It’s the world’s highest cemetery.
The young, old, inexperienced and disabled may soon be banned from climbing Mount Everest. Nepal's tourism officials were weighing enacting new rules ahead of the spring climbing season that would only allow certain people to attempt to scale the world's highest peak, the Guardian reported Monday. Excluded would be people under 18 and over 75, as well as potential climbers with severe disabilities.
“We cannot let everyone go on Everest and die. If they are not physically and mentally fit it will be like a legal suicide,” tourism minister Kripasur Sherpa told the Guardian. “Only those who can go on their own will be given permission.”
About 700 people try to climb Everest, which stands about 29,000 feet tall, every year. Eight people died in 2013, but since 1953 the success rate was about 60 percent, according to mountain climber Alan Arnette's reading of the Himalayan Database. This past year saw Everest's deadliest accident ever in the April earthquake that killed 19 people, most of them sherpa guides, and wounded about 60.
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