Everest: is it right to go back to the top?

I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, which is a sad circus where money is king, and wrote about my experience here : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdklein.fr&#x2F;essays&#x2F;kilimanjaro.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdklein.fr&#x2F;essays&#x2F;kilimanjaro.html</a><p>I really hope Everest will never get to this point. The difficulty of this summit protects it a bit, as (more or less safely) dragging an inexperienced climber up the mountain is not going to be cheap, but what I hear these last few years about the Everest is alarming.<p>To people that love mountaineering and don&#x27;t want to climb in America or Europe, I suggest Kirghizstan. It&#x27;s relatively safe, pristine, and it&#x27;s really beautiful. There is no infrastructure and no mountain rescue, though, so YMMV depending on what you want to experience.

When she says &quot;Should Nepalese guides continue to be put at risk&quot;, what she doesn&#x27;t realise she means is &quot;Should Nepalese guides continue to be allowed to put themselves at risk to feed their families&quot;.

“People ask me, &#x27;What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?&#x27; and my answer must at once be, &#x27;It is of no use.&#x27;There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won&#x27;t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”<p>― George Mallory

I&#x27;m conflicted as a whole in regards to Everest. Being a climber who&#x27;s paid for expedition services on Denali, I can see where it is often necessary. However, adding luxury items and allowing inexperienced climbers on the mountain is dangerous.

There is obviously too much money in mountain climbing at the Everest. Everywhere that happens, things are getting unhealthy.

Strange how the Guardian published this story about Everest on the annual anniversary of the event which made Everest obsolete as a destination for ultimate challenges: 8 years after the first ascent of Everest, the first manned spacecraft went into space. And because Gagarin &quot;did it alone&quot; (ignoring support work such as base camp and mission control) instead of with a partner, his achievement wasn&#x27;t superceded in any way by the moon landing another 8 years later. His solitary orbit around the earth stands as the beckoning event right in the middle of the span of time from 1953 to 1969 when humankind went &quot;higher and further&quot; far faster than at any time before. Whereas ascending Everest is too easy and landing on the moon too difficult, to ride into space and return to Earth all alone will define the pinnacle of achievement for explorers well into the forseeable future, regardless of any effort by the Guardian or Western media to suggest otherwise.