When the first edition of Into Thin Air was published not long after the 1996 Mount Everest calamity, during which eight climbers died in a violent storm, I assumed that the disturbing events I described in my book would convince amateur climbers that paying a lot of money to be guided up the highest mountain on Earth was a bad idea. I was wrong. The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine. The owner of one of the prominent guiding companies told me that Into Thin Air was better advertising for his business than anything he could have imagined.
When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was, according to the Himalayan Database, only the 621st person to arrive there since the mountain was first summited, in May 1953. During the 30 years following my ascent, Everest was climbed approximately 13,000 times. At least 90 percent of those ascents were made by clients and employees of commercial guiding companies. As this astounding number suggests, scaling the world’s highest mountain is a very different experience than it was in 1996. Most notably, Everest climbers are now much less likely to die. From 1921, when the first serious attempt to climb the mountain was made, through 1996, one person was killed, on average, for every five who reached the summit. Over the next 28 years, that ratio diminished to one death for every 68 summits. In 2025, only five climbers died and 866 reached the summit, a ratio of one fatality for every 173 climbers who got to the top.
The greater likelihood of surviving an Everest expedition might come as a surprise, given the numerous photos of alarming traffic jams on the mountain that have gone viral in recent years. But the very real risks posed by these crowds have been mitigated by other developments. Weather forecasts are more accurate, oxygen masks are more efficient and reliable, guided climbers are now provided with as many oxygen canisters as they are willing to pay for, and each commercial climbing client is typically ushered up the mountain by at least one personal Sherpa guide.
Perhaps the most significant change in the past 30 years, however, is the transfer of authority and agency on the mountain: from European and American climbers and guiding companies to Nepalis. Thanks to the greater demand for high-altitude workers on Everest, many more Nepalis are now employed by commercial guiding operations; today they represent a majority of the highly qualified guides. Even more noteworthy is the dramatic increase in the number of expedition services owned and run by Nepalis, which currently make up most of the guiding companies on Everest.
No longer do Nepalis primarily function as kitchen workers and load carriers. They are now frequently the most skilled and accomplished guides on the mountain. For all intents and purposes, climbing activity on the Nepali side of Everest—where most ascents take place—is controlled by Sherpas. They install and maintain the dozens of ladders and miles of fixed rope on the mountain. They call the shots. They’re the gatekeepers. This is entirely appropriate, given that the mountain rises from the homeland of the Sherpas, a native ethnic group, and they have been a crucial presence on Everest expeditions since the earliest attempts to climb it.
[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]
This remarkable transformation can be traced to a variety of factors, but among the most consequential was the creation of the Khumbu Climbing Center, a project launched by the American climbers Jenni Lowe and Conrad Anker to teach technical-climbing skills to Nepali high-altitude workers. The idea to create a training program for Sherpas came from Jenni’s first husband, Alex Lowe, a friend and occasional climbing partner of mine, who had been appalled, on numerous Himalayan expeditions, by how little technical training most Sherpas had received, putting them at great risk.
Tragically, Alex was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma, a 26,335-foot Tibetan peak, in October 1999, before he had an opportunity to accomplish his goal. In 2004, Jenni, along with her second husband, Conrad, launched the first Khumbu Climbing School in Phortse village. (I volunteered as an instructor that inaugural year, and again in 2005.) The Khumbu Climbing Center, as it is now known, has certified more than 1,000 Nepali guides, who are presently employed by commercial guiding companies on Everest and throughout the world.
Nepali workers deserve much of the credit for making Everest a less dangerous mountain than it used to be. But climbing it is still exceedingly hazardous, especially for the Sherpas themselves. Because clients now receive a lot more supplemental oxygen than they used to, workers must make even more trips through the deadly Khumbu Icefall (a constantly shifting, 2,000-foot-high jumble of house-size blocks of ice) to carry additional canisters to the upper mountain. Furthermore, the rapidly warming Himalayan climate is making the carapace of snow and ice that covers much of the Everest massif more unstable, which makes the icefall more likely to be the site of another mass-casualty event like the avalanche that killed 16 Nepali workers on April 14, 2014.
Despite the dire risks they face, the Nepalis have often failed to receive the respect they deserve from foreign climbers. Resentment over this has festered for decades among Sherpas. In 2013, the frustration erupted on a steep ice face at 23,000 feet. (The incident was most thoughtfully recounted in Melissa Arnot Reid’s climbing memoir, Enough.) Earlier that year, Nepali expedition leaders announced that on April 27, a large Sherpa team would begin installing fixed ropes on Everest’s Lhotse Face, and asked all climbers to stay far away for the duration of the operation. Everyone heeded this request except for two acclaimed professional alpinists, Ueli Steck and Simone Moro, and the cinematographer documenting their ascent, Jonathan Griffith. The European climbers stayed more than 100 feet away from the Sherpa team for most of their climb, but to reach Camp 3, they had to pass directly above the Sherpas as they worked. When doing so, the Europeans inadvertently knocked off small chunks of ice that struck a few Sherpas.
According to Arnot Reid, who was on the mountain that day, the Sherpas were furious—in part because the falling ice was a genuine hazard, but mostly because they considered the Europeans’ defiance of the closure incredibly disrespectful. An altercation broke out on the steep ice face, during which Moro directed an obscene insult at Mingma Tenzing, the leader of the Sherpa rope team. This was so objectionable to the Sherpas that the entire team immediately abandoned their unfinished work and descended to Camp 2. When the European climbers came down to that camp shortly thereafter, a mob of 100 angry Sherpas confronted them, hurling rocks at the climbers and kicking them after they fell to the ground. As the melee escalated, Arnot Reid persuaded Moro to get down on his knees and apologize. When he reluctantly acceded, the mob dispersed, allowing Steck and Moro to flee down the Khumbu Icefall with minor injuries and their tails between their legs.
[Read: The year climate change closed Everest]
The confrontation was ugly, but it led to a more honest, long overdue accounting of the historic relationship between Sherpas and foreign climbers—an assessment reinforced by a labor strike prompted by the 2014 avalanche. These shocking incidents compelled foreigners to acknowledge that Sherpas have played an essential role—and have been exposed to disproportionate risk—on almost every significant Everest expedition since the very first one in 1921, yet have seldom been regarded as equal partners or elite mountaineers.
A pivotal event in the Sherpas’ struggle for respect occurred on January 16, 2021, when 10 of Nepal’s most accomplished mountain guides endured gale-force winds and a temperature of 58 degrees below zero to complete the first winter ascent of K2, the planet’s second-highest summit—a much more difficult and dangerous peak than Everest. Considered the last great unsolved challenge in high-altitude mountaineering, a K2 winter ascent had been attempted many times without success by some of the strongest climbers in the world before the all-Nepali team arrived on top, 28,251 feet above sea level, and belted out Nepal’s national anthem en masse. A video of this moment went viral, generating accolades from around the world. According to one of the team leaders, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa (also known as “Mingma G”), their astonishing feat was “about giving justice to our future generations.” Roughly 100 years after the first Sherpa deaths on Everest, the hard-won respect achieved by Nepali climbers was wonderful to behold.
Other developments since 1996 have been less wonderful. The swarms of climbers who now arrive every April to be guided up the Nepali side of Everest give a big boost to the regional economy, but their presence is highly damaging to the environment, and new regulations concerning trash and human-waste removal have failed to adequately address the degradation.
Developments over the past 30 years have wrought a different kind of degradation as well. Climbing to the highest point on Earth is still an adventure that entails considerable risk and typically requires weeks of immense effort. But the commodification of the mountain has stripped away much of what once made climbing Everest such a uniquely profound experience. As the journalist Carl Hoffman mused in a review of a recent book about the Everest guiding industry, these companies perform an admirable service by providing expertise and assistance that now enables almost anyone to climb Everest. Nevertheless, he writes, “it’s hard not to look at those pictures of clients stacked on the side of the mountain in long lines, clutching their handrails and not think: Gross. That something fundamental to exploration and adventure and the human experience of it has been lost, is lost; that the thing they’ve purchased is a thing so vastly different from its very idea as to render it meaningless.”
This is true, I’m sad to say. But if you have what it takes, it is still possible to ascend Everest in the same manner as mountaineers of yore—including the minimalist style of Reinhold Messner’s renowned solo ascent. On August 20, 1980, Messner reached the summit of Everest alone, in stormy monsoon conditions, via a partially new route on the Tibetan side of the peak, without relying on bottled oxygen, established camps, a rope, or other humans of any nationality. It is still considered the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.
If you’re unwilling to go full Messner, you can honor the mountain’s historic stature and avoid the hordes by forgoing the relatively favorable weather of the spring climbing season and attempting your ascent in the colder, much snowier autumn months, or simply stay away from the two primary guided routes. By taking a direct route up Everest’s immense North Face instead, or trying the remote Kangshung Face, you are unlikely to encounter other people, and are guaranteed to experience all the adversity you might desire. You also stand a better chance of getting killed. Which explains, of course, why such routes remain uncrowded: Most of the multitudes who attempt Everest these days simply want to reach the summit with as little effort and risk as possible, by whatever means offer the greatest probability of success.
After what I experienced in 1996, I’m not inclined to fault them.
This essay was adapted from the 30th-anniversary edition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which is out May 10.
The post What’s Changed Since I Climbed Everest appeared first on The Atlantic.
