---
title: "Mount Everest is Way More Dangerous Than You'd Think."
description: "Everest isn't just the world's tallest mountain—it is *lethal*. From air that is too thin to breathe, to cold that can put you in a tangle in mere moments, to geographic features that can just claim your life when they please, with no warning nor quarter offered—Everest has the lot. And even then, that's *before* you factor in the human element: crowds and their consequential bottlenecks, and even just poor decision making. They are, both of them, every bit as deadly as that which the mountain itself puts before you.\n\nA bucket list destination Everest may be then—the climb to eclipse all others—but a bracing mooch up to Machu Picchu, or a hardy romp up to the top of Mount Fuji it is not… which is exactly why a not insignificant percentage of those who try to conquer Everest… *never* come back down.\n\n## The Altitude That Kills\n\nThe most apparent danger of Everest is the sheer height of the thing; with the summit standing at **8,849 metres** above sea level. For reference, an airliner typically cruises at somewhere in the region of nine to 13 thousand metres… so yeah… it's *tall*—a shocking thing to say about the world's highest mountain, we know.\n\nAnd us humans, simply put, are just **not** designed to exist at such heights; they're downright *lethal* to us in fact—hence why the altitude vaguely above 8,000 metres or so is known as the \"death zone\", because when there, no two ways about it, your body **is** shutting off and dying… slowly but surely.\n\nChiefly, this is due to the oxygen—or lack thereof—at such heights.\n\nYou see, air—including the oxygen we need to stay alive within it—is a physical thing with mass, so it's affected by gravity, which pulls it down towards the surface. *But*, it doesn't just get pulled down into a thick blanket at ground (or sea) level, because air molecules are always smashing into each other and therefore bouncing around at incredible speeds… and with this happening with genuinely countless frequency, it settles into a dependable pattern of density.\n\nWe can put some *exact* figures on this too, thanks to the work of Respiratory Physiologist John West—who led an expedition up Everest in 1981, and then did all manner of interesting experiments while he was up there. And from those experiments, we know that the pressure up on the summit of Everest hovers somewhere around the 250 to 253 Torr sort of mark, specifically \"when the mountain is usually climbed, during May and October.\"\n\nIf you were wondering as well, 'Torr'—we had to look up ourselves what it is we'd freely admit—is just a pressure unit; and if you translate it into a unit that normal human beings *actually* use, you end up with roughly 335 Hectopascal, as compared to about 1,000 Hectopascal at sea level.\n\nIn other words, up at the top of Everest, the barometric pressure is only about a **third** of what it is down on a beach—so the pressure of oxygen in each breath is *drastically* lower.\n\nThat also means that all the 'death zone' *actually* is, is the altitude where acclimatisation basically becomes impossible, and the body starts losing ground even if you stop moving.\n\nAnd what does that *actually* feel like to experience, you no doubt want to know?\n\nWell, according to the American mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears—who climbed Everest **five** times during his life:\n\n> \"Climbing above (8,000 metres), even with bottled oxygen, is like running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw.\"\n\nThat's very much a 'headline' or 'TL;DR' summary of the matter though, because the lack of oxygen up on Everest also causes some *far* more specific physiological effects than just your lungs proving utterly insatiable in their appetite for oxygen—no matter how hard you breathe.\n\nFor example, one Dr Peter Hackett, speaking to PBS back in 1998, stated that:\n\n> \"Judgement becomes impaired, a person becomes confused. They don't even know where they are as it gets worse. People hallucinate. So, all sorts of mental changes can take place as the brain starts to become more and more abnormal.\"\n\nIt isn't **just** oxygen deprivation per se that causes such phenomena either, it's something called 'High-Altitude Cerebral Oedema', or 'HACE'—a consequential follow on from oxygen deprivation where your brain *literally* starts to swell up inside your skull.\n\n*Basically* how it works is the arteries feeding your brain panic, and open **right** up to try to ram more blood—and thus precious oxygen—through. That extra flow—plus the chemical chaos that comes with severe hypoxia—makes the microscopic blood vessels in your brain wall go leaky. Fluid then starts to seep out of them into the brain tissue like water into a sponge, and at the same time, the brain cells themselves are so short on oxygen that their internal 'pumps'—the little molecular machines that normally keep salt and water in balance—begin to fail, so they start puffing up too.\n\nThen, because all of that swelling is happening inside a rather inflexible bone helmet that has no flex or give in it, the pressure in your skull rises, the delicate wiring of your brain gets thrown out of whack, and your thoughts, balance, personality and grip on reality begin to unravel therefrom.\n\nWe have some solid numbers to consider alongside all that too, because in 2007, British Doctor Jeremy Windsor, climbing Everest as part of the 'Caudwell Xtreme Everest Research Expedition', drew some arterial blood from four climbers while perched on 'The Balcony'—a tiny little ledge some 8,400 metres up—and he summed the whole experiment, and his findings therefrom, as follows:\n\n> \"A very simple question was answered – what happens to our oxygen levels at 8,000m? The answer was incredible. Blood samples were taken … These were stored in ice and rushed down to the Western Cwm where they were processed. The results revealed that the mountaineers were surviving on just one quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level. These were comparable to figures found in patients on the verge of death. Extraordinary!\"\n\nAnd what can we say about that other than: **¼**?! We aren't exactly what you'd call medical professionals here… but that certainly helps it fall into place in our minds…\n\nHowever, let's not simply reduce all of this to a mere matter of intellectual curiosity. Because *yes*, while it is certainly interesting to learn about exactly how the extreme conditions up on Everest affect the human body—as it is also interesting to hear the testimony of people who *did* experience it and survive—there is no shortage of people who experienced it and *didn't* survive.\n\nPeople like, *say*, Scott Fischer, who went up in 1996, made it to the summit well enough, but then deteriorated **quickly** on his descent, before ultimately collapsing and passing away at 8,300 metres. According to his Sherpa—Lopsang Jangbu—HACE was no small part of what tragically got him in the end.\n\nConsider also, Francys Arsentiev. She made the ascent in 1998—being the first American woman ever to do so without supplementary oxygen in fact—but she died high on the mountain during the descent.\n\nIt's worth circling back to how she did it **without** supplementary oxygen too, because *yes* the vast, *vast* majority of people who climb Everest do it with big old tanks of oxygen on their backs, *but*, right on the sharp purist edge of things, there does indeed exist a minority who totally forgo it—with it being Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler who first proved it was possible on their 1978 ascent.\n\nAll their doing that did, however, was to evolve the question of *can* you climb Everest without bottled oxygen, to *should* you climb Everest without bottled oxygen.\n\nIt's a surprisingly contested matter you see, *some*—most in fact as far as we can tell—remain ardent that to climb Everest with supplemental oxygen is a rather silly idea. But then a minority exists who are **all** about it.\n\nWhat is **not** up for debate, however, is the fact that it *is* more dangerous to some degree. As evidence for that claim, consider a 2000 published University of Washington analysis of 1,173 Everest summiters from 1978 to 1999—as it found that 3% of climbers using supplemental oxygen died on the descent, compared with 8.3% of those who did not… pretty clear numbers… *right*?\n\nEither way—because we aren't going to pretend to be anything like a suitable arbiter in the matter—what we have learned remains unchanged: Everest, simply through its height alone, **will** try to kill you.\n\nIt's the unavoidable baseline of the mountain; while up there above the 8,000 metre mark, you're operating on ungodly low levels of oxygen, your brain and body are slowly failing, and if you're unlucky or unsuitably prepared, that which is failing, *will* fail, and you'll **never** come back down—just as hundreds of climbers didn't before you.\n\nAnd were it the only danger… because as you can see… we have more perils still to discuss yet…\n\n## Ruthless Weather\n\n…perils like, *say* the weather you get up there; which is… *extreme*, to put it mildly.\n\nConsider the temperatures alone, because according to University of Toronto Professors George Moore and John Semple—who wrote a *whole* paper about exactly this back in 2011—high up on Everest they routinely plummet below −30°C, and that's just as a true temperature. Throw windchill into the equation too and suddenly we're talking −45°C.\n\nAnd what do temperatures *that* low do to you, you ask?\n\nWell, according to Moore and Semple, again, because they talked about *exactly* this too, it isn't just that it's *very* cold, it's that it's *so* cold *so* often that you can literally timetable in how long catastrophic cold related injuries take to come about—with them using what they call \"facial frostbite time\" to do exactly that.\n\nIt's a metric that's exactly what it sounds like: the average time that exposed skin on the face—the most likely part to be exposed at some point during an ascent—takes to physically reach the freezing point of human tissue and begin forming ice crystals… i.e. the onset point of frostbite.\n\nAnd according to them, near Everest's summit, the typical frostbite time is always under **20** minutes—and in the spring climbing season it's typically about **five** minutes, with severe storms pushing it down further still towards **one** minute… **ONE**!!!\n\nIt's not *just* about the skin damage either—with the *real* killer being what that cold does to your body's ability to function more broadly.\n\nYou see, your body prioritises its core for survival; and not without good reason—you can survive without an arm, or a leg, but lose any of those vital organs squished up in the middle of you, and you have *had* it.\n\nIt **really** is your body choosing to sacrifice the bits you can *maybe* survive without in the most literal sense too; the blood that gets pulled away from your extremities—your fingers, your toes, your arms, your legs—goes straight to keeping your brain and heart as warm as can be… it's all very conscious on your subconscious' part.\n\nAnd of course, all of that comes at a price up on Everest, because as you lose blood flow from, say, your fingers, your dexterity *goes*, and suddenly you're fumbling with buckles you could flick open with a finger down at base camp, and that oxygen valve that you easily opened before, you can now barely even get a proper grip on.\n\nThat, in turn, slows you down, which leaves you more exposed for longer, which slows you down *again*, which leaves you more exposed for longer, *again*, and so on and so forth in what could quite easily become quite the cataclysmic cycle.\n\nMoore and Semple themselves discussed this particularly vicious loop in fact, and provided a case study: two different climbers—Lincoln Hall from Australia, and David Sharp from the UK—both of whom made the ascent at different times in 2006, but *also* both had to spend a night out up near the summit after things went awry.\n\nFor Hall, it was in late May, and after summiting from the north side, he fell badly ill on the descent and could not carry on. His Sherpa team eventually left him high on the mountain when their own oxygen was running out, reasoning that there was nothing further to be achieved by their staying other than making one corpse into three…\n\n**However**, in defiance of any reasonable expectation, the next day, Hall was *still alive*—he just about managed to draw attention to himself, as fresh summiteers passed, and was rescued, eventually making a full recovery.\n\nSharp, *however*, he did not survive his equivalent ordeal.\n\nHe made his ascent a week or so before Hall, and after setting off late, climbing solo, carrying only two bottles of oxygen instead of the go-to five, and **not** bringing a radio—not far off *everything* you could do to tempt fate basically—he was up the North Side, badly depleted, and unable to go on, took refuge at 'Green Boot's Cave' 8,500 metres up; so called because it contains a particularly famous body wearing the titular footwear—typically believed to be Tsewang Paljor who died back on a 1996 ascent.\n\nBy the time other teams encountered him the following day, he was still alive, but **severely** hypoxic and badly frostbitten—to the extent that even when people did try to rouse him and even share oxygen, he couldn't properly respond or get to his feet. Over 40 climbers in all would pass him before he himself passed.\n\nIt was the same mountain, the same season, the same rough height, the same basic nightmare scenario—alone, hypoxic, sitting out the night in the Death Zone—but two *completely* different endings.\n\nAnd to figure the reason for the differing outcomes out, Moore and Semple stripped away the drama of it all, and asked a brutally simple question: what was the weather *actually* doing while they both sat there?\n\nAnd their answer was grimly simple: Hall got lucky with the weather, and Sharp didn't. Hall was in conditions that were ever so milder than the seasonal norm, while Sharp was in conditions that were ever so harsher than the seasonal norm—on the order of about a standard deviation either side.\n\n**That** was it—*one* flick away from the norm either way, *two* away from one another directly. So extreme is the weather up on Everest, that when things go wrong, fluctuations *that* small can make the difference between life and death…\n\nAnd that's just the *cold* bit of the weather; we haven't even begun to consider what happens when snow and wind get thrown into the equation too.\n\nPerhaps an example would explain it best, though—specifically the 10th through the 11th of May 1996 Mount Everest Disaster.\n\nIt started out straightforward enough—or as straightforward as anything ever is on Everest anyway—with multiple commercial teams, including one led by Kiwi Rob Hall, and American Scott Fischer, all starting out on the South Route.\n\nBut it didn't take long for things to start going wrong, with climbers finding that **multiple** fixed ropes had not yet been set at key technical points like the Balcony and the Hillary Step—a queue then forming as groups that had set off well-spaced from one another all, stumbled into the same bottleneck that they could do all but bugger all about.\n\nAnd that took a *long* time; so long that come 2pm—the usual 'safety first give it up as a bad job and turn around' time—multiple groups were still heading *up*.\n\nThen—right at the *worst* possible moment—came the turn in the weather; snowfall and wind that just built and built through the afternoon and into the evening.\n\nThe well-trodden track, **gone**. The fixed ropes, **gone**. Visibility, **gone**. And because of it all, 33 climbers were trapped up the mountain.\n\nBy the time things cleared up the following day, 8 of that 33 were to remain on Everest forever: both Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, Adventure Consultants guide Andy Harris, clients Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, and three members of an Indo-Tibetan Border Police team on the north side Dorje Morup, Tsewang Smanla, and a name that should sound familiar—Tsewang Paljor.\n\nAnd make no mistake, clear and evident mistakes were made on that tragic day—the ropes, the ignoring of turnaround times by some—but **none** of them on their own locked in the disaster; they only did their damage when the weather piled in on top, once the wind and snow wiped the trail, buried the ropes, destroyed visibility, dropped temperatures, and stranded 33 climbers up there…\n\n## Nature's Deadliest Obstacles\n\nUp until now, we've been talking about Everest trying to kill you in a metaphoric kind of way; because while the weather and the temperature are part of the mountain in a sense, they aren't an actual *physical* part of the 8,849-metre lump of rock itself, are they?\n\nIcefalls and crevasses though, they **absolutely** are. They're the mountain's own built-in booby traps in fact—great walls of flowing ice, and deep dark holes that can swallow you in a second if you put even so much as a boot wrong. And for the former, there is no better example of that than the Khumbu Icefall…\n\nIt's not even *that* high up by Everest standards either, sitting just above Base Camp, at an altitude given as 5,486 metres, on the southern side of the mountain—so not only are we *not* talking on the final 'push' between Camp 3 at roughly 7,200 metres, and the summit, but we're not even talking beyond Camp 1, which sits at 6,096 metres.\n\n**However**, just because the air floating around it might be comparatively smothering in its thickness—at least compared to what we've seen so far—that doesn't mean it's not dangerous, because it is, and it *does*, claim lives.\n\nConsider, as an example, the 1970 Mount Everest Disaster; and *yes*, there are multiple Mount Everest Disasters—with the year not being a handy extra sprinkling of information for yourselves, but **the** accepted nomenclature by which we distinguish between the multiple mass-casualty catastrophes that have befallen the mountain.\n\nAnd of course, this one happened right down on the Khumbu Icefall, specifically on the 5th of April, when a Japanese team—the very one there to film the once upon a time rather famous documentary *The Man Who Skied Down Everest* in fact—were making their ascent when a **huge** chunk of ice around the 5,700 metre kind of mark just… *let go*, and avalanched straight toward a group of load-carrying Sherpas who were ahead of the main party—killing **six** of them outright.\n\nAnd because we are **not** just reducing the Sherpas to background characters in this, as so many rather distastefully do, their names were Mima Norbu, Nima Dorje, Tshering Tarkey, Pasang, Kunga Norbu, and Kami Tshering—all of them masters of the land, and experts in their trade, but just unfortunately lacking in that one vital mountaineering supply that mother nature packs for you: *luck*.\n\nAnd for an even more modern example of the same basic horror, we can jump forward forty-four years to the 2014 Everest Avalanche—which, again, played out right there on the Khumbu Icefall.\n\nIt happened on the 18th of April, and again, as before, a **huge** bulge of ice hanging directly about the Icefall simply broke free—we have measurements for this one too, with the largest block of the lot estimated at being around 34.5 metres high, and weighing roughly **14 thousand** tonnes.\n\nAnd of course, it made straight for a team of around 25 Sherpas, who were directly below, and doing the oh so unappreciated graft that makes the scaling of Everest by amateur climbers possible: hauling oxygen tanks, tents, and fuel, fine-tuning the route with ropes and ladders, and so on and so forth.\n\nWhen the ice hit, 16 were killed almost instantly; with 13 of the bodies being recovered within two days, and the final three having to be left entombed because it was simply too dangerous to dig any deeper. And their names:\n\n- Mingma Nuru Sherpa\n- Dorji Sherpa\n- Ang Tshiri Sherpa\n- Nima Sherpa\n- Tenzing Chottar Sherpa\n- Phurba Ongyal Sherpa\n- Lakpa Tenjing Sherpa\n- Chhering Ongchu Sherpa\n- Dorjee Khatri\n- Then Dorjee Sherpa\n- Phur Temba Sherpa\n- Aankaji Sherpa\n- Pem Tenji Sherpa\n- Aash Bahadur Gurung\n- Pasang Karma Sherpa\n- Asman Tamang\n\nIt was the single deadliest day on Everest… *up to that point*, and it was down on the Khumbu Icefall, barely even beyond basecamp—a place most people have filed away as 'something to get out of the way' so that you can get on with the *real* climbing.\n\nAs for crevasses generally, they—in simple terms—are cracks in a glacier or an ice sheet. **But**, on Everest, they are oh so much more than *just* that, as they can often be tens of metres deep, and… most terrifyingly of all, can be roofed by a thin little lid of snow that looks like *everything* else around it… right up until the point that someone steps on it and falls through it.\n\nThe Khumbu Icefall in particular is absolutely riddled with them, as is the broader glacier above, up in the Western Cwm between Camp 1 and Camp 2—a 'cwm' just being what we would all call a valley.\n\n**However**, crevasses aren't *usually* a problem, the bulk of them are known and monitored, and those that aren't are quickly added to the list when they are first discovered—for the particularly perilous ones that are in the way too they'll even lash together little ad-hoc bridges from ladders and leave them in-situ… even including fixed ropes *just to be safe*.\n\nKeyword there though: **usually**.\n\nConsider, for a moment, the death of Babu Chiri—a Sherpa.\n\nCome 2001, he was one of the **juggernauts** of Everest: 10 full summits to his name, a high-speed climb of the 'normal' Southern Route in under 17 hours among them, and a frankly wild 1999 stunt where he spent 21 hours on the summit… **without supplementary oxygen**.\n\nSkill, raw natural talent, a mountaineering genetic jackpot, and balls not of steel, but of pure aerospace grade titanium—these are all things of which he was not lacking. But none of that mattered in the end; because as we have already seen oh so many times… his luck ran out.\n\nIt was the 29th of April, in the Western Cwm on the south-side route, in the 6,500 metres slash Camp 2 kind of area; he took a step on what appeared to be perfectly normal ground… and he fell through—a narrow natural bridge over the top having given way under his weight. Killed outright by the fall; his body was recovered two days later.\n\nAnd that's the terrifying thing about crevasses—the *randomness*. Sure, they aren't *usually* a problem, but when they are, you have no say in the matter—if they can get Chiri, they can get **anyone**.\n\nTragically, too, Chiri is *far* from the only life claimed by Everest's glaciers. But, as Namgyal Tshering would be able to attest, sometimes it isn't *just* a matter of bad luck—as he died just below Camp 1 at roughly 6,000 metres, after falling about 30 metres from a ladder into a crevasse… and witnesses said he was **not** clipped into a safety line.\n\nAnd the obvious question there is *why* he wasn't on the line in the first place—because those safety lines were very much there, and they absolutely **do** work when people use them.\n\nThe uncomfortable answer, according to people who were *actually* on the mountain that season, is that some Sherpas simply didn't always bother. Early reports pulled together by National Geographic and others quote climbers and guides saying that it was \"not completely uncommon\" for Sherpas to just race across the ladders un-clipped when they're fresh, confident, and have done the same crossing a hundred times before—clipping in and out takes a few extra seconds, and seconds matter when you're paid to be fast and efficient.\n\nAnd that very much brings us to something that you can bolt on a secondary element of basically *everything* else that we discuss: complacency.\n\nAs Anano Atabegashvili rather succinctly put it while writing for the 'Summiters Club':\n\n> \"Here's a hard truth: most Everest deaths don't happen on the way up. They happen on the way down. Summit fever is real. People push too hard, spend too long at the top, or run out of oxygen on the descent. Exhaustion sets in. So does complacency. The climb isn't over until you're safely back at Base Camp. Experienced guides often remind climbers: the summit is only halfway. … Everest doesn't forgive mistakes, especially on the way down.\"\n\nWrinkle brain derived data supports that last point too, with a 2008 report in the *British Medical Journal* finding that, of Everest mountaineers who died after climbing above 8,000 metres… **56%** died during the descent from the summit. So not a *huge* difference, admittedly, but very much still supportive of Atabegashvili's overall idea.\n\nOn the point of 'complacency' more broadly, however, consider the view of Alison Levine—a woman who's stood on top of the world twice in her time—as she wrote a *whole* article titled *Fear is Fine. But Complacency Will Kill You*, themed around the Khumbu Icefall, incidentally, and in it she states that:\n\n> \"The threat is constant, and when it comes to that icefall, there is never a time or place you feel totally safe. … As a veteran of two Everest expeditions, I've probably been though the icefall sixteen times. And while you would think it would become less and less frightening the more times I climbed through it, it didn't … the risk is never gone, and plenty of experienced climbers have lost their lives while going through it. … I knew there was still a tremendous amount of risk present, but I focused on my surroundings. I was more agile, more able to adapt and move quickly when the ice around me moved and shifted. And this experience taught me one of the most critical lessons: … Fear is fine—it's just a normal, human emotion. But complacency will kill you.\"\n\nWe could go on, but you get the idea; the people who've *actually* been are **very** clear about the grave danger that complacency poses.\n\nBringing it back to the core matter of this chapter now though—that of geographic danger—let's highlight some specific points of particular danger, starting right up near the very top with the innocuous-sounding but utterly lethal 'Cornice Traverse'.\n\nIt's a short little ridge that links the South Summit—about 8,750 metres up—to the final rock barrier of the Hillary Step, then up to the *true* summit, and just a quick look at the place goes some way to explaining the danger; you've got a narrow crest of snow and ice perched on a rocky spine, with roughly 2,400 metres of near-vertical Southwest Face dropping away to your left and around 3,000 metres of Kangshung Face vanishing into Tibet to your right. It is, by far and away, the **single** most exposed section of the entire ascent.\n\nAnd, to be fair, on a *good* day, one where the snow is firm, and the fixed ropes are all behaving, most modern teams treat it as an awkward, if nerve-rattling shuffle, rather than a quite literal do or die flip of the coin. You clip into the line, you plant your crampons exactly where the boot track already is, and you keep your wits about you—as much as you can at that altitude anyway—placing one foot in front of the other, until you are through it.\n\n**But**, on a *bad* day, it's warm enough that the snow under your crampons has turned to porridge so every step is *slippery*, the jet stream hasn't quite behaved the way the forecast promised so the wind is *brutal*, and there are a few dozen people trying to squeeze through the same fifty-odd metres of ridge in both directions, so you don't even have elbow room at points—be it *proverbially* or *literally*.\n\nIt's hardly a surprise then, that the Cornice Traverse has claimed no shortage of lives.\n\nTake, as an example, the 2024 deaths of British climber Daniel Paterson, and his Sherpa guide Pas Tenji. They summited in the early hours of the 21st of May with an 8K Expeditions team… and then *disappeared* on the descent… after an ice cornice collapsed near the Cornice Traverse. They were never found.\n\nDrop back down the mountain a bit, and there's also another section that seasoned climbers will happily rank right up there with the Icefall and the Cornice Traverse for its sheer danger: the Lhotse Face—a *huge* blue-ice wall that rears up above Camp 2, which *every* south-side Everest climber has to climb to reach Camp 3 and the South Col.\n\nIn dry, technical terms it's about 1,100 metres of hard glacial ice angled at around 40–50 degrees, with occasional bulges that steepen up towards 80 degrees, cut by two rocky bands—the Yellow Band and the Geneva Spur—on its upper half.\n\nAnd to learn about its dangers, we have only to turn to British climber Peter Legate.\n\nIn 2002 he was up at Camp 3 on the Face, around 7,150 metres up, riding out a truly wicked storm, before he then decided to drop back down to Base Camp to rest and regroup for another summit attempt. Then, sometime between Camps 2 and 3, he slipped on that steep blue ice in the bad weather, and went sliding thousands of feet down the Lhotse Face… with his body later being found at its base.\n\nAnd tragically, nor is his fate an exclusive one, as back in 1996, Taiwanese climber Chen Yu Nan—as part of an expedition often criticised for a string of **poor** decisions—became the first fatality of that season thanks to the Lhotse Face.\n\n*Basically*, Chen stepped out from his tent platform near Camp 3 on the Lhotse Face without wearing crampons, slipped on icy terrain, and fell into a deep crevasse… He *was* hauled out alive, but his condition soon deteriorated, and he died before getting back even to Base Camp.\n\nTop and bottom of all this then, when we talk about \"Nature's Deadliest Obstacles\" on Everest, we are *not* merely being poetic; we are talking about very literal ambush points built into the very mountain itself—be they general features found everywhere, or specific named features that act as chokepoints…\n\n## The Human Element\n\nIn *stark* contrast to the natural dangers of the mountain itself, is **the** most unnatural element of all: Man.\n\nBecause, *yes*, our very being there creates new perils—ones that would **never** be a factor if we were to just leave Everest well enough alone.\n\nHere's *the* photo that exemplifies it best. Uploaded to Instagram on the 23rd of May 2019 by the British-Nepalese Gurkha and Special Boat Service veteran—and thus absolute weapon of a man—Nirmal Purja. It was just one of two photos uploaded to celebrate his ascent to the summit the day before… and nothing more… *at first*.\n\nHe made only a passing reference to the crowd pictured, literally, \"I summited Everest at 5:30 am and Lhotse 3:45 pm despite of the heavy traffic (roughly 320 people)\", and that was it.\n\nBut then the internet saw it, and collectively said \"What. The. F*ck?!\". With much discussion then following about the oversaturation of climbers on Everest and what, exactly, that photo said about our relationship with the mountain.\n\nWithin a couple of days it had jumped from Instagram to the front pages of the *New York Times* and the BBC, and was being held up as **the** visual of a season where Nepal had issued a then record 381 south-side permits, and a short, twitchy weather window had forced *everyone* onto the same handful of summit days… during which *at least* 11 people died.\n\nAnd that's the thing about 'overcrowding' on Everest: it isn't just *annoying*, it isn't just environmentally *damaging* even… it is **dangerous**. It creates *new* ways to die that simply wouldn't have existed if you didn't have a few hundred people all clipped to the same bit of rope up near the summit.\n\nFor example, what is a queue? Fundamentally, it's *waiting about*, and *where* are you waiting about on your final push to the summit of Everest? The death zone. That place where you are slowly *dying* the **entire** time you are in it. And that's to say nothing of the hit it takes to your finite oxygen supply; which doesn't care if you are waiting about, and doesn't care if you're pushing it hard—if that valve is open, it **is** trickling down at one pace or another.\n\nAs Alan Arnette put it, who has been on the mountain for four separate seasons, and summitted once, \"Crowds, while not the only reason people die on Everest, slow a climber's pace and thus increase their fatigue and use of oxygen.\"\n\nHe then noted that some of the people who died \"spent 10 or 12 hours to get to the summit and four to six hours to get back down to the South Col\"—in other words, a *14 to 18 hour* day in one of the worst places on Earth to be hanging around.\n\n*Outside Magazine* boiled the problem down even more brutally: after those long, delayed summit pushes, \"It's rare to carry oxygen for that much time, thus forcing the Sherpas to turn down the flow or give up their own personal supply.\" In plain English: if queues blow your carefully-timed schedule to bits, **somebody** is going to run out of oxygen while still dangling off the mountain.\n\nYou can see that play out in individual deaths too, as on the 22nd of May 2019, *both* Donald Cash—American—and Anjali Kulkarni—Indian—both died while descending from the summit.\n\nCash's operator later told reporters that she fainted with high-altitude sickness after spending a long time waiting near the top, while Kulkarni's company said \"heavy traffic caused her death as she had to wait to descend.\" The *Kathmandu Post* was even more direct, noting that \"two climbers died on Wednesday due to an hours-long 'traffic jam'.\" In other words then: it **was** the crowds that killed them.\n\nMoving beyond just the delays that overcrowding causes, however, there's also the fact that they force already narrow and difficult to navigate routes into one-way valves where you **cannot** easily flow back if you find yourself in a tangle.\n\nThe summit ridge, the Hillary Step area, the Balcony, the top of the Lhotse Face—these are all one-person-wide bits of ground with thousands of metres of exposure on either side, linked by a *single* fixed rope.\n\nAnd once a queue forms, you can't just step off to overtake, because 'off' is *literally* a two- or three-**kilometre** fall, and neither can you quickly reverse back to safer ground if the weather takes an unpleasant turn—because there are 30 people clipped to the same line behind you.\n\nConsider also, just how badly overcrowding interacts with inexperience.\n\nBecause the days of Edmund Hillary are **gone**. No longer are climbers heading up Everest having to plot their specific path as they go, sussing out whether this way or that way is likely to be the more perilous of the two, and having to screw in their own ropes as they go.\n\nNo. Now, today, the path is basically pre-fabricated for you. Sherpas and high-altitude workers go up first and stitch the whole thing together with fixed ropes and ladder bridges, then commercial outfits follow behind with long conga lines of clients whose job is, essentially, to clip into the rope and shuffle after the person in front.\n\nDoes that mean climbing Everest is easy? **Absolutely not**, and frankly that'd be nothing if not a bold point of argumentation given *everything* that we've already learned. But does it mean that climbing Everest is easy-*er* now than at any other point in human history? *Yes*, that certainly seems fair to say.\n\nAnd that attracts a different sort of crowd. Still plenty of bold and gallant climbers wanting to achieve the natural apex to their vertically orientated trades, certainly, but undeniably—and to be quite frank about it—simple thrill seekers, experience collectors, and those hoping that burning some of the stacks of paper they earned in a drab grey air-conditioned cube on something wild might **finally** get their brains to pump some serotonin for the first time since 1983.\n\nThat's not just 'what we reckon' either, the clever sorts concur; with the 2020 paper *Mountaineers on Mount Everest: Effects of Age, Sex, Experience, and Crowding on Rates of Success and Death*, trying to get to the bottom of—among other things—the very matter of how many Everest summiteers were inexperienced.\n\nAnd it concluded that for people attempting Everest for first time between 1990 and 2005, a mere **37.7%** had experience on at least one other Nepalese or border peak. Then, between 2006 and 2018, the figure dropped further still to a mere 30.7%.\n\nFlip it the other way around, and it means that something in the region of **70%** of first-time Everest climbers have **no** recorded prior high-altitude experience on Nepalese peaks… *at all*.\n\n**However**, and this is where the matter gets all the more interesting—there is a *stark* divide on the point of whether or not that inexperience is actually dangerous.\n\nThe wrinkle brains, *typically*, and rather shockingly, say that no it isn't. Point in case—the 2012 *BMJ* published paper *Effects of Experience and Commercialisation on Survival in Himalayan Mountaineering: Retrospective Cohort Study* by Westhoff et al.\n\nIt looked at nearly **24,000** climbers in all and concluded that, after you control for things like route, peak, age and season, \"increased Himalayan experience was not associated with a change in the odds of death\".\n\nAnd likewise—just to show that wasn't a one-off conclusion—the penultimate paper that we mentioned, the 2020 one, found that:\n\n> \"Probabilities of dying were also similar for men and women, increased for climbers about 60 and older (especially for the few that had summited), and were independent of experience.\"\n\n\"Independent of experience\". I.e. it had no bearing *at all* whether or not it was the ghost of Hillary himself tabbing up the side of Everest, or a tech-bro up there to snap a new LinkedIn profile picture… those facts alone did **not** alter their chances of death.\n\nThen there's the climbers themselves who—again, *typically*—say the exact opposite; that to go up Everest lacking experience is to mark yourself for death.\n\nGoing back to Alan Arnette, by way of an example, he says the following in one of his *big* Everest think-pieces:\n\n> \"Everest is not for the inexperienced, the novice or someone looking for a walk-up. … There are no shortcuts. You have to put the work in before you arrive. It is hard and people die. Base Camp is not a 5 star hotel. If you come expecting a walk-up, most likely you will take advantage of that helicopter ride out, and not in a good way.\"\n\nThen there's Mark Jenkins, who summited Everest twice:\n\n> \"Too many inexperienced climbers are attempting to scale Mount Everest. A few are losing their lives. … (It) has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions.\"\n\nAll in all, you get the idea then: specific details of *how much* human activity acts as a self-fulfilling ouroboros of danger may be contested, but the base idea really isn't—Everest is plenty lethal on its own, and adding people into the equation **does** only send the danger in one direction. *Upwards*…\n\n## The Final Toll\n\nAnd with that being all the individual ways that Everest is *way* more dangerous than you'd think covered, there is just one last thing to discover: not the individual point proving deaths that we've been discussing thus far… but the bigger picture… the **total** number of deaths.\n\nAccording to the latest edition of 'Everest by the Numbers', a yearly statistical summary published by Alan Arnette, the mountain has been summited a total of 13,737 times by 7,563 people up to December 2025. A *tiny* number really, not even enough people to fill a middling sized stadium—with 339 recorded deaths across Everest's expedition history since 1922.\n\nAnd what of those bodies? *Some* do come down—if the death happens low enough, if the weather and terrain allow it, and if a team can be assembled without creating even more corpses in the process.\n\nBut above the death zone, 'bringing them home' very quickly stops being a question of willpower, and becomes a brutally pragmatic question of physics and ethics.\n\nBecause at 8,000 metres, even the act of mere *walking* is hard; trying to haul a deadweight human body down fixed ropes, across ladders, over crevasses and through bottlenecks is a whole different level of ordeal. Which is why so many—around **60%** of all who ever died up there—are left where they fell: not out of disrespect, but because the mountain makes retrieval either suicidal, ruinously expensive, or simply impossible.\n\nAnd so, over time they freeze into the landscape, and then—slowly—get swallowed by snow, ice, and gravity until they disappear into Everest's own long memory… or at least… they do in the most dignified set of circumstances.\n\nIn the least dignified set of circumstances—where they never fall beneath the line of the snow—they become part of the very fabric of the mountain itself; often becoming **waypoints** by which future summiteers find their way.\n\nRemember Tsewang Paljor, the supposed identity of 'Green Boots'? He's one of them… as too is Francys Arsentiev, or as she is now known to climbers, 'Sleeping Beauty'…\n\nAnd that, really, is the final indictment—the final thing you need to know to understand that Mount Everest is **way** more dangerous than you'd think.\n\n*Not* the statistics buried away in academic papers, *not* the dramatic tales of death and survival in the face of the very worst that nature can throw at you, but the thing that you can look in the eyes—the person who once was full of ambition, of drive, their muscles tingling with adrenaline from the excitement of what they were about to tackle…. frozen in time by the very mountain they wanted to conquer… reduced to a mere signpost for future aspirants…\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Everest's 'death zone' above 8,000 metres has only one-third of sea-level air pressure, causing irreversible bodily shutdown and fatal brain swelling.\n- Extreme cold near the summit can cause frostbite in under five minutes, with minor weather fluctuations determining survival during overnight emergencies.\n- The Khumbu Icefall and hidden snow-bridged crevasses kill even elite climbers instantly, with complacency about safety gear proving equally deadly.\n- Overcrowding creates lethal bottlenecks in the death zone, forcing climbers to exhaust finite oxygen supplies while trapped on narrow, exposed ridges.\n- Around 60% of Everest fatalities remain on the mountain forever, their preserved bodies becoming grim waypoints for subsequent climbers.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is the 'death zone' on Mount Everest?\n\nThe 'death zone' is the altitude above approximately 8,000 metres where acclimatisation becomes impossible and the body starts losing ground even if you stop moving. At this height, the barometric pressure is only about a third of sea level pressure, meaning the pressure of oxygen in each breath is drastically lower. The human body is literally shutting off and dying slowly but surely in this zone.\n\n### How low are oxygen levels at 8,000 metres on Everest?\n\nAccording to British Doctor Jeremy Windsor's 2007 research as part of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Research Expedition, climbers at 8,400 metres were surviving on just one quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level. These figures were comparable to patients on the verge of death.\n\n### What is High-Altitude Cerebral Oedema (HACE) and how does it affect climbers?\n\nHACE is a condition where the brain literally starts to swell up inside the skull due to oxygen deprivation. The arteries feeding the brain open wide to force more blood through, causing microscopic blood vessels in the brain wall to become leaky. Fluid seeps into brain tissue, and brain cells themselves puff up due to failing internal pumps. Because this swelling happens inside the inflexible skull, pressure rises, throwing brain function out of whack and causing impaired judgement, confusion, hallucinations, and loss of grip on reality.\n\n### How dangerous is it to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen?\n\nA 2000 University of Washington analysis of 1,173 Everest summiters from 1978 to 1999 found that 3% of climbers using supplemental oxygen died on the descent, compared with 8.3% of those who did not use supplemental oxygen. While some climbers argue for climbing without oxygen, it is objectively more dangerous to some degree.\n\n### How cold does it get near Everest's summit and how quickly can frostbite occur?\n\nAccording to University of Toronto Professors George Moore and John Semple, temperatures near Everest's summit routinely plummet below −30°C, and with windchill this can reach −45°C. The typical 'facial frostbite time' (time for exposed skin to reach freezing point) is always under 20 minutes, typically about 5 minutes in spring climbing season, and severe storms can push this down towards 1 minute.\n\n### What role did weather play in the different outcomes for Lincoln Hall and David Sharp in 2006?\n\nBoth climbers spent a night out near the summit in similar circumstances in 2006. Lincoln Hall survived and was rescued, while David Sharp died. Moore and Semple's analysis found the critical difference was weather: Hall experienced conditions about one standard deviation milder than seasonal norm, while Sharp experienced conditions about one standard deviation harsher. This small fluctuation made the difference between life and death.\n\n### What happened during the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster?\n\nOn May 10-11, 1996, multiple commercial teams on the South Route encountered missing fixed ropes causing bottlenecks, leading many to pass the 2pm turnaround time. A severe weather turn then brought snowfall and wind that eliminated the track, fixed ropes, and visibility, trapping 33 climbers. Eight died: Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Yasuko Namba, Dorje Morup, Tsewang Smanla, and Tsewang Paljor.\n\n### What is the Khumbu Icefall and why is it dangerous?\n\nThe Khumbu Icefall sits just above Base Camp at 5,486 metres on Everest's southern side. It consists of great walls of flowing ice with deep crevasses, making it one of the mountain's built-in booby traps. It claimed 6 Sherpas in the 1970 disaster and 16 Sherpas in the 2014 avalanche (the single deadliest day on Everest up to that point), despite being relatively low on the mountain.\n\n### How does overcrowding on Everest create new dangers?\n\nOvercrowding forces climbers to wait in queues in the death zone where their bodies are slowly dying and oxygen supplies deplete regardless of activity. It creates bottlenecks on narrow, exposed sections where climbers cannot easily turn back. In 2019, a record 381 south-side permits and a short weather window forced roughly 320 people onto the same summit days, contributing to at least 11 deaths. Two climbers, Donald Cash and Anjali Kulkarni, died on May 22, 2019 specifically due to hours-long 'traffic jams' causing delays.\n\n### What percentage of Everest climbers die during descent versus ascent?\n\nAccording to a 2008 report in the British Medical Journal, of Everest mountaineers who died after climbing above 8,000 metres, 56% died during the descent from the summit. This supports the observation that 'most Everest deaths don't happen on the way up, they happen on the way down.'\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Places video: Mount Everest is Way More Dangerous Than You'd Think.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaA8KKGAl4)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Aerial_landscape_view_%282017%29.jpg) by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage"
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<!-- aeo:section start="lede" -->
Everest isn't just the world's tallest mountain—it is *lethal*. From air that is too thin to breathe, to cold that can put you in a tangle in mere moments, to geographic features that can just claim your life when they please, with no warning nor quarter offered—Everest has the lot. And even then, that's *before* you factor in the human element: crowds and their consequential bottlenecks, and even just poor decision making. They are, both of them, every bit as deadly as that which the mountain itself puts before you.

A bucket list destination Everest may be then—the climb to eclipse all others—but a bracing mooch up to Machu Picchu, or a hardy romp up to the top of Mount Fuji it is not… which is exactly why a not insignificant percentage of those who try to conquer Everest… *never* come back down.

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-altitude-that-kills" -->
## The Altitude That Kills

The most apparent danger of Everest is the sheer height of the thing; with the summit standing at **8,849 metres** above sea level. For reference, an airliner typically cruises at somewhere in the region of nine to 13 thousand metres… so yeah… it's *tall*—a shocking thing to say about the world's highest mountain, we know.

And us humans, simply put, are just **not** designed to exist at such heights; they're downright *lethal* to us in fact—hence why the altitude vaguely above 8,000 metres or so is known as the "death zone", because when there, no two ways about it, your body **is** shutting off and dying… slowly but surely.

Chiefly, this is due to the oxygen—or lack thereof—at such heights.

You see, air—including the oxygen we need to stay alive within it—is a physical thing with mass, so it's affected by gravity, which pulls it down towards the surface. *But*, it doesn't just get pulled down into a thick blanket at ground (or sea) level, because air molecules are always smashing into each other and therefore bouncing around at incredible speeds… and with this happening with genuinely countless frequency, it settles into a dependable pattern of density.

We can put some *exact* figures on this too, thanks to the work of Respiratory Physiologist John West—who led an expedition up Everest in 1981, and then did all manner of interesting experiments while he was up there. And from those experiments, we know that the pressure up on the summit of Everest hovers somewhere around the 250 to 253 Torr sort of mark, specifically "when the mountain is usually climbed, during May and October."

If you were wondering as well, 'Torr'—we had to look up ourselves what it is we'd freely admit—is just a pressure unit; and if you translate it into a unit that normal human beings *actually* use, you end up with roughly 335 Hectopascal, as compared to about 1,000 Hectopascal at sea level.

In other words, up at the top of Everest, the barometric pressure is only about a **third** of what it is down on a beach—so the pressure of oxygen in each breath is *drastically* lower.

That also means that all the 'death zone' *actually* is, is the altitude where acclimatisation basically becomes impossible, and the body starts losing ground even if you stop moving.

And what does that *actually* feel like to experience, you no doubt want to know?

Well, according to the American mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears—who climbed Everest **five** times during his life:

> "Climbing above (8,000 metres), even with bottled oxygen, is like running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw."

That's very much a 'headline' or 'TL;DR' summary of the matter though, because the lack of oxygen up on Everest also causes some *far* more specific physiological effects than just your lungs proving utterly insatiable in their appetite for oxygen—no matter how hard you breathe.

For example, one Dr Peter Hackett, speaking to PBS back in 1998, stated that:

> "Judgement becomes impaired, a person becomes confused. They don't even know where they are as it gets worse. People hallucinate. So, all sorts of mental changes can take place as the brain starts to become more and more abnormal."

It isn't **just** oxygen deprivation per se that causes such phenomena either, it's something called 'High-Altitude Cerebral Oedema', or 'HACE'—a consequential follow on from oxygen deprivation where your brain *literally* starts to swell up inside your skull.

*Basically* how it works is the arteries feeding your brain panic, and open **right** up to try to ram more blood—and thus precious oxygen—through. That extra flow—plus the chemical chaos that comes with severe hypoxia—makes the microscopic blood vessels in your brain wall go leaky. Fluid then starts to seep out of them into the brain tissue like water into a sponge, and at the same time, the brain cells themselves are so short on oxygen that their internal 'pumps'—the little molecular machines that normally keep salt and water in balance—begin to fail, so they start puffing up too.

Then, because all of that swelling is happening inside a rather inflexible bone helmet that has no flex or give in it, the pressure in your skull rises, the delicate wiring of your brain gets thrown out of whack, and your thoughts, balance, personality and grip on reality begin to unravel therefrom.

We have some solid numbers to consider alongside all that too, because in 2007, British Doctor Jeremy Windsor, climbing Everest as part of the 'Caudwell Xtreme Everest Research Expedition', drew some arterial blood from four climbers while perched on 'The Balcony'—a tiny little ledge some 8,400 metres up—and he summed the whole experiment, and his findings therefrom, as follows:

> "A very simple question was answered – what happens to our oxygen levels at 8,000m? The answer was incredible. Blood samples were taken … These were stored in ice and rushed down to the Western Cwm where they were processed. The results revealed that the mountaineers were surviving on just one quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level. These were comparable to figures found in patients on the verge of death. Extraordinary!"

And what can we say about that other than: **¼**?! We aren't exactly what you'd call medical professionals here… but that certainly helps it fall into place in our minds…

However, let's not simply reduce all of this to a mere matter of intellectual curiosity. Because *yes*, while it is certainly interesting to learn about exactly how the extreme conditions up on Everest affect the human body—as it is also interesting to hear the testimony of people who *did* experience it and survive—there is no shortage of people who experienced it and *didn't* survive.

People like, *say*, Scott Fischer, who went up in 1996, made it to the summit well enough, but then deteriorated **quickly** on his descent, before ultimately collapsing and passing away at 8,300 metres. According to his Sherpa—Lopsang Jangbu—HACE was no small part of what tragically got him in the end.

Consider also, Francys Arsentiev. She made the ascent in 1998—being the first American woman ever to do so without supplementary oxygen in fact—but she died high on the mountain during the descent.

It's worth circling back to how she did it **without** supplementary oxygen too, because *yes* the vast, *vast* majority of people who climb Everest do it with big old tanks of oxygen on their backs, *but*, right on the sharp purist edge of things, there does indeed exist a minority who totally forgo it—with it being Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler who first proved it was possible on their 1978 ascent.

All their doing that did, however, was to evolve the question of *can* you climb Everest without bottled oxygen, to *should* you climb Everest without bottled oxygen.

It's a surprisingly contested matter you see, *some*—most in fact as far as we can tell—remain ardent that to climb Everest with supplemental oxygen is a rather silly idea. But then a minority exists who are **all** about it.

What is **not** up for debate, however, is the fact that it *is* more dangerous to some degree. As evidence for that claim, consider a 2000 published University of Washington analysis of 1,173 Everest summiters from 1978 to 1999—as it found that 3% of climbers using supplemental oxygen died on the descent, compared with 8.3% of those who did not… pretty clear numbers… *right*?

Either way—because we aren't going to pretend to be anything like a suitable arbiter in the matter—what we have learned remains unchanged: Everest, simply through its height alone, **will** try to kill you.

It's the unavoidable baseline of the mountain; while up there above the 8,000 metre mark, you're operating on ungodly low levels of oxygen, your brain and body are slowly failing, and if you're unlucky or unsuitably prepared, that which is failing, *will* fail, and you'll **never** come back down—just as hundreds of climbers didn't before you.

And were it the only danger… because as you can see… we have more perils still to discuss yet…

<!-- aeo:section end="the-altitude-that-kills" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="ruthless-weather" -->
## Ruthless Weather

…perils like, *say* the weather you get up there; which is… *extreme*, to put it mildly.

Consider the temperatures alone, because according to University of Toronto Professors George Moore and John Semple—who wrote a *whole* paper about exactly this back in 2011—high up on Everest they routinely plummet below −30°C, and that's just as a true temperature. Throw windchill into the equation too and suddenly we're talking −45°C.

And what do temperatures *that* low do to you, you ask?

Well, according to Moore and Semple, again, because they talked about *exactly* this too, it isn't just that it's *very* cold, it's that it's *so* cold *so* often that you can literally timetable in how long catastrophic cold related injuries take to come about—with them using what they call "facial frostbite time" to do exactly that.

It's a metric that's exactly what it sounds like: the average time that exposed skin on the face—the most likely part to be exposed at some point during an ascent—takes to physically reach the freezing point of human tissue and begin forming ice crystals… i.e. the onset point of frostbite.

And according to them, near Everest's summit, the typical frostbite time is always under **20** minutes—and in the spring climbing season it's typically about **five** minutes, with severe storms pushing it down further still towards **one** minute… **ONE**!!!

It's not *just* about the skin damage either—with the *real* killer being what that cold does to your body's ability to function more broadly.

You see, your body prioritises its core for survival; and not without good reason—you can survive without an arm, or a leg, but lose any of those vital organs squished up in the middle of you, and you have *had* it.

It **really** is your body choosing to sacrifice the bits you can *maybe* survive without in the most literal sense too; the blood that gets pulled away from your extremities—your fingers, your toes, your arms, your legs—goes straight to keeping your brain and heart as warm as can be… it's all very conscious on your subconscious' part.

And of course, all of that comes at a price up on Everest, because as you lose blood flow from, say, your fingers, your dexterity *goes*, and suddenly you're fumbling with buckles you could flick open with a finger down at base camp, and that oxygen valve that you easily opened before, you can now barely even get a proper grip on.

That, in turn, slows you down, which leaves you more exposed for longer, which slows you down *again*, which leaves you more exposed for longer, *again*, and so on and so forth in what could quite easily become quite the cataclysmic cycle.

Moore and Semple themselves discussed this particularly vicious loop in fact, and provided a case study: two different climbers—Lincoln Hall from Australia, and David Sharp from the UK—both of whom made the ascent at different times in 2006, but *also* both had to spend a night out up near the summit after things went awry.

For Hall, it was in late May, and after summiting from the north side, he fell badly ill on the descent and could not carry on. His Sherpa team eventually left him high on the mountain when their own oxygen was running out, reasoning that there was nothing further to be achieved by their staying other than making one corpse into three…

**However**, in defiance of any reasonable expectation, the next day, Hall was *still alive*—he just about managed to draw attention to himself, as fresh summiteers passed, and was rescued, eventually making a full recovery.

Sharp, *however*, he did not survive his equivalent ordeal.

He made his ascent a week or so before Hall, and after setting off late, climbing solo, carrying only two bottles of oxygen instead of the go-to five, and **not** bringing a radio—not far off *everything* you could do to tempt fate basically—he was up the North Side, badly depleted, and unable to go on, took refuge at 'Green Boot's Cave' 8,500 metres up; so called because it contains a particularly famous body wearing the titular footwear—typically believed to be Tsewang Paljor who died back on a 1996 ascent.

By the time other teams encountered him the following day, he was still alive, but **severely** hypoxic and badly frostbitten—to the extent that even when people did try to rouse him and even share oxygen, he couldn't properly respond or get to his feet. Over 40 climbers in all would pass him before he himself passed.

It was the same mountain, the same season, the same rough height, the same basic nightmare scenario—alone, hypoxic, sitting out the night in the Death Zone—but two *completely* different endings.

And to figure the reason for the differing outcomes out, Moore and Semple stripped away the drama of it all, and asked a brutally simple question: what was the weather *actually* doing while they both sat there?

And their answer was grimly simple: Hall got lucky with the weather, and Sharp didn't. Hall was in conditions that were ever so milder than the seasonal norm, while Sharp was in conditions that were ever so harsher than the seasonal norm—on the order of about a standard deviation either side.

**That** was it—*one* flick away from the norm either way, *two* away from one another directly. So extreme is the weather up on Everest, that when things go wrong, fluctuations *that* small can make the difference between life and death…

And that's just the *cold* bit of the weather; we haven't even begun to consider what happens when snow and wind get thrown into the equation too.

Perhaps an example would explain it best, though—specifically the 10th through the 11th of May 1996 Mount Everest Disaster.

It started out straightforward enough—or as straightforward as anything ever is on Everest anyway—with multiple commercial teams, including one led by Kiwi Rob Hall, and American Scott Fischer, all starting out on the South Route.

But it didn't take long for things to start going wrong, with climbers finding that **multiple** fixed ropes had not yet been set at key technical points like the Balcony and the Hillary Step—a queue then forming as groups that had set off well-spaced from one another all, stumbled into the same bottleneck that they could do all but bugger all about.

And that took a *long* time; so long that come 2pm—the usual 'safety first give it up as a bad job and turn around' time—multiple groups were still heading *up*.

Then—right at the *worst* possible moment—came the turn in the weather; snowfall and wind that just built and built through the afternoon and into the evening.

The well-trodden track, **gone**. The fixed ropes, **gone**. Visibility, **gone**. And because of it all, 33 climbers were trapped up the mountain.

By the time things cleared up the following day, 8 of that 33 were to remain on Everest forever: both Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, Adventure Consultants guide Andy Harris, clients Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, and three members of an Indo-Tibetan Border Police team on the north side Dorje Morup, Tsewang Smanla, and a name that should sound familiar—Tsewang Paljor.

And make no mistake, clear and evident mistakes were made on that tragic day—the ropes, the ignoring of turnaround times by some—but **none** of them on their own locked in the disaster; they only did their damage when the weather piled in on top, once the wind and snow wiped the trail, buried the ropes, destroyed visibility, dropped temperatures, and stranded 33 climbers up there…

<!-- aeo:section end="ruthless-weather" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="nature-s-deadliest-obstacles" -->
## Nature's Deadliest Obstacles

Up until now, we've been talking about Everest trying to kill you in a metaphoric kind of way; because while the weather and the temperature are part of the mountain in a sense, they aren't an actual *physical* part of the 8,849-metre lump of rock itself, are they?

Icefalls and crevasses though, they **absolutely** are. They're the mountain's own built-in booby traps in fact—great walls of flowing ice, and deep dark holes that can swallow you in a second if you put even so much as a boot wrong. And for the former, there is no better example of that than the Khumbu Icefall…

It's not even *that* high up by Everest standards either, sitting just above Base Camp, at an altitude given as 5,486 metres, on the southern side of the mountain—so not only are we *not* talking on the final 'push' between Camp 3 at roughly 7,200 metres, and the summit, but we're not even talking beyond Camp 1, which sits at 6,096 metres.

**However**, just because the air floating around it might be comparatively smothering in its thickness—at least compared to what we've seen so far—that doesn't mean it's not dangerous, because it is, and it *does*, claim lives.

Consider, as an example, the 1970 Mount Everest Disaster; and *yes*, there are multiple Mount Everest Disasters—with the year not being a handy extra sprinkling of information for yourselves, but **the** accepted nomenclature by which we distinguish between the multiple mass-casualty catastrophes that have befallen the mountain.

And of course, this one happened right down on the Khumbu Icefall, specifically on the 5th of April, when a Japanese team—the very one there to film the once upon a time rather famous documentary *The Man Who Skied Down Everest* in fact—were making their ascent when a **huge** chunk of ice around the 5,700 metre kind of mark just… *let go*, and avalanched straight toward a group of load-carrying Sherpas who were ahead of the main party—killing **six** of them outright.

And because we are **not** just reducing the Sherpas to background characters in this, as so many rather distastefully do, their names were Mima Norbu, Nima Dorje, Tshering Tarkey, Pasang, Kunga Norbu, and Kami Tshering—all of them masters of the land, and experts in their trade, but just unfortunately lacking in that one vital mountaineering supply that mother nature packs for you: *luck*.

And for an even more modern example of the same basic horror, we can jump forward forty-four years to the 2014 Everest Avalanche—which, again, played out right there on the Khumbu Icefall.

It happened on the 18th of April, and again, as before, a **huge** bulge of ice hanging directly about the Icefall simply broke free—we have measurements for this one too, with the largest block of the lot estimated at being around 34.5 metres high, and weighing roughly **14 thousand** tonnes.

And of course, it made straight for a team of around 25 Sherpas, who were directly below, and doing the oh so unappreciated graft that makes the scaling of Everest by amateur climbers possible: hauling oxygen tanks, tents, and fuel, fine-tuning the route with ropes and ladders, and so on and so forth.

When the ice hit, 16 were killed almost instantly; with 13 of the bodies being recovered within two days, and the final three having to be left entombed because it was simply too dangerous to dig any deeper. And their names:

- Mingma Nuru Sherpa
- Dorji Sherpa
- Ang Tshiri Sherpa
- Nima Sherpa
- Tenzing Chottar Sherpa
- Phurba Ongyal Sherpa
- Lakpa Tenjing Sherpa
- Chhering Ongchu Sherpa
- Dorjee Khatri
- Then Dorjee Sherpa
- Phur Temba Sherpa
- Aankaji Sherpa
- Pem Tenji Sherpa
- Aash Bahadur Gurung
- Pasang Karma Sherpa
- Asman Tamang

It was the single deadliest day on Everest… *up to that point*, and it was down on the Khumbu Icefall, barely even beyond basecamp—a place most people have filed away as 'something to get out of the way' so that you can get on with the *real* climbing.

As for crevasses generally, they—in simple terms—are cracks in a glacier or an ice sheet. **But**, on Everest, they are oh so much more than *just* that, as they can often be tens of metres deep, and… most terrifyingly of all, can be roofed by a thin little lid of snow that looks like *everything* else around it… right up until the point that someone steps on it and falls through it.

The Khumbu Icefall in particular is absolutely riddled with them, as is the broader glacier above, up in the Western Cwm between Camp 1 and Camp 2—a 'cwm' just being what we would all call a valley.

**However**, crevasses aren't *usually* a problem, the bulk of them are known and monitored, and those that aren't are quickly added to the list when they are first discovered—for the particularly perilous ones that are in the way too they'll even lash together little ad-hoc bridges from ladders and leave them in-situ… even including fixed ropes *just to be safe*.

Keyword there though: **usually**.

Consider, for a moment, the death of Babu Chiri—a Sherpa.

Come 2001, he was one of the **juggernauts** of Everest: 10 full summits to his name, a high-speed climb of the 'normal' Southern Route in under 17 hours among them, and a frankly wild 1999 stunt where he spent 21 hours on the summit… **without supplementary oxygen**.

Skill, raw natural talent, a mountaineering genetic jackpot, and balls not of steel, but of pure aerospace grade titanium—these are all things of which he was not lacking. But none of that mattered in the end; because as we have already seen oh so many times… his luck ran out.

It was the 29th of April, in the Western Cwm on the south-side route, in the 6,500 metres slash Camp 2 kind of area; he took a step on what appeared to be perfectly normal ground… and he fell through—a narrow natural bridge over the top having given way under his weight. Killed outright by the fall; his body was recovered two days later.

And that's the terrifying thing about crevasses—the *randomness*. Sure, they aren't *usually* a problem, but when they are, you have no say in the matter—if they can get Chiri, they can get **anyone**.

Tragically, too, Chiri is *far* from the only life claimed by Everest's glaciers. But, as Namgyal Tshering would be able to attest, sometimes it isn't *just* a matter of bad luck—as he died just below Camp 1 at roughly 6,000 metres, after falling about 30 metres from a ladder into a crevasse… and witnesses said he was **not** clipped into a safety line.

And the obvious question there is *why* he wasn't on the line in the first place—because those safety lines were very much there, and they absolutely **do** work when people use them.

The uncomfortable answer, according to people who were *actually* on the mountain that season, is that some Sherpas simply didn't always bother. Early reports pulled together by National Geographic and others quote climbers and guides saying that it was "not completely uncommon" for Sherpas to just race across the ladders un-clipped when they're fresh, confident, and have done the same crossing a hundred times before—clipping in and out takes a few extra seconds, and seconds matter when you're paid to be fast and efficient.

And that very much brings us to something that you can bolt on a secondary element of basically *everything* else that we discuss: complacency.

As Anano Atabegashvili rather succinctly put it while writing for the 'Summiters Club':

> "Here's a hard truth: most Everest deaths don't happen on the way up. They happen on the way down. Summit fever is real. People push too hard, spend too long at the top, or run out of oxygen on the descent. Exhaustion sets in. So does complacency. The climb isn't over until you're safely back at Base Camp. Experienced guides often remind climbers: the summit is only halfway. … Everest doesn't forgive mistakes, especially on the way down."

Wrinkle brain derived data supports that last point too, with a 2008 report in the *British Medical Journal* finding that, of Everest mountaineers who died after climbing above 8,000 metres… **56%** died during the descent from the summit. So not a *huge* difference, admittedly, but very much still supportive of Atabegashvili's overall idea.

On the point of 'complacency' more broadly, however, consider the view of Alison Levine—a woman who's stood on top of the world twice in her time—as she wrote a *whole* article titled *Fear is Fine. But Complacency Will Kill You*, themed around the Khumbu Icefall, incidentally, and in it she states that:

> "The threat is constant, and when it comes to that icefall, there is never a time or place you feel totally safe. … As a veteran of two Everest expeditions, I've probably been though the icefall sixteen times. And while you would think it would become less and less frightening the more times I climbed through it, it didn't … the risk is never gone, and plenty of experienced climbers have lost their lives while going through it. … I knew there was still a tremendous amount of risk present, but I focused on my surroundings. I was more agile, more able to adapt and move quickly when the ice around me moved and shifted. And this experience taught me one of the most critical lessons: … Fear is fine—it's just a normal, human emotion. But complacency will kill you."

We could go on, but you get the idea; the people who've *actually* been are **very** clear about the grave danger that complacency poses.

Bringing it back to the core matter of this chapter now though—that of geographic danger—let's highlight some specific points of particular danger, starting right up near the very top with the innocuous-sounding but utterly lethal 'Cornice Traverse'.

It's a short little ridge that links the South Summit—about 8,750 metres up—to the final rock barrier of the Hillary Step, then up to the *true* summit, and just a quick look at the place goes some way to explaining the danger; you've got a narrow crest of snow and ice perched on a rocky spine, with roughly 2,400 metres of near-vertical Southwest Face dropping away to your left and around 3,000 metres of Kangshung Face vanishing into Tibet to your right. It is, by far and away, the **single** most exposed section of the entire ascent.

And, to be fair, on a *good* day, one where the snow is firm, and the fixed ropes are all behaving, most modern teams treat it as an awkward, if nerve-rattling shuffle, rather than a quite literal do or die flip of the coin. You clip into the line, you plant your crampons exactly where the boot track already is, and you keep your wits about you—as much as you can at that altitude anyway—placing one foot in front of the other, until you are through it.

**But**, on a *bad* day, it's warm enough that the snow under your crampons has turned to porridge so every step is *slippery*, the jet stream hasn't quite behaved the way the forecast promised so the wind is *brutal*, and there are a few dozen people trying to squeeze through the same fifty-odd metres of ridge in both directions, so you don't even have elbow room at points—be it *proverbially* or *literally*.

It's hardly a surprise then, that the Cornice Traverse has claimed no shortage of lives.

Take, as an example, the 2024 deaths of British climber Daniel Paterson, and his Sherpa guide Pas Tenji. They summited in the early hours of the 21st of May with an 8K Expeditions team… and then *disappeared* on the descent… after an ice cornice collapsed near the Cornice Traverse. They were never found.

Drop back down the mountain a bit, and there's also another section that seasoned climbers will happily rank right up there with the Icefall and the Cornice Traverse for its sheer danger: the Lhotse Face—a *huge* blue-ice wall that rears up above Camp 2, which *every* south-side Everest climber has to climb to reach Camp 3 and the South Col.

In dry, technical terms it's about 1,100 metres of hard glacial ice angled at around 40–50 degrees, with occasional bulges that steepen up towards 80 degrees, cut by two rocky bands—the Yellow Band and the Geneva Spur—on its upper half.

And to learn about its dangers, we have only to turn to British climber Peter Legate.

In 2002 he was up at Camp 3 on the Face, around 7,150 metres up, riding out a truly wicked storm, before he then decided to drop back down to Base Camp to rest and regroup for another summit attempt. Then, sometime between Camps 2 and 3, he slipped on that steep blue ice in the bad weather, and went sliding thousands of feet down the Lhotse Face… with his body later being found at its base.

And tragically, nor is his fate an exclusive one, as back in 1996, Taiwanese climber Chen Yu Nan—as part of an expedition often criticised for a string of **poor** decisions—became the first fatality of that season thanks to the Lhotse Face.

*Basically*, Chen stepped out from his tent platform near Camp 3 on the Lhotse Face without wearing crampons, slipped on icy terrain, and fell into a deep crevasse… He *was* hauled out alive, but his condition soon deteriorated, and he died before getting back even to Base Camp.

Top and bottom of all this then, when we talk about "Nature's Deadliest Obstacles" on Everest, we are *not* merely being poetic; we are talking about very literal ambush points built into the very mountain itself—be they general features found everywhere, or specific named features that act as chokepoints…

<!-- aeo:section end="nature-s-deadliest-obstacles" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-human-element" -->
## The Human Element

In *stark* contrast to the natural dangers of the mountain itself, is **the** most unnatural element of all: Man.

Because, *yes*, our very being there creates new perils—ones that would **never** be a factor if we were to just leave Everest well enough alone.

Here's *the* photo that exemplifies it best. Uploaded to Instagram on the 23rd of May 2019 by the British-Nepalese Gurkha and Special Boat Service veteran—and thus absolute weapon of a man—Nirmal Purja. It was just one of two photos uploaded to celebrate his ascent to the summit the day before… and nothing more… *at first*.

He made only a passing reference to the crowd pictured, literally, "I summited Everest at 5:30 am and Lhotse 3:45 pm despite of the heavy traffic (roughly 320 people)", and that was it.

But then the internet saw it, and collectively said "What. The. F*ck?!". With much discussion then following about the oversaturation of climbers on Everest and what, exactly, that photo said about our relationship with the mountain.

Within a couple of days it had jumped from Instagram to the front pages of the *New York Times* and the BBC, and was being held up as **the** visual of a season where Nepal had issued a then record 381 south-side permits, and a short, twitchy weather window had forced *everyone* onto the same handful of summit days… during which *at least* 11 people died.

And that's the thing about 'overcrowding' on Everest: it isn't just *annoying*, it isn't just environmentally *damaging* even… it is **dangerous**. It creates *new* ways to die that simply wouldn't have existed if you didn't have a few hundred people all clipped to the same bit of rope up near the summit.

For example, what is a queue? Fundamentally, it's *waiting about*, and *where* are you waiting about on your final push to the summit of Everest? The death zone. That place where you are slowly *dying* the **entire** time you are in it. And that's to say nothing of the hit it takes to your finite oxygen supply; which doesn't care if you are waiting about, and doesn't care if you're pushing it hard—if that valve is open, it **is** trickling down at one pace or another.

As Alan Arnette put it, who has been on the mountain for four separate seasons, and summitted once, "Crowds, while not the only reason people die on Everest, slow a climber's pace and thus increase their fatigue and use of oxygen."

He then noted that some of the people who died "spent 10 or 12 hours to get to the summit and four to six hours to get back down to the South Col"—in other words, a *14 to 18 hour* day in one of the worst places on Earth to be hanging around.

*Outside Magazine* boiled the problem down even more brutally: after those long, delayed summit pushes, "It's rare to carry oxygen for that much time, thus forcing the Sherpas to turn down the flow or give up their own personal supply." In plain English: if queues blow your carefully-timed schedule to bits, **somebody** is going to run out of oxygen while still dangling off the mountain.

You can see that play out in individual deaths too, as on the 22nd of May 2019, *both* Donald Cash—American—and Anjali Kulkarni—Indian—both died while descending from the summit.

Cash's operator later told reporters that she fainted with high-altitude sickness after spending a long time waiting near the top, while Kulkarni's company said "heavy traffic caused her death as she had to wait to descend." The *Kathmandu Post* was even more direct, noting that "two climbers died on Wednesday due to an hours-long 'traffic jam'." In other words then: it **was** the crowds that killed them.

Moving beyond just the delays that overcrowding causes, however, there's also the fact that they force already narrow and difficult to navigate routes into one-way valves where you **cannot** easily flow back if you find yourself in a tangle.

The summit ridge, the Hillary Step area, the Balcony, the top of the Lhotse Face—these are all one-person-wide bits of ground with thousands of metres of exposure on either side, linked by a *single* fixed rope.

And once a queue forms, you can't just step off to overtake, because 'off' is *literally* a two- or three-**kilometre** fall, and neither can you quickly reverse back to safer ground if the weather takes an unpleasant turn—because there are 30 people clipped to the same line behind you.

Consider also, just how badly overcrowding interacts with inexperience.

Because the days of Edmund Hillary are **gone**. No longer are climbers heading up Everest having to plot their specific path as they go, sussing out whether this way or that way is likely to be the more perilous of the two, and having to screw in their own ropes as they go.

No. Now, today, the path is basically pre-fabricated for you. Sherpas and high-altitude workers go up first and stitch the whole thing together with fixed ropes and ladder bridges, then commercial outfits follow behind with long conga lines of clients whose job is, essentially, to clip into the rope and shuffle after the person in front.

Does that mean climbing Everest is easy? **Absolutely not**, and frankly that'd be nothing if not a bold point of argumentation given *everything* that we've already learned. But does it mean that climbing Everest is easy-*er* now than at any other point in human history? *Yes*, that certainly seems fair to say.

And that attracts a different sort of crowd. Still plenty of bold and gallant climbers wanting to achieve the natural apex to their vertically orientated trades, certainly, but undeniably—and to be quite frank about it—simple thrill seekers, experience collectors, and those hoping that burning some of the stacks of paper they earned in a drab grey air-conditioned cube on something wild might **finally** get their brains to pump some serotonin for the first time since 1983.

That's not just 'what we reckon' either, the clever sorts concur; with the 2020 paper *Mountaineers on Mount Everest: Effects of Age, Sex, Experience, and Crowding on Rates of Success and Death*, trying to get to the bottom of—among other things—the very matter of how many Everest summiteers were inexperienced.

And it concluded that for people attempting Everest for first time between 1990 and 2005, a mere **37.7%** had experience on at least one other Nepalese or border peak. Then, between 2006 and 2018, the figure dropped further still to a mere 30.7%.

Flip it the other way around, and it means that something in the region of **70%** of first-time Everest climbers have **no** recorded prior high-altitude experience on Nepalese peaks… *at all*.

**However**, and this is where the matter gets all the more interesting—there is a *stark* divide on the point of whether or not that inexperience is actually dangerous.

The wrinkle brains, *typically*, and rather shockingly, say that no it isn't. Point in case—the 2012 *BMJ* published paper *Effects of Experience and Commercialisation on Survival in Himalayan Mountaineering: Retrospective Cohort Study* by Westhoff et al.

It looked at nearly **24,000** climbers in all and concluded that, after you control for things like route, peak, age and season, "increased Himalayan experience was not associated with a change in the odds of death".

And likewise—just to show that wasn't a one-off conclusion—the penultimate paper that we mentioned, the 2020 one, found that:

> "Probabilities of dying were also similar for men and women, increased for climbers about 60 and older (especially for the few that had summited), and were independent of experience."

"Independent of experience". I.e. it had no bearing *at all* whether or not it was the ghost of Hillary himself tabbing up the side of Everest, or a tech-bro up there to snap a new LinkedIn profile picture… those facts alone did **not** alter their chances of death.

Then there's the climbers themselves who—again, *typically*—say the exact opposite; that to go up Everest lacking experience is to mark yourself for death.

Going back to Alan Arnette, by way of an example, he says the following in one of his *big* Everest think-pieces:

> "Everest is not for the inexperienced, the novice or someone looking for a walk-up. … There are no shortcuts. You have to put the work in before you arrive. It is hard and people die. Base Camp is not a 5 star hotel. If you come expecting a walk-up, most likely you will take advantage of that helicopter ride out, and not in a good way."

Then there's Mark Jenkins, who summited Everest twice:

> "Too many inexperienced climbers are attempting to scale Mount Everest. A few are losing their lives. … (It) has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions."

All in all, you get the idea then: specific details of *how much* human activity acts as a self-fulfilling ouroboros of danger may be contested, but the base idea really isn't—Everest is plenty lethal on its own, and adding people into the equation **does** only send the danger in one direction. *Upwards*…

<!-- aeo:section end="the-human-element" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-final-toll" -->
## The Final Toll

And with that being all the individual ways that Everest is *way* more dangerous than you'd think covered, there is just one last thing to discover: not the individual point proving deaths that we've been discussing thus far… but the bigger picture… the **total** number of deaths.

According to the latest edition of 'Everest by the Numbers', a yearly statistical summary published by Alan Arnette, the mountain has been summited a total of 13,737 times by 7,563 people up to December 2025. A *tiny* number really, not even enough people to fill a middling sized stadium—with 339 recorded deaths across Everest's expedition history since 1922.

And what of those bodies? *Some* do come down—if the death happens low enough, if the weather and terrain allow it, and if a team can be assembled without creating even more corpses in the process.

But above the death zone, 'bringing them home' very quickly stops being a question of willpower, and becomes a brutally pragmatic question of physics and ethics.

Because at 8,000 metres, even the act of mere *walking* is hard; trying to haul a deadweight human body down fixed ropes, across ladders, over crevasses and through bottlenecks is a whole different level of ordeal. Which is why so many—around **60%** of all who ever died up there—are left where they fell: not out of disrespect, but because the mountain makes retrieval either suicidal, ruinously expensive, or simply impossible.

And so, over time they freeze into the landscape, and then—slowly—get swallowed by snow, ice, and gravity until they disappear into Everest's own long memory… or at least… they do in the most dignified set of circumstances.

In the least dignified set of circumstances—where they never fall beneath the line of the snow—they become part of the very fabric of the mountain itself; often becoming **waypoints** by which future summiteers find their way.

Remember Tsewang Paljor, the supposed identity of 'Green Boots'? He's one of them… as too is Francys Arsentiev, or as she is now known to climbers, 'Sleeping Beauty'…

And that, really, is the final indictment—the final thing you need to know to understand that Mount Everest is **way** more dangerous than you'd think.

*Not* the statistics buried away in academic papers, *not* the dramatic tales of death and survival in the face of the very worst that nature can throw at you, but the thing that you can look in the eyes—the person who once was full of ambition, of drive, their muscles tingling with adrenaline from the excitement of what they were about to tackle…. frozen in time by the very mountain they wanted to conquer… reduced to a mere signpost for future aspirants…

<!-- aeo:section end="the-final-toll" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- Everest's 'death zone' above 8,000 metres has only one-third of sea-level air pressure, causing irreversible bodily shutdown and fatal brain swelling.
- Extreme cold near the summit can cause frostbite in under five minutes, with minor weather fluctuations determining survival during overnight emergencies.
- The Khumbu Icefall and hidden snow-bridged crevasses kill even elite climbers instantly, with complacency about safety gear proving equally deadly.
- Overcrowding creates lethal bottlenecks in the death zone, forcing climbers to exhaust finite oxygen supplies while trapped on narrow, exposed ridges.
- Around 60% of Everest fatalities remain on the mountain forever, their preserved bodies becoming grim waypoints for subsequent climbers.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is the 'death zone' on Mount Everest?

The 'death zone' is the altitude above approximately 8,000 metres where acclimatisation becomes impossible and the body starts losing ground even if you stop moving. At this height, the barometric pressure is only about a third of sea level pressure, meaning the pressure of oxygen in each breath is drastically lower. The human body is literally shutting off and dying slowly but surely in this zone.

### How low are oxygen levels at 8,000 metres on Everest?

According to British Doctor Jeremy Windsor's 2007 research as part of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Research Expedition, climbers at 8,400 metres were surviving on just one quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level. These figures were comparable to patients on the verge of death.

### What is High-Altitude Cerebral Oedema (HACE) and how does it affect climbers?

HACE is a condition where the brain literally starts to swell up inside the skull due to oxygen deprivation. The arteries feeding the brain open wide to force more blood through, causing microscopic blood vessels in the brain wall to become leaky. Fluid seeps into brain tissue, and brain cells themselves puff up due to failing internal pumps. Because this swelling happens inside the inflexible skull, pressure rises, throwing brain function out of whack and causing impaired judgement, confusion, hallucinations, and loss of grip on reality.

### How dangerous is it to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen?

A 2000 University of Washington analysis of 1,173 Everest summiters from 1978 to 1999 found that 3% of climbers using supplemental oxygen died on the descent, compared with 8.3% of those who did not use supplemental oxygen. While some climbers argue for climbing without oxygen, it is objectively more dangerous to some degree.

### How cold does it get near Everest's summit and how quickly can frostbite occur?

According to University of Toronto Professors George Moore and John Semple, temperatures near Everest's summit routinely plummet below −30°C, and with windchill this can reach −45°C. The typical 'facial frostbite time' (time for exposed skin to reach freezing point) is always under 20 minutes, typically about 5 minutes in spring climbing season, and severe storms can push this down towards 1 minute.

### What role did weather play in the different outcomes for Lincoln Hall and David Sharp in 2006?

Both climbers spent a night out near the summit in similar circumstances in 2006. Lincoln Hall survived and was rescued, while David Sharp died. Moore and Semple's analysis found the critical difference was weather: Hall experienced conditions about one standard deviation milder than seasonal norm, while Sharp experienced conditions about one standard deviation harsher. This small fluctuation made the difference between life and death.

### What happened during the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster?

On May 10-11, 1996, multiple commercial teams on the South Route encountered missing fixed ropes causing bottlenecks, leading many to pass the 2pm turnaround time. A severe weather turn then brought snowfall and wind that eliminated the track, fixed ropes, and visibility, trapping 33 climbers. Eight died: Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Yasuko Namba, Dorje Morup, Tsewang Smanla, and Tsewang Paljor.

### What is the Khumbu Icefall and why is it dangerous?

The Khumbu Icefall sits just above Base Camp at 5,486 metres on Everest's southern side. It consists of great walls of flowing ice with deep crevasses, making it one of the mountain's built-in booby traps. It claimed 6 Sherpas in the 1970 disaster and 16 Sherpas in the 2014 avalanche (the single deadliest day on Everest up to that point), despite being relatively low on the mountain.

### How does overcrowding on Everest create new dangers?

Overcrowding forces climbers to wait in queues in the death zone where their bodies are slowly dying and oxygen supplies deplete regardless of activity. It creates bottlenecks on narrow, exposed sections where climbers cannot easily turn back. In 2019, a record 381 south-side permits and a short weather window forced roughly 320 people onto the same summit days, contributing to at least 11 deaths. Two climbers, Donald Cash and Anjali Kulkarni, died on May 22, 2019 specifically due to hours-long 'traffic jams' causing delays.

### What percentage of Everest climbers die during descent versus ascent?

According to a 2008 report in the British Medical Journal, of Everest mountaineers who died after climbing above 8,000 metres, 56% died during the descent from the summit. This supports the observation that 'most Everest deaths don't happen on the way up, they happen on the way down.'

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

- [Original Places video: Mount Everest is Way More Dangerous Than You'd Think.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaA8KKGAl4)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Aerial_landscape_view_%282017%29.jpg) by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->