DEATH MOUNTAIN
Three die due to overcrowding on Everest with one man collapsing of exhaustion after being made to wait 12 hours to reach peak
The dead are two Indians and an Austrian and it comes amid traffic jams near the summit
THREE climbers have died on Mount Everest after waiting 12 hours to reach the summit amid overcrowding on the world’s highest mountain.
The climbers all died of exhaustion on their way down, bringing the death toll to seven this past week as astonishing pictures showed a line of climbers queuing to reach the top.
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Two Indian climbers, Kalpana Das, 49, from the eastern state of Odisha and Nihal Bagwan, 27, from Pune, died while coming back down the mountain on Thursday.
An unnamed 65-year-old Austrian died on the northern side of mountain in Tibet,
Local tour organiser Keshav Paudel said Bagwan had been "stuck in the traffic for more than 12 hours and was exhausted".
Another Indian Anjali Sharad Kulkarni, 54, from Mumbai, and American Donald Lynn Cash, 55, from Utah, US, who died from altitude sickness, lost their lives on Wednesday.
A Nepali guide is also reported to have been killed.
An Irish professor, Seamus Lawless, is presumed dead after falling on 16 May.
Images show more than 200 climbers queuing to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Clear weather sparked a busy day with teams of people lining up for hours risking frostbite and being killed on top of the world’s highest mountain on Wednesday.
Hundreds of people attempted to reach the 29,029ft summit from both Nepal and Tibet.
Some mountaineers complained of a similar traffic jam on Sunday with the popularity of the mountain attracting large numbers of unskilled climbers.
The number of climbers has rocketed in recent years because of competition between expedition organisers which has caused costs to plummet, reports
Brit Harry Taylor, who was the first person to scale Everest’s northeast ridge in 1988, told that amateur climbers are risking their lives paying ill-equipped expedition operators and corrupt local officials
Many inexperienced adventurers pay up to £55,000 for a chance to reach the peak – and Taylor fears for the worst if the situation is allowed to continue.
Mount Everest - the Goddess Mountain that continues to claim lives
Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest, a Welsh official of the British Raj who surveyed the Himalayas.
In 1953 Sir Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay made the first ascent of Everest – known to Tibetans as Chomolungma or Goddess Mother of Mountains.
Since then more 4,000 people have reached the summit, according to the Himalayan Database.
Jordan Romero, from the US became the youngest person to climb Everest aged 13 and 10 months in 2010 while 2013, an 80-year-old Japanese man Yuichiro Miura became the oldest.
Nearly 300 people have died trying to climb the famous mountain since the first attempt to scale it in 1922.
The deaths that have perhaps grabbed the most attention over the years were those of George Mallory (pictured) and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine.
They disappeared in 1924 after setting off for the summit with only primitive gear and there has been endless speculation they were in fact the first to the top.
Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999 but that failed to resolve the mystery.
Many of the corpses are buried underneath the snow and but melting glaciers are exposing bodies once entombed in ice on the world's highest graveyard.
“Everest is a cash cow for them," said Taylor.
“The Nepali government will try to push operators out who have the highest safety standards.”
“Some local operators are so cheap they put huge pressure on the western outfits to cut costs just to remain in the market...
“I fear a cataclysmic disaster if the western operators have to shut up shop due to being pushed out.”
Today, a new search began for dad-of-one Lawless, 39,
Seamus, from Bray, Co Wicklow, was descending from the summit when he fell from an altitude of 27,200 ft while in the balcony area near the mountain's summit last Thursday.
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The Himalayan Times has reported that a team of nine, led by Irish mountaineer Noel Hanna who was part of Lawless' original expedition, launched a search operation today.
The rising numbers of people climbing - and dying - on Everest has led for calls for permits to be limited.
Ben Fogle, the adventurer and television presenter who climbed the mountain last year, called for "London Marathon style lottery for climbing permits" in a Twitter post.
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