On May 22, a single file line of people made their way to the summit of Mt Everest. Overcrowding on the mountain caused delays, and with delays comes death. This season, 11 people have died while climbing Mt Everest.
On her sixth summit, New Zealand mountaineer Lydia Bradey was on the mountain that day.
Photo: AFP
“We summited much later in the day…and we just saw the last people disappearing off the summit ridge a little way down and I had no idea that that was the dregs of that huge line.”
She says the line was likely 8 hours long on the summit ridge.
“I’m surprised that so many people were able to stay in that line for what looked like it must be a reasonably long time…because you’ve got oxygen, and oxygen runs out.”
An experienced mountaineer, Bradley was the first woman to reach the summit of Mt Everest without oxygen. She’s now a guide, taking other people up the mountain.
With the advent of guiding, there are only two routes that people take to reach the summit of Mt Everest, she says. One route takes Sir Edmond Hillary’s track from Nepal, the other on the Northern ridge begins in Tibet.
Bradey says the bottle-necking is better than it used to be.
“There’s lots of debate around what happened in the 2015 earthquake to the Hillary Step (a nearly vertical rock face near the summit) and after the earthquake, I climbed in 2016, and when we popped over the south summit and we could see the Hillary Step it was for the first time, able to be bypassed on the snow... which hadn’t existed before.”
She believes the Hillary Step has slumped.
New Zealand mountaineer Lydia Bradey Photo: Supplied
It’s not often that you come across bodies on the trail, but this time, Bradley says, she came across three.
“On the north side, the summit day is a large amount of traversing, going through very, very technical rock steps, which are fixed with ropes and some ladders and things, but if you get sick, very, very sick, or if you die, you can’t get the body down as easily as you can on the Nepal side, in fact, you can’t get the body down.”
The bodies she came across had been there for at least two years, she says.
Despite the long line and deaths, Bradey says regulation isn’t the answer, she says people should have more experience before climbing.
“Walking on crampons, on rocky and icy, snowy terrain is quite hard, you put an oxygen mask on, you can’t see your feet. No one tells you that. It’s OK for those of us who know how to walk up hill, but it’s not that easy.”
