Mount Everest climbers spend up to $100,000 expecting a solitary battle against nature. The reality is often a deadly high-altitude traffic jam where people literally die while waiting in line.
Because there are only a few days a year when the jet stream shifts enough to allow a summit push, hundreds of climbers attempt the peak simultaneously. This creates severe bottlenecks on the narrow ridges leading to the summit. Above 8,000 meters (26,000 feet), climbers enter the "Death Zone," an altitude where the human body cannot acclimatize and begins to slowly shut down. During peak season, mountaineers sometimes spend hours waiting in sub-zero temperatures just to safely pass a single technical section, burning through their severely limited supplemental oxygen.
Climbers navigate a narrow, exposed ridge near the summit of Mount Everest. - Photo by Debasish biswas kolkata (Wikimedia Commons) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Beyond the crowds, the people climbing the mountain consistently defy conventional logic.
Sherpas possess unique evolutionary adaptations. Many assume the local Sherpa guides are simply extremely fit, but their physiology has evolved over thousands of years to thrive in thin air. Surprisingly, acclimatized Sherpas have lower concentrations of red blood cells than visiting climbers. While a typical climber's body goes into overdrive producing red blood cells to capture oxygen—making their blood thick and sluggish—Sherpa cells are simply much more efficient at metabolizing the oxygen they do have.
Age limits are routinely shattered. The mountain has been conquered by a 13-year-old boy (American Jordan Romero) and an 80-year-old man (Japanese mountaineer Yuichiro Miura). Miura's achievement is particularly baffling to medical science: he underwent two heart surgeries for cardiac arrhythmia before his record-breaking 2013 ascent.
The route is marked by the fallen. Due to the extreme danger and physical impossibility of carrying dead weight down from the Death Zone, the bodies of most who perish on Everest remain on the mountain. Over time, some of these well-preserved bodies have inadvertently become macabre navigational landmarks for climbers passing through the snow.
While visiting mountaineers spend years training for a single, once-in-a-lifetime attempt, one man treats the summit almost like a regular commute. Kami Rita Sherpa has stood at the top of the world more times than anyone else in history. As of May 2024, he has successfully summited Mount Everest a record 30 times.