On Friday, May 13, 17 members of Lukas Furtenbach's expedition team stood on the summit of Mount Everest (8,849 meters).

All 17 members, as the mountain tour operator emphasized on Instagram, success rate: 100 percent.

Another number was even more remarkable.

Only 16 days after leaving the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, the group reached the highest point in the world – while Everest aspirants usually take weeks to acclimatize.

Furtenbach's team had prepared at home with hypoxia training and slept in a tent with limited oxygen supply.

On the mountain it was assisted by 27 Sherpas and with plenty of bottled oxygen for each participant.

Cost of the expedition per customer: almost 100,000 euros.

Bernd Steinle

Editor in the department "Germany and the World".

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Furtenbach's so-called flash expeditions are a result of the development of mountaineering on Everest, which Oliver Schulz describes in "8849".

At the end of the book, Furtenbach explains in an interview how he feels about the use of bottled oxygen for high-altitude mountaineering.

It has long since become a symbol for the fundamental question of modern tourism on Everest: Should all available technical aids really be used to make the highest mountains in the world accessible to people who would otherwise be closed to them?

Furtenbach's answer is unequivocal: "There really doesn't seem to be any other sport in which science and technical innovation are so vehemently opposed and even go so far as to discredit them as worth rejecting."

The fatal ambition of overwhelmed hobby alpinists

How much tourism can Mount Everest tolerate?

This is one of the questions Schulz is investigating.

He does it by first, in the traditional mountaineering way, gradually approaching history, spiritual significance, important ascents, records.

Where the journey is going is clear from the start.

"Mass tourism, death and exploitation on Mount Everest" is the subtitle of the book, the lurid blurb talks about the "madness of all international alpinism", the cover photo shows the famous photograph by the Nepalese alpinist Nirmal Purja from May 2019, on which a climber's worm climbs hundreds of meters up the ridge to the summit.

How much tourism can Everest take?

Definitely, that suggests, less than is usual today.

Schulz is less concerned with the fascination of mountaineering, with alpinistic subtleties, physical borderline experiences, overwhelming happiness at the summit.

He focuses on how the business of commercial expeditions has transformed what is happening on Everest - into a "total tourist sell-off".

The evidence he cites cannot be dismissed out of hand: the catastrophe on May 10, 1996, for example, when eight mountaineers died in a snowstorm, the fatal ambition of overwhelmed amateur alpinists, the garbage problem in the camps or the role of the Sherpas, without which many expeditions would be impossible, which take great risks and are nevertheless often inadequately remunerated.

Schulz tells of the grievances in detail, entertaining, sometimes captivating, he draws from many sources and arouses desire

Just a trophy for ambitious egocentrics?

"8849" gives a good overview of the past and present on Everest, urgent problems and undesirable developments.

If you are looking for something new, you will hardly find anything.

In addition to the interviews with the expedition organizers Lukas Furtenbach and Mingma Sherpa, only impressions of a trip to the Khumbu region, at the foot of Everest, remain from personal experience.

One would have liked to have read more of such personal encounters and descriptions, from the Everest base camp, for example, which resembles a small town in the high season and could have illustrated the excesses of mass tourism well.

The otherwise carefully compiled compendium lacks the proximity to mountaineers and mountaineers, the interest in the question of what drives people to accept all the imponderables, deprivations, efforts and risks, not to mention the costs, just for the sake of one to reach mountain tops.

Everest often only appears as a trophy for ambitious egocentrics; it has "above all degenerated into a backdrop," writes Schulz.

Such exaggerations do not do justice to the dozens of mountaineers who, every year, are well trained and sufficiently experienced to fulfill their mountaineering lifelong dream on Everest.

Solutions for mass tourism?

are difficult.

Many interests stand in the way of a restriction on climbing permits or stricter rules on mountaineering skills - those of the Nepalese government, which is dependent on income from tourism (almost 3.3 million dollars this spring on Everest alone), those of the organizers, those of many locals, those of the Expedition business live, and that of paying customers.

"The chances," concludes Schulz, "that mass tourism and death on the mountain will continue are therefore great." The past spring season was mild after all.

About 650 ascents were recorded from Nepal, three climbers lost their lives on Everest – none of the three cases had to do with traffic jams in the death zone or naïve hooray alpinism.

Oliver Schulz: "8849".

Mass tourism, death and exploitation on Mount Everest.

Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2022. 192 p., br., €18.