Two Climbers Set to Carve a New Route to Everest after ‘Traffic Jam’ Experience This Year

This summit season, Mt Everest witnessed the first-ever fatal traffic jam as the pictures and images of the pathetic wait spread all over social media and news reports depicting a single line of climbers stretching along the ridgeline, increasing high levels of pollution and the gruesome need to navigate around the bodies of lost climbers. Thus two climbers, Cory Richards and Estaban ‘Topo’ Mena have decided to carve a new route to the world’s tallest peak.

This year, the mountain claimed at least 11 lives, making it the deadliest climbing season since a series of avalanches in 2015, which killed around 20 climbers. Since 2010, deaths due to falls or avalanches account for more than half of the deaths, but there has been an increase in altitude-related deaths. 

Prolonged exposure past this point leads to most of the altitude-related deaths, making the increased traffic along the two most-popular routes more deadly. Everest experts blame the small weather window and prolonged summit wait times to the increased deaths this year. 

The heaviest traffic occurs along the two routes, the northeast ridge that originates from Tibet and the South Col, that is located in Nepal. 

Richards and Mena are familiar with the dangerous routes of the Everest. Together they have trekked up to 29,029 feet to the summit 6 times. 31-year-old Mena is a guide associated with Alpenglow Expeditions, a guiding company that operates on Everest. He reached the top of the peak without the use of supplemental oxygen.

While Richards’s relationship with Mt Everest started in the year 2010, when he worked with Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term study documenting the glacier recession alongside the Khumbu icefall. 

He reached the top of Mt Everest for the first time in the year 2016 without supplemental oxygen, alongside Adrian Ballinger, who is a professional mountaineer and founder of the Alpenglow Expeditions.

There are nearly 20 named routes established on the Everest. Most recently in 2009, a Korean team discovered a route. The strange part is that only three percent of the roughly 7,000-recorded summits have occurred on one of these routes, according to the Himalayan Database. As the majority of the climbers stick to the two main routes because they are the most established and familiar.

On April 10, with the mission to discover a new convenient route, the two climbers arrived at the Everest base camp on April 10 but as the weather was too cold and too short. Ultimately, they made the decision to turn back. After years of preparation and over a month of scouting and acclimatizing, they failed as they were forced to accept the rough conditions.

Richard said, “There is sadness, there is disappointment, there is anger. But underscoring all of that, we are doing this from a place of profound privilege”.

So Richards and Mena, after a training break of two weeks, have declared that they will start preparing for a second attempt next year. This time, for Richards, the journey of the Everest is more important than to reach the destination, he believes the steps taken, the training, the fear, the anxiety, the sacrifices can only be understood when he reaches that destination.