a decision-making room. The document asked for a single thing: a temporary two-year moratorium on the issuance of Everest climbing permits, with the goal of assessing the accumulated damage, designing a sustainable management system, and cleaning the routes of unrecoverable garbage with state resources. It was a reasoned proposal, documented with scientific data, and signed by people who knew the mountain better than any bureaucrat in Kathmandu. The government filed it without a formal response. The spring 2020 season arrived with its permits, its expeditions, and its usual queue on the northwest ridge. The pandemic did what the government did not want to do. It closed Everest for one season. And when it reopened, everything went back to exactly as before.
Reinhold Messner, the Italian climber who in 1978 was the first to ascend Everest without supplemental oxygen alongside Peter Habeler, and who repeated the feat solo in 1980, has spent more than three decades warning about what he considers the moral corruption of commercial mountaineering at high altitudes. His words are not those of an armchair environmentalist. They are those of a man who knows the death zone from the inside, who lost his brother Günther on Nanga Parbat in 1970, who built his legend on walls where the margin for error was zero. Messner has said publicly in interviews and conferences that the current Everest produces in him a mixture of sadness and disgust, that what is sold today as mountaineering is not mountaineering but luxury tourism with the risk of death included in the price, and that those who die in those conditions do not die as climbers but as consumers of an experience that was poorly designed from the beginning.
Messner’s voice is respected, but it is also easy to ignore because it comes from a world that no longer exists. It is harder to ignore the voices of the Sherpas themselves, who in recent years have begun to organize with a determination the industry did not expect. After the 2014 disaster, several high-altitude porters formed the Khumbu High-Altitude Sherpa Association, an organization that for the first time in the history of Himalayan mountaineering raised formal collective demands: mandatory life insurance with real coverage, limits on the number of loads transportable per person per day, participation in decisions about route management, and especially regulation of the number of expeditions per season. Some of those demands were partially accepted. Most remain in the same file where the 2019 document ended up.
Climber and photographer Cory Richards, who has documented some of the most extreme expeditions of the last 20 years in the Himalayas, described what he saw in the 2019 season with a visual brutality that is impossible to forget. He spoke of corpses protruding from the ice in areas he had traveled years before seeing nothing. He spoke of garbage as a new geological layer, an artificial stratum that future geologists will find between the ice, just as we find traces of the Anthropocene in seabed sediments today. He spoke above all of the sensation of living through the end of something, of witnessing the collapse of an era without anyone at base camp seeming to have noticed yet. His photos from that season circulated widely. His words, much less.
H2: The Three Scenarios For What Comes Next
The calls for a permit moratorium are neither new nor marginal. In 2010, mountaineer and British writer Ed Douglas published a comprehensive analysis in Alpinist magazine arguing that Everest’s management model was ecologically and ethically unsustainable, and that a mandatory pause in expeditions was the only measure capable of creating the necessary space to reform the system from its foundations. In 2017, a group of researchers from the University of Kathmandu published a study calculating that to remove all the garbage currently deposited on Everest’s routes above base camp, without generating new contamination during the process, would require a minimum of ten consecutive seasons of expeditions exclusively dedicated to cleaning, with no commercial ascents simultaneously. Ten years of total closure. The industry responded with silence. Nepal responded with silence. The world responded by looking at the photos of the queue on the summit and clicking like.
There is a current within the mountaineering community itself that goes beyond asking for a moratorium and directly proposes the abolition of the commercial model as it exists today. They do not ask to close Everest forever. They ask to return to a system where access to the mountain requires demonstrating real technical competence, where the number of permits per season has a strict limit based on the ecosystem’s carrying capacity and not on the projected income of the Ministry of Tourism, and where expedition companies are legally obligated to remove 100 percent of the waste they generate with independent verification. It is a model that exists on other protected mountains of the world, applied with varying degrees of rigor. On Denali in Alaska, the waste management system is so strict that climbers must carry their feces in special bags and deposit them at designated collection points. On Everest, that same proposal was deemed utopian by industry representatives in a meeting with the Nepali government held in 2022.
The experts’ scenarios for the coming decades range from cautious optimism to structural pessimism, and none is completely reassuring. In the best possible case, Nepal implements before 2030 a strict quota system limiting the number of climbing permits to 250 per season, establishes verifiable technical requirements for applicants, forces expedition agencies to deposit environmental bonds of $20,000 per client, and allocates 30 percent of permit income to permanent cleaning operations and scientific monitoring. It is a scenario several experts consider technically viable. It is also a scenario that would reduce Nepal’s adventure tourism revenue by more than 50 percent and would face colossal political and economic resistance at all levels of the chain of interests involved. The best possible scenario is also the most improbable, given the current state of political will.
In the intermediate scenario, which most analysts consider the most likely given the current pace of change, Nepal implements partial and insufficient reforms that marginally reduce the number of permits, slightly improve waste management protocols, and generate enough narrative of environmental responsibility to silence the most visible critics without truly transforming the structure of the business. Degradation continues at a somewhat slower pace. The bodies keep emerging from the glacier each spring. Garbage accumulates more slowly but without stopping. And at some point in that process—perhaps in 2040, perhaps in 2050—the combination of visible environmental deterioration, growing route instability from melting, and international media pressure reaches a threshold beyond which high-end tourism begins to shun Everest for image reasons. The collapse does not come as an official closure but as a gradual abandonment. The same mechanism by which many overexploited tourist destinations die without anyone ever signing their death certificate.
The pessimistic scenario, which a significant minority of scientists consider equally plausible, is simpler and more brutal. Nothing happens. Reforms do not arrive, or they arrive too late. The Khumbu Glacier continues retreating until it makes the south route technically impracticable for commercial expeditions sometime in the second half of this century. The bodies keep emerging until no ice remains to hold them. The garbage spreads down the slope with the melt toward inhabited valleys. And Everest, the highest mountain on the planet, which for millennia was a symbol of the unattainable and for 70 years was a symbol of human ambition in its most extreme form, ends up being remembered as the most eloquent symbol of humanity’s inability to protect what it claims to value.
THE FINAL QUESTION
I have taken you through all of this because I believe you deserve to have the complete picture before forming an opinion. Because Everest is not a distant problem happening on an inaccessible mountain that has nothing to do with you. It is the sharpest mirror of how we treat common goods when there is enough money on the table. It is the reduced model of what we do with the oceans, with the forests, with the atmosphere. We use them to the limit. We externalize the damage toward those with the least power to resist it. And when the consequences are impossible to ignore, we form committees, publish reports, and organize summits where the same people who caused the problem debate solemnly the solutions that never fully arrive. Everest is not an exception to human behavior. It is its best example.
And yet—and this is what is hardest for me to write because it sounds almost naive after everything above—there are reasons not to give up. There are because the Sherpas who formed their association in 2014 achieved real improvements, though insufficient. There are because the cleanup expeditions have removed tens of tons of garbage that would otherwise still be there. There are because there are young Nepalis studying glaciology and environmental management who return to their communities with tools their parents did not have. There are because Nirmal Purja’s photograph provoked a global conversation that did not exist before he pressed the shutter. Real change always arrives later than it should and earlier than seemed possible at the moment of maximum pessimism. The question is whether it will arrive before or after the point of no return.
Everest stands 8,849 meters of accumulated silence. It has seen glaciations and thaws, tectonic eruptions and millennial erosions, and it will continue to see them long after the last climber has descended their last summit. What is at stake is not the mountain. What is at stake is what we decide to do with it while there is still something to decide. And that decision—which seems to belong to governments and industries and experts—actually starts much earlier. It starts the moment someone decides to inform themselves, the moment someone decides to speak, the moment someone decides that an extraordinary place deserves something better than becoming the highest garbage dump on Earth.
Now I ask you one last time, and I want you to answer with the same honesty with which you have come this far. Do you believe Everest can be saved, or have we already arrived too late?