Mount Everest: a not so novel feat

So many people, and celebrities, are conquering Everest that it's more resort than wilderness. But Nepal needs this tourist trade
Bonita Morris: youngest British woman to climb Everest
Bonita Norris, 22, has become Britain's youngest successful female climber of Mount Everest. Photograph: Bonita Norris/PA

It's Everest season again. Despite the fact it was climbed almost 60 years ago and most of the genuine mountaineering feats have been done, the goddess mother can still catch the media's eye. In the last week we've had the youngest British female, 22-year-old media studies graduate Bonita Norris, reaching the summit and sustaining a back injury on the climb down.

In the same week, New Zealand skydiver Wendy Smith jumped out of an aircraft over the mountain, while Australian guide Duncan Chessell has set out to find the body of Andrew Irvine, thus proving the young Oxford rowing blue was the first to reach the summit with George Mallory in 1924. Another handsome sportsman, this time in the buff shape of ex-England rugby star Josh Lewsey is close to making his bid for the summit, which will bring down another avalanche of headlines.

Should we bother caring anymore? On the one hand, anyone who thinks climbing a mountain over 8,000m (26,000ft) isn't much of a challenge anymore should try doing it. It's lung-bursting work, dangerous and physically demanding.

On the other hand, much of the coverage is less about Everest or mountains generally and more about the profile of the person doing the climbing. It was the same principle at work when Cheryl Cole slogged up Kilimanjaro. Josh Lewsey is undoubtedly a brave man, and he's raising a lot of cash for charity. But it must be galling for Britain's leading climbers to struggle on in obscurity. Lewsey wouldn't have made the back pages playing rugby for a lower division club, but that's the equivalent of an Everest ascent these days. Perhaps that's why top climber Leo Houlding, who strolled up Everest for a movie a few years ago, declaimed: "I wouldn't even call it mountaineering."

But there's another side to the Everest story that doesn't get told. At least, not properly. The news that a team of Sherpas was bringing down the corpses of dead climbers this spring was widely reported, feeding into the common perception that not only is Everest awash with the living, it's also covered in the dead.

Garbage left behind by careless mountaineers is also routinely offered as more evidence of a once glorious symbol tarnished by a consumerist frenzy. The truth is more positive.

Of course, the new Everest industry does cause environmental problems. While base camp is kept tidy, it's a struggle to remove detritus from higher up the mountain. But that shouldn't outweigh the positive impact the commercialisation of Everest has had. Before the peak was climbed, the people of Everest were among the poorest in the world, with many young men forced to migrate to look for work. Now the Sherpas of Everest have good schools and health posts, many of them founded by the Himalayan Trust, founded by Sir Edmund Hillary after the first ascent in 1953. Everest has been their springboard to a more prosperous way of life.

Compared to the problems faced by ordinary Nepalis daily across the country, like malnutrition and bad water, removing garbage left by tourists is not a problem. Many commercial climbing outfitters work hard to keep the mountain clean and take care of their employees. Rich westerners burning jet fuel to get to Nepal to climb and trek may look self-indulgent, but those tourists secure a lot of jobs. Were tourism to disappear, many unemployed young Nepalis would be forced to migrate to the Gulf and beyond to look for work, as happened during Nepal's bitter civil war.

The business of Everest may not be as romantic as its amateur past, but in one of the poorest countries in the world, the hope is that business stays good and that the mountains of Nepal stay as beautiful as ever.

Ed Douglas will be addressing these themes in a talk at the Royal Geographical Society next month