Summit Stupid

There are so many over-salaried losers paying guides to take them to the top of Mount Everest, the famous mountain has become gridlocked with me-too-ers. Over two hundred people per day accomplish the so-called feat now:

This year some complained of waiting two-and-a-half hours in queues at bottlenecks on their way to the summit.

"There were just people everywhere," says Ayisha Jessa, 31, a keen climber from London who recently visited Everest's base camp. At the nearby village of Namachi, she says, "it's completely commercialised - everything is intended for the Western traveller".

"It isn't a wilderness experience - it's a McDonald's experience," says Graham Hoyland, an experienced mountaineer and author of The Last Hours on Everest, an account of the ill-fated 1924 ascent by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine.

There's also a bit of a garbage problem on the mountain:



So the next time you see some tool like this clown trumpeting his "achievement," remember that buying a lot of very expensive equipment and paying someone to guide you up a well-worn path is not exploration, it's exploitation. Try climbing to the top of Mauna Kea in January while wearing summer clothing and with no more equipment than a couple of canteens and a MRE. Of course, I only did that under duress. Because the platoon leader was an idiot... And I couldn't frag him... Not without going to prison, anyway. But that's another story.