[The decision to reopen the peak is proving controversial, with at least one tour company canceling its spring expeditions over safety concerns. Meanwhile, some in Nepal want to see restrictions eased even further, as many of the cooks and porters who typically make a living as support staff for Everest climbs have struggled to feed their families amid the sudden loss of income.]
Those days are over: Nepal has
reopened to foreign tourists who test negative for the coronavirus and spend
one week in quarantine, allowing the main climbing season to begin
under near-normal conditions in April.
Mira Acharya, a tourism official
for the Nepalese government, told Reuters more than 300 foreign climbers are
expected to attempt the ascent this spring — only slightly less than the record
381 climbers who attempted to do so in 2019. That year, at least 11 people died
on the peak, and some of the fatalities were blamed on the long wait to descend to base camp.
The decision to reopen the peak is
proving controversial, with at least one tour company canceling its spring
expeditions over safety concerns. Meanwhile, some in Nepal want to see
restrictions eased even further, as many of the cooks and porters who typically
make a living as support staff for Everest climbs have struggled to feed their families amid the sudden loss
of income.
Nepal has technically been allowing
Everest expeditions since the fall, but the overwhelming majority of climbers
typically make the ascent between April and June, when conditions for reaching
the summit are most favorable. The Tibetan side of the mountain, which is
claimed by China, remains closed.
Most of the overcrowding in recent
years has taken place on the Nepali side of the mountain, which is considered
the easier route to the summit. Tourists and guides typically bunk together in
crowded tent cities as they wait to ascend the peak, creating the ideal
conditions for a superspreader event.
This year, Nepal’s protocols require that climbers sleep in
single-occupancy tents and that communal dining tents are well-ventilated and
allow space for social distancing.
[Mount
Everest has gotten so crowded that climbers are perishing in the traffic jams]
While foreign travelers must
provide proof that they tested negative for the coronavirus in the 72 hours
before flying to Nepal, and submit to another polymerase chain reaction test on
their fifth day of hotel quarantine, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility
they could still get sick once inside the country. Given that breathing at high
altitude is difficult under the best of conditions, an outbreak of the deadly
respiratory virus could be devastating.
In January, the California-based
tour company Alpenglow Expeditions announced plans to call off its Everest
expedition for the second year in a row. “We don’t have confidence in Tibet
opening for the spring, we don’t believe we can safely run an Everest climb in
the current circumstances from the Nepal side,” founder Adrian Ballinger wrote on
Instagram
Other outfits, including the
guiding company Furtenbach Adventures, plan to add safety measures such as
bringing along a team doctor and establishing a closed quarantine “bubble” at
base camp. Contact with other groups of climbers will be minimized, which will
be “hard and sad” but necessary, Lukas Furtenbach, the company’s owner, wrote
in an email to The Washington Post.
Many of the climbers planning to
take part in expeditions this spring have already been vaccinated, Furtenbach
added, but the decision to go forward with the treks was a difficult one.
“To be honest, it would have been
easier to cancel Everest,” he wrote. “At the end we do it for our clients, for
our staff, for our local partners, our superstar Sherpa team. They all need us
to run this expedition. To feed their families or to make their dreams come
true.”
While Nepal welcomed nearly 12 million tourists in 2019, that number
fell to just under 47,000 in 2020. Some guides aren’t sure how they
will survive without the return of foreign climbers. During the pandemic, many
of these guides have returned to eking out an existence by growing rye and potatoes in Nepal’s harsh terrain. “I
often think I will die of hunger before corona kills me,” Upendra Lama, one of
the out-of-work porters, told the New York Times in November.
Tourism is typically a $2 billion
industry in Nepal, with Everest expeditions contributing more than $300 million to the economy in 2019. Some
there want the government to further ease travel curbs, especially for
foreigners who are vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“For the industry to recover, we
need the government to take a drastic step,” Deepak Raj Joshi, former chief
executive of the Nepal Tourism Board, told the Kathmandu Post.
This report has been updated.
