Everest Base Camp
On the morning of May 29, 1953, at 11:00 AM, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, marking the first time humans had ever stood on top of the world's highest peak. Since then, the sacred Everest has become more accessible. Over the past 60 years, more and more people have come to the Himalayas, even if only to gaze at the beautiful face of Everest.
Every person born and raised here relies on the blessings bestowed by this sacred mountain. With the rise of tourism and mountaineering, these blessings have transformed into one commercial and employment opportunity after another created by Everest.
Tent guesthouses
Starting from the world’s highest monastery, it takes less than 10 minutes to reach the “tourism base camp,” which lies just 5 kilometers ahead of Everest’s climbing base camp. The tourism base camp emerged around 1995 or 1996 and consists of two rows of tent guesthouses that offer accommodation and rest areas for tourists waiting to watch the sunrise and sunset over Everest.
Around 7:00 PM, as the sun dips lower and the wind grows colder, Cuozhen Zhuoma adds a piece of cow dung to the stove, stokes the fire, and tries to warm up the tent. She places her 7-month-old son, Tenzing, in a basket and begins preparing dinner.
In 2011, she and her husband, Dunzhu, spent over 20,000 yuan to acquire all the necessities for the tent guesthouse and paid another 1,000 yuan to have it transported up the mountain. Since then, every year from early April, they head up the mountain to be with Everest, and return to their home in Zhaxi Village, 50 kilometers away, after the tourist season ends in mid-to-late October.
The price of the tent guesthouses is set by the government. During the off-season, it’s now 60 yuan per person per night. During the peak season in June and July, the price doubles. The tents are 30 square meters and can accommodate 8 people. Zhuoma says with some disappointment that this year the government raised the “land price,” increasing it from 14,500 yuan to 35,000 yuan per tent, but the accommodation price hasn’t been adjusted. This will significantly impact their income. Last year, their net income was 70,000 yuan, but this year they don’t know what it will be. Aside from the “land price,” Zhuoma also has to pay for cow and sheep dung to fuel the stove. At high altitudes with low temperatures, the stove must burn all night. A 15-kilogram bag of cow or sheep dung costs 30–40 yuan and burns out in just two nights.
Zhuoma and Dunzhu speak Mandarin quite well. She never attended school but learned Mandarin when her family ran a guesthouse as a child. Her husband completed junior high school and studied Chinese. This is the minimum requirement for doing business at the base camp. Some villagers who want to open tent guesthouses give up due to language barriers.
Making a living through mountaineering
During a casual chat, Zhuoma suddenly mentions that her younger brother, Deqing Ouzhu, is also a mountain guide. He graduated from the Tibet Mountaineering School and is currently on the mountain preparing for a summit attempt.
Her husband, Dunzhu, was also hired as a cook by a mountaineering team last year and worked at the Advance Base Camp at an altitude of 6,500 meters for over two months. Compared to the “gear enthusiasts” among mountaineers, Dunzhu’s climb to 6,500 meters was incredibly easy. He points to his jeans and explains he wore those, added a pair of wool pants underneath, and had on a pair of Liberation shoes. He wore a down jacket and didn’t even use an ice axe while climbing glaciers. According to him, although he had to cross icy paths, “the route was quite walkable.”
It seems that the lives of the locals are more or less connected to mountaineering. Laba Ciren, head of the Everest Base Camp workstation under the Tingri County Tourism Management Station, said he once sent his son to the mountaineering school, but later, thinking that being a mountain guide was too dangerous, made him join the military instead.
He is 40 years old and was assigned to the Everest Base Camp workstation as a liaison officer in 1999, responsible for registering incoming mountaineering teams, environmental management, and yak rentals. All mountaineering teams need to rent yaks to transport supplies from the base camp at 5,200 meters to the advance base camp at 6,500 meters. Currently, there are 869 yaks owned by herders in the county. So far this year, mountaineering teams have rented over 1,000 yak trips.
Mountaineering has created wealth-building opportunities for local residents. Renting out a yak costs 50 yuan per day, and one person can handle three yaks, with labor costing 60 yuan per day. To ensure equal opportunities for wealth, the county has stipulated that no single family can take on all the work for a mountaineering team—otherwise, wealthier families with more yaks would get richer, while poorer ones would fall further behind. The same principle applies to tent management. To protect the environment at the foot of Everest, the county has limited the total number of tents at the tourism base camp to 58. Villagers cannot rush in all at once but must take turns. For example, Zhuoma and Dunzhu can only stay on the mountain for a maximum of three years before having to come down, with no chance to return. To accommodate every village, the quotas for each batch are also limited. Zhuoma’s village, Zhaxi, has only four households in the current batch.
Building a “sky ladder”
Perhaps for similar considerations and because of the stronger physical adaptability of local youths, the Tibet Mountaineering School, founded in 1999 by Nyima Tsering, principal of the school and leader of the China Amateur Mountaineering Team, primarily recruits students from impoverished families in Dingri and Nyalam counties, where Everest is located.
Students at the school are trained to become professional mountain guides. Before becoming guides, students undergo three years of theoretical study and one year of practical training, along with extensive mountaineering experience, including route-setting, camp-building, and transportation. It takes about seven or eight years after graduation to become a qualified guide.
The job of mountaineering is clearly not an easy one. Take route-setting before each climbing season, for example. Route-setting involves installing ropes and ladders on steep, treacherous slopes, snowfields, and crevasses—some of the most dangerous tasks in the entire mountaineering process. During route-setting, most of the old ropes left from the previous year have weathered and broken. The route-setters must rely entirely on their exceptional mountaineering skills, carrying heavy ropes, rock anchors, ice screws, snow anchors, and other tools, advancing slowly. Setting up routes on Everest requires over 5,000 meters of rope. Nylon ropes with an 8-millimeter diameter weigh about seven or eight kilograms per 100 meters, all of which must be carried up by the route-setters themselves. Each year, due to glacier changes, previously installed ladders may need to be reinstalled, and fixed points must be added to particularly steep sections using rock anchors and ice screws—extremely dangerous work. Since route-setting takes about a month, the work begins in mid-April, and all of the above tasks must be completed in low temperatures and strong winds, making it especially challenging.
Nyima Tsering says that mountaineering is a systematic project, including acclimatization training for team members in Lhasa and at the base camp, coordination services above the camps, route-setting, camp-building, transportation, and logistical support. Thanks to these specialized services, reaching the summit of Everest comes at a high price—300,000 yuan. Taking this year’s climbing team as an example, the 20 climbers required around 70 or 80 guides and support staff, consuming over 200 oxygen bottles alone.
Everest cleanup
Laba Ciren says that due to complex factors affecting summit applications, the number of teams climbing Everest from the northern slope in China varies each year. The numbers peaked between 2005 and 2006, with 700 people, including climbers and guides from both domestic and international teams. Around 2008, the number was about 400–500, in 2010 it was 300–400, and last year it dropped to just over 200. This year, there are 40 foreign teams summiting Everest, with an average of around 10 people per team, plus support staff, totaling about 400 people.
As more people climb, the resulting problems have gradually become more apparent. The issue that gives Laba Ciren the most headaches is the increasing amount of trash on Everest. Although the Everest Nature Reserve was established in 1988, due to a lack of environmental awareness, the trash on Everest remained uncleaned for a long time. Until 1998, trash at the base camp was still buried, sometimes as deep as 2 meters. After Laba Ciren arrived at the Everest Base Camp workstation in 1999, he hired local herders to dig up and remove the buried trash. It took 20 people a full month to clear all the accumulated waste.
“Now we require merchants to collect the trash first, and we organize five cleaners to clean once a week. Each time, we can handle a maximum of one truckload of trash, which is much less than before,” Laba Ciren says.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of mountaineering skills and equipment, Laba Ciren’s workstation can only manage environmental sanitation below 6,500 meters. Watching hundreds of people climb Everest each year, Laba Ciren wonders about the conditions higher up. He has often given his camera to climbers, asking them to take photos of litter on the mountain, but most have not brought any back. In the few photos that were returned, Laba Ciren saw that most of the trash on the mountain consists of oxygen bottles, batteries, instant noodle wrappers, and plastic bags, along with some occasional temporary waste. Although not densely scattered, the sight is deeply distressing.
Laba Ciren is angry but feels powerless. He knows it would take a significant investment from the government, but that seems unlikely for now. He mentions that there is an annual environmental cleanup campaign, but it’s just a formality. Participants only clean up the trash they generate and ignore everything else.
“To be honest, only we are doing the work of cleaning up trash and protecting the environment. I don’t welcome those who just put on a show for the campaign,” says Laba Ciren. Having worked at the Everest Base Camp workstation for 14 years, he has developed heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis. But he worries that once he’s gone, others won’t have the same environmental awareness, so he wants to hold on for a few more years—to do as much as he can.