Fresh ice avalanches struck on a perilous route where 16 Everest Sherpas were killed on April 18, hiking officials said on Friday, making it almost certain that no one will summit the world’s highest mountain from Nepal during this year’s climbing season.
“Teams are leaving; it’s over for all,” leading climber Alan Arnette said on his Web site. “Time to mourn and regroup.”
Many expeditions abandoned base camp last week after the April 18 avalanche killed 16 guides who were cracking ice and fixing ropes on the upper reaches of the notorious Khumbu Icefall.
As the single deadliest disaster on the 8,850m Himalayan mountain, the incident has shocked the mountaineering community and highlighted the disproportionate risks that Nepalese guides run for a few thousand US dollars to help foreign climbers reach the summit.
In the days since, many of about 400 Sherpas still working the mountain have said they do not want to climb this year, both out of respect for those who were killed and because they want more insurance and other benefits for their families.
Californian mountain guide Adrian Ballinger said that even before the latest avalanches, there had been an exodus of teams from base camp due to the aggressive behavior of a group of younger Sherpas there.
He said these Sherpas were determined to ensure that no one scaled Everest from the south side during this year’s climbing season, which ends around May 25. It could be the first year of no summits since commercial climbs took off in the mid-1990s, though there are to be attempts on the north side from Tibet.
The tragedy has provoked criticism that the government takes hefty fees for climbing permits but does little for the guides themselves. This week it gave in to demands from the guides to pay compensation to the families of those killed and to raise the minimum insurance cover for mountain guides.
Guiding foreign climbers is the main job for Sherpas, helping them make up to US$8,000 or more each year in a country with an average annual income of just over US$700.
“I could see fresh avalanches falling at the same spot that was hit last week,” Ang Tshering Sherpa of the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA) said in Kathmandu after returning from base camp. No one was hurt in the latest avalanches as there was no one on the unstable Khumbu Icefall.
Ed Marzec, a 67-year-old Californian who had hoped to become the oldest American to scale Everest, said there was a “crack” of ice as he was waiting on Thursday for a plane to take him off base camp.
“The Sherpas say the ice conditions have changed so much and so rapidly, they have created extremely dangerous conditions which prevent finding a safe route to the summit,” he said in comments e-mailed by his friend, Daniel Beer.
Ballinger told reporters by phone from Kathmandu that when he left base camp early on Thursday afternoon there were only 40 to 50 climbers still there hoping to make an ascent. They had a similar number of Sherpas, though even they had gone to villages lower down because they felt threatened by other guides.
About a week ago there had been more than 600 people there.
Two big teams that were still holding out on Thursday later declared their expeditions were over, Arnette said.
Tilakram Pandey, an official at Nepal’s mountaineering department, said the so-called Icefall Doctors, who are responsible for making routes through the glacier up to Camp 1, would repair the trail for those who wanted to climb.
However, Ballinger said that with so few Sherpas left, it would be virtually impossible to set out.
“You need this critical mass of people to keep digging and putting the route back in,” he said. “Non-professional recreational climbers ... just don’t have the power to push through those conditions without significant Sherpa support.”
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