Why queues on Everest are a sign that travel might be about to change forever
Far from being at peak tourism, this is really just the beginning
Back in 2019, a Nepali mountaineer named Nimsdai Purja turned to take a photo having just summited Everest, the world’s highest peak. And it got quite a lot of attention.
What’s shocking about this photo isn’t the threat of 700 meter drops, 80 km/h winds, or the risk of avalanches. It’s the altitude.
At 8,000 meters, your body is getting about a third of the oxygen it gets at sea level. Your brain swells which can cause hypoxia, and your lungs can fill with oxygen causing an edema. Your decision-making is impaired.
Not surprisingly, at this altitude, you’re in what mountaineers call the Death Zone. Because once you’re in it, you’re actually slowly dying.
So having to stand in a queue in the Death Zone—where every second matters to your chances of survival—is bonkers.
Before 2010, the idea that more than 150 people could summit Everest in a single day was unthinkable. Since then it's happened 13 times, 5 of them in the last 5 years.
So how did we even get to a point where we are queueing in one of the harshest, most dangerous and least accessible environments in the world?
In this video, we explain how the queues in the death zone on Everest are part of a broader phenomenon that’s going to change where, when and how we travel in the years to come:
Key Takeaways:
Every destination has fixed, immovable limits. Mt Everest encapsulates this perfectly: the dangers of the mountain, the limited space available and the small ‘weather window’ (around 15 days per year) means that it simply can’t accommodate more people despite the demand.
Before 2010, there had never been a group of more than 150 people successfully summiting Everest in a single day. Since that time, it’s happened 13 times. Essentially, the amount of people climbing Everest has reached a point where it is beginning to test the limits of the mountain.
The phenomenon of our love of travel testing the physical limits of a place is not unique to Everest. In fact, there are examples of it all over the world, and it’s becoming so common that it has a name: overtourism.
Right now, less than 5% of the world’s population can afford to take a vacation. That’s about 400 million people. But over the next 25 years, in a single generation, that number is set to double, to 800 million people.
Far from being at peak tourism, this is just the start for the travel and tourism industry. And what governments and industry decide to do next will likely shape the future of where, when and how we travel.
We love data visualisation so much we created this printable infographic
This visualisation shows the dramatic rise in single-day summits on Mt. Everest from 1980-2024 driven by the peak’s commercialisation, highlighting overtourism’s impact on even the remotest destinations.
You can download the poster for free in letter, A4, A3 and A2 size:
Links, sources and further reading
New York Times: On Everest, Traffic Isn’t Just Inconvenient. It Can Be Deadly.
Smithsonian Magazine: More Than 200 Dead Bodies Have Been Left Behind on Mount Everest, and Many Mark the Path to the Summit
"Both Tenzing and I thought that once we'd climbed the mountain, it was unlikely anyone would ever make another attempt. We couldn't have been more wrong.” Sir Edmund Hilary