For many years, the most lucrative commercial guiding operation on Mt. Everest has been a company called Himalayan Experience, or Himex, which is owned by a New Zealand mountaineer named Russell Brice. In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to Everest’s West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of the mountain. Brice’s clients (“members,” in the parlance of Himalayan mountaineering), Western guides, and Sherpas repeatedly had to climb beneath the threatening ice bulge as they moved up and down the mountain to acclimatize and establish a series of higher camps necessary for their summit assault. One day, Brice timed how long it took his head guide, Adrian Ballinger (“who is incredibly fast,” he wrote in the blog post excerpted below), to climb through the most hazardous terrain: 
 
 Adding to Brice’s concern, some of his most experienced Sherpas, ordinarily exceedingly stoical men, approached him to say that the conditions on the mountain made them fear for their lives. One of them actually broke down in tears as he confessed this. So on May 7, 2012, Brice made an announcement that shocked most of the thousand people camped at the base of Everest: he was pulling all his guides, members, and Sherpas off the mountain, packing up their tents and equipment, and heading home. He was widely criticized for this decision in 2012, and not just by clients who were forced to abandon their dreams of climbing the world’s highest mountain without receiving a refund for the forty-three thousand euros they had paid him in advance. Many of the other expedition leaders also thought Brice was wildly overreacting. The reputation of Himex took a major hit. 
 
 After what happened last Friday, though, it’s hard to argue with Brice’s call. On April 18th, shortly before 7 A.M. local time, an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion broke loose from the same ice bulge that had frightened Brice into leaving Everest in 2012. As it crashed onto the slope below, the ice shattered into truck-size chunks and hurtled toward some fifty climbers laboring slowly upward through the Khumbu Icefall, a jumbled maze of unstable ice towers that looms above the 17,600-foot base camp. The climbers in the line of fire were at approximately nineteen thousand feet when the avalanche struck. Of the twenty-five men hit by the falling ice, sixteen were killed, all of them Nepalis working for guided climbing teams. Three of the bodies were buried beneath the frozen debris and may never be found. 
 
 Although many news reports indicated that all the victims were Sherpas, the legendary mountain people who comprise just half of one per cent of the Nepali population, three of the sixteen were members of other, much larger ethnic groups: one was Gurung, one was Tamang, and one was a member of the Hindu Chhetri caste. All, however, were employed as high-altitude climbing Sherpas—an élite profession that deservedly commands respect and admiration from mountaineers around the world. 
 
 It was the worst climbing accident in the history of Everest, twice as deadly as the infamous storm in May, 1996, that killed eight people, the subject of my book “Into Thin Air” (four of my teammates accounted for half of that grim tally). But dying on Everest has been an occupational hazard for Sherpas ever since a team led by George Leigh Mallory to attempt the Tibetan side of the peak, in 1922, became the first mountaineers to ascend higher than the lower flanks of the mountain. In the final days of that expedition, seven Sherpas from Darjeeling, India, were swept to their deaths in an avalanche. Sad to say, the job hasn’t gotten any safer for Sherpas with the passage of time. According to a piece by Jonah Ogles posted on outsideonline.com, the death rate for climbing Sherpas on Everest from 2004 until now was twelve times higher than the death rate for U.S. military personnel deployed in Iraq from 2003-07. 
 
 There is no denying that climbing Everest is a preposterously dangerous undertaking for the members who provide the Sherpas’ income. But running counter to the disturbing trend among Sherpas, climbing Everest has actually grown significantly safer for Western guides and members in recent years, according to the available data. This can be attributed to a number of factors. Western climbers now use bottled oxygen much more liberally than they did in the past; many Western climbers now prophylactically dose themselves with dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, when they ascend above twenty-two thousand feet, which has proven to be an effective strategy for minimizing the risk of contracting high-altitude cerebral edema ( HACE ) and high-altitude pulmonary edema ( HAPE ), potentially fatal ailments that are common on Everest; and weather forecasts are much more accurate than they were eighteen or twenty years ago. 
 
 During the seventy-six years from the first attempt on Everest, in 1921, through 1996, when I was guided up Everest, a hundred and forty-four people died and the summit was reached six hundred and thirty times, a ratio of one death for every four successful ascents. Notably, over the eighteen years that have passed since 1996, a hundred and four people have died and the summit has been reached six thousand two hundred and forty-one times—one death for every sixty ascents. Furthermore, non-Sherpas accounted for only seventy-one of these deaths, which equates to just one death for every eighty-eight ascents. 
 
 The reason the risk remains so much greater for Sherpas can be traced to several things. Sherpas aren’t provided with nearly as much bottled oxygen, because it is so expensive to buy and to stock on the upper mountain, and they tend to be much better acclimatized than Westerners. Sherpas are almost never given dexamethasone prophylactically, because they don’t have personal physicians in their villages who will prescribe the drug on request. And perhaps most significant, Sherpas do all the heavy lifting on Everest, literally and figuratively. The mostly foreign-owned guiding companies assign the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs to their Sherpa staff, thereby mitigating the risk to their Western guides and members, whose backpacks seldom hold much more than a water bottle, a camera, an extra jacket, and lunch. The work Sherpas are paid to do—carrying loads, installing the aluminum ladders, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope—requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Khumbu Icefall—the shattered, creaking, ever-shifting expanse of glacier that extends from just above base camp, at seventeen thousand six hundred feet, to the nineteen-thousand-five-hundred-foot elevation. The fact that members and Western guides now suck down a lot more bottled oxygen is wonderful for them, but it means the Sherpas have to carry those additional oxygen bottles through the Icefall for the Westerners to use. 
 
 Historically, more Everest climbers have perished from severe weather, HACE , HAPE , exhaustion, falling from steep terrain, or some combination of these hazards than from being crushed or buried in the Khumbu Icefall. This seems to be changing, however. Accurate weather forecasting has reduced the risk of being surprised by a killer storm like the one that struck in 1996. But the pronounced warming of the Himalayan climate in recent years has made the Icefall more unstable than ever, and there is still no way to predict when a serac is going to topple over. And Sherpas spend much, much more time in the Icefall than their Western employers. 
 
 In 1996, for example, I made four round trips through the Khumbu Icefall: three circuits as I progressively acclimatized to twenty-four thousand feet during the month of April, and a final round trip on my journey to the 29,035-foot summit and back. I was terrified each of the eight times I moved through the frozen chaos, which usually took more than three hours to ascend, even with my nearly empty backpack, and slightly less than an hour to descend. In contrast, each of the Sherpas supporting my team’s ascent was required to make something like thirty trips through the Icefall, often while carrying eighty-pound loads of food, propane, and bottled oxygen. 
 
 These days, moreover, members are apt to spend even less time in the Icefall than I did when I was on Everest, eighteen years ago. It’s becoming increasingly common for Western guides and members to acclimatize in hypobaric chambers before they arrive in Nepal, or on other, less hazardous Himalayan peaks in advance of their summit assaults, greatly reducing the number of times they must expose themselves to the perils of the Icefall. Some members now make only a single round trip through it, while each of the Sherpas supporting them must still pass through that hazardous terrain between two and three dozen times. Most Western climbers feel more than a little guilty about this, but I know of none who have ever offered to take an extra lap through the Icefall with a heavy load in order to reduce a Sherpa’s exposure. 
 
 The statistics suggesting that Everest has become safe for members may, in fact, be giving Westerners a false sense of security, however. The astounding number of climbers who now attempt to reach the summit on the limited number of days when the weather is favorable presents a new kind of hazard. A notorious photo shot by Ralf Dujmovits in May, 2012, showed more than a hundred and fifty people attached to a series of fixed ropes as they ascended the Lhotse Face toward the South Col of Everest, jammed together so tightly that they had to move in lockstep. The static weight of all these people and their gear was well over thirty thousand pounds. If some mishap had occurred that caused more than a handful of the climbers to put their full weight on one of the ropes simultaneously, the shock to the anchors securing the ropes to the ice could easily have caused them to fail, resulting in the climbers falling two thousand or more feet to the base of the Lhotse Face. If such an accident should come to pass in the future (which isn’t far-fetched), the death count for both members and Sherpas would be horrific. 
 
 In any event, no Western members or guides were killed or injured in last week’s avalanche. At the moment, in the immediate aftermath, almost everyone climbing on the Nepal side of Everest has retreated to base camp to try to come to grips with the catastrophe. Most of them, Sherpas and foreign climbers alike, are reeling from the unprecedented loss of life. At least one expedition has already announced that it will abandon the mountain. For the foreign climbers, to go home now will mean forfeiting most or all of the fifty to ninety thousand dollars they have spent to be guided up Everest. For the Sherpas who make the guided ascents possible, however, to quit now, after only a few weeks’ wages, will be an even greater economic sacrifice, relatively speaking. 
 
 Depending on their talent, experience, foreign-language skills, how many loads they carry up and down the mountain, and how generously they’re tipped by their clients, climbing Sherpas generally take home between two and eight thousand dollars at the conclusion of an Everest expedition, which commences for them in late March and typically ends around the first of June. If a climbing Sherpa dies on the job, his family receives a million rupees (approximately ten thousand five hundred dollars) from the insurance his employer is required to provide. By any reasonable measure, neither these wages nor insurance payouts are fair compensation for the risk involved. But in Nepal, where the median annual income is less than six hundred dollars, most of the Sherpas’ countrymen would eagerly take similar risks for the opportunity to receive that kind of pay. 
 
 Nevertheless, on April 20th, after holding several emotional, contentious meetings at Everest base camp, the climbing Sherpas announced that they would go on strike unless the Nepali government agreed to meet thirteen demands within a week. The threat of a work stoppage was provoked by the Sherpas’ outrage over the Nepali government’s offer to provide just forty thousand rupees—slightly more than four hundred dollars—to the families of the Sherpas killed in the avalanche, to defray their funeral expenses. Among the Sherpas’ demands are that the government increase this compensation to approximately a thousand dollars per family; provide ten thousand dollars to climbing Sherpas who have been seriously disabled; establish a permanent relief fund for injured Sherpas with a portion of the ten-thousand-dollar permit fee every Western Everest climber is charged by the Nepali government; double the current insurance benefit provided by the guiding companies to twenty-one thousand dollars; require the guiding companies to pay Sherpas their salaries, even if they call off the remainder of the 2014 Everest climbing season; and establish a monument in Kathmandu to memorialize the deceased Sherpas. 
 
 The collective anger and resentment expressed by the Sherpas over the past few days is unprecedented. On April 20th, Tim and Becky Rippel, the owners of a guiding company called Peak Freaks, which lost a Sherpa named Mingma Tenzing to a fatal case of HAPE earlier in the month, stated, in a blog post: 
 
 As we suggested in a previous post the Sherpa guides are heating up, emotions are running wild and demands are being made to share the wealth with the Sherpa people on the table. Now that there are more Sherpa operators today on Everest, they’ve come to learn how much the government of Nepal makes in revenues from Everest expeditions and they are asking for a share. This is their time and under very unfortunate circumstances. In any case things are getting very complicated and there is a lot of tension here and it’s growing. Peak Freaks is in support of the Sherpa people any which way it goes. They are our family, our brothers and sisters and the muscle on Everest. We follow their lead, we are guests here. 
 
 Should the government and the Sherpas manage to reach an agreement concerning the terms of the new demands, it will come as no great surprise if most of the Sherpas now grieving intensely for their absent companions resume their dangerous work within the next week or two. Many people believe that this is the most likely outcome. 
 
 Jon Krakauer’s most recent books are “Three Cups of Deceit,” “Where Men Win Glory,” and “Under the Banner of Heaven.” 
 
 Photograph by Niranjan Shrestha/AP. ||||| Two members of the “Everest” IMAX film scaled the treacherous Khumbu Icefall in 1996. (Reuters) 
 
 Of all the obstacles to those ascending Mount Everest, the Khumbu Icefall is perhaps the most treacherous. 
 
 The steep, craggy expanse of glacier skids downhill at a rate of several feet per day, constantly heaving and shifting from the pull of gravity and the pressure of its own immense weight. Deep crevasses can appear overnight, and huge ice towers called “seracs” can splinter and fall at any moment, sending chunks the size of cars cascading downward. Mountaineers have christened the icefall’s most notorious sections with names like “Popcorn Field” and “the Ballroom of Death,” and for years guides have eyed the path through them with unease. 
 
 “Each trip through the Icefall was a little like playing a round of Russian roulette,” climber and writer John Krakauer wrote in his 1997 book “Into Thin Air.” “Sooner or later any given serac was going to fall over without warning, and you could only hope you weren’t beneath it when it toppled.” 
 
 
 
 The icefall in 2003. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) 
 
 Last April, 16 climbers — all of them Nepali men working as Sherpas for climbing expeditions — were crushed beneath one of those collapsing ice columns. It was the single deadliest incident in Everest’s history and triggered a boycott among Sherpa climbers that led to the cancellation of the season’s expeditions. 
 
 [At least 12 killed, others missing after Mount Everest avalanche] 
 
 Now Nepali officials say they are changing the route through the icefall in time for the 2015 season, shifting climbers’ paths toward the glacier’s central section. 
 
 “The route through the center will be difficult and time consuming, but it will be relatively free from the risk of avalanche,” Ang Dorji Sherpa told the BBC. He heads the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, the Nepali organization that sets the route for Everest expeditions. 
 
 
 
 Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. He and climbing partner Edmund Hillary were the first people to reach the highest point on Earth. (Edmund Hillary/Royal Geographical Society via AP) 
 
 The central route isn’t really new — it has been used by mountaineers climbing Everest’s south face since 1953, according to National Geographic. But the path was changed in favor of the more dangerous “West Shoulder” in the 1990s. The new route skirted the left-hand side of the icefall, avoiding the pocked and arduous path through the gut of the glacier, but passed right below massive towers of ice that loom over the icefall’s edge. This is where Krakauer trekked during his 1996 trip up Everest, and where the 16 Sherpas were killed last year. 
 
 By shifting toward the icefall’s safer center, the change in route addresses some of the safety concerns that have dogged Everest hikes — but not all of them. Last April’s disaster sparked two separate but related discussions about problems with Everest’s climbing culture: One about the impact of climate change on the mountain, the other about the treatment of the Sherpas who make most outsiders’ Everest ascents possible. 
 
 
 
 British mountain climber George Mallory, who died while scaling Mount Everest in 1924. (Photos by Getty) 
 
 Though the icefall has been considered risky for years — pioneering Everest climber George Mallory famously turned away from it in 1921, calling the section “terribly steep and broken” — some mountaineers say climate change has made the section more treacherous than ever. 
 
 “The ice is melting at unprecedented rates and [that] greatly increases the risk to climbers,” climber and environmental science professor John All told the Atlantic last April. All was writing from Everest base camp, his trek up the mountain cut short because of the 16 deaths. 
 
 “Climate change closed Mt.Everest this year,” All added. 
 
 Canadian avalanche specialist Tom Rippel, an Everest guide whose expedition was canceled, blogged about climate change’s role in the disaster. 
 
 “The mountain has been deteriorating rapidly the past three years due global warming and the breakdown in the Khumbu Icefall is dramatic, especially at the upper Icefall,” he wrote. “Each day we sit and listen to the groaning and crashing of the glacier.” 
 
 If Everest is becoming more dangerous, then Sherpas — the expert Nepali mountaineers who work as guides or porters for mostly foreign-run climbing expeditions — are bearing the brunt of that risk. 
 
 
 
 Nepalese Sherpas with luggage on the icefall in 2003. (Gurinder Osan/AP) 
 
 In a feature for the New Yorker published last spring, Krakauer argued that some of the same technologies that made Everest safer for visiting climbers in recent years — bottled oxygen, hypobaric chambers that allow climbers to acclimate to high altitudes before scaling the mountain — are increasing the burden on Sherpas. 
 
 “Sherpas do all the heavy lifting on Everest, literally and figuratively,” he wrote. “The mostly foreign-owned guiding companies assign the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs to their Sherpa staff, thereby mitigating the risk to their Western guides and members.” 
 
 Sherpas’ work, including installing ladders, anchoring ropes and carrying oxygen bottles in the icefall, may help climbers make their ascent, but it means the Sherpas have to spend more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain. Most paying climbers only traverse the icefall twice — once going up, the other coming down. By contrast, Sherpas cross that treacherous expanse two to three dozen times per season. 
 
 “All the hard work is done by Sherpas, that is the reality,” Pasang Sherpa of the Nepal National Mountain Guide Association told the New York Times last year. “Our job is to make a good scale for the clients, to make this comfortable. We have to do that.” 
 
 “The day-to-day life is very tense,” added Nima Nuru Sherpa, the first vice president of Nepal Mountaineering Association. “We never know what will happen. So we are not at peace. It’s a scary profession, a scary job.” 
 
 
 
 The icefall in 2003. (Gurinder Osan/AP) 
 
 During the boycott that followed last year’s disaster, Sherpas composed a list of 13 demands for better pay and stronger safety guarantees from the Nepali government. Compensation for those injured or killed figured prominently among them. Incensed by the government’s offer of just 40,000 rupees — about $400 — to the families of those killed, the Sherpas wanted this allowance increased to about $1,000 per family. They also demanded the government provide $10,000 disability benefit for climbing Sherpas who are seriously disabled, and that guide companies be required to raise their life insurance payments to about $20,000. 
 
 [A closer look at the dangerous work that Everest’s Sherpas undertake for Western climbers] 
 
 That’s a lot of money in the remote Himalayan communities where Sherpas live, and where subsistence farming is often the only other way to eke out a living. But Sherpas — and many of the foreigners they climb with — say what they’re paid is still not enough compensation for the risks they take. 
 
 The Nepali government met some of the Sherpas’ demands last April, raising the minimum insurance payment to about $15,000 and establishing a relief fund for families. Other items from the list — such as a request to use helicopters to drop heavy equipment at the camp above the icefall, reducing the number of trips Sherpas must make through the dangerous expanse — remain sticking points. 
 
 But they won’t prevent Sherpas from trekking back up the mountain this spring. 
 
 “We have already prepared the equipment required to begin the season,” Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee member Yangee Sherpa told Agence France-Presse. ||||| FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 22, 2016 file photo, international trekkers pass through a glacier at the Mount Everest base camp, Nepal. A Nepal official says some 30 climbers have gotten frostbite or become... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 22, 2016 file photo, international trekkers pass through a glacier at the Mount Everest base camp, Nepal. A Nepal official says some 30 climbers have gotten frostbite or become... (Associated Press) 
 
 KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — An Indian climber has died while being helped down Mount Everest, just a couple of days after a Dutch and an Australian died near the peak. Two other Indian climbers are missing, and experts say some of the tragedy may have been avoidable. 
 
 Poor planning and overcrowding on the world's tallest peak may have led to bottlenecks that kept people delayed at the highest reaches while waiting for the path to clear lower down, Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association said Monday. 
 
 "This was a man-made disaster that may have been minimized with better management of the teams," he said. "The last two disasters on Everest were caused by nature, but not this one." 
 
 Many had hoped this year's climbing season would bring success and restore confidence in the route, after deadly disasters canceled climbing the previous two years. But as hundreds of eager climbers, joined by local Sherpa guides and expedition experts, scrambled to take advantage of good weather to make it to the peak, reports of tragedy began trickling down the mountain. 
 
 First, a 35-year-old Dutch man, Eric Arnold, died on his way down from the peak from altitude sickness. Hours later, a 34-year-old Australian woman, Maria Strydom, died near the top, also after apparently suffering from altitude sickness. 
 
 On Monday, Subhash Paul of India was reported as the third death after succumbing to altitude sickness overnight as he was being helped down the mountain by Sherpa guides, said Wangchu Sherpa of the Trekking Camp Nepal agency in Kathmandu. 
 
 An Indian woman from Paul's team, Sunita Hazra, was resting at a lower-altitude camp after becoming ill higher up. But two other Indian climbers — Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh — have been missing since Saturday. Wangchu Sherpa said it was unlikely they would be able to survive Everest's hostile conditions. 
 
 Dozens of other climbers have developed frostbite or become sick near the summit in recent days, including the Australian woman's husband, Robert Gropal, who was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu on Monday for treatment. 
 
 Tshering said the competition between expedition organizers has become so fierce that they are dropping their prices, which can lead to compromises in hiring equipment, oxygen tanks and experienced guides to help get climbers to the top. 
 
 "Teams are hiring raw guides that have no knowledge of responding to situations of emergency," he said. 
 
 Belgian climber Jelle Vegt, who reached the peak on May 13, said that he made his attempt when there were fewer climbers on the narrow route snaking to the top, but that bad weather then forced many others to wait a few days. 
 
 Then, "a lot of people tried to go on the same weather window," the 30-year-old from Deldermond said after returning to Kathmandu. 
 
 Since Everest was first conquered by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, more than 4,000 climbers have reached the 8,850-meter-high (29,035-foot-high) peak. 
 
 Nearly 400 of those climbers reached the summit since May 11. Nepal's government had issued permits this year to 289 climbers, each of whom paid $11,000 to the government, plus another $25,000-$50,000 to an expedition company that provides guides, equipment and, often, bottled oxygen to use at high altitudes where the atmosphere is thin. The climbers are accompanied on the mountain by around 400 local Nepalese Sherpa guides. 
 
 Nepal and the Everest climbing community had been anxious for a successful season this year. The industry brings more than $3 million from permit fees alone into the poor, Himalayan country each year, and thousands of locals depend on the climbing season for secondary work as porters, hotel keepers or cooks. 
 
 Last year, a devastating earthquake unleashed an avalanche that killed 19 people at Base Camp, effectively ending all attempts at the peak for 2015. A year earlier, a massive ice fall on a glacier that is part of the route to the top killed 16 and rendered the route impassable for the season. 
 
 Before that, the worst disaster had been caused by a fierce blizzard in 1996 that killed eight climbers and was memorialized by Jon Krakauer in the book "Into Thin Air." 
 
 But while hundreds have died trying to reach the top of Everest due to avalanches, altitude sickness, exposure and other dangers, the use of bottled oxygen and better equipment had helped reduce the number of deaths each year. Satellite communication equipment and better medical facilities have also helped prevent tragedy. 
 
 Yet, some criticize expedition companies for taking novice climbers without any mountaineering experience. There are no regulations to require climbers to have any past experience before trying Everest.
– Jon Krakauer takes to the pages of the New Yorker to weigh in on the latest tragedy on Everest (the author was, of course, part of the 1996 disaster that saw eight climbers killed). His piece makes plain the imbalance between the dangers faced by Sherpas and the climbers they shepherd to the mountain's peak, but before arriving at that point, he shares a fascinating backstory: That of Himex, a New Zealand-based company that Krakauer calls the most "lucrative commercial guiding operation" on Everest—one that on May 7, 2012, packed up shop after 18 years on the mountain and headed home, taking its guides, members (aka paying climbers, who didn't see their $60,000 refunded), and Sherpas with them. The much-assailed decision was one made by owner Russell Brice, who had grown fearful of a 900-foot-wide overhang of glacial ice set directly above the main route on the mountain's Nepal side, an overhang that his members were directly under for as long as an hour while traversing the route. As Krakauer writes, the "wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion" that broke free and caused last week's avalanche came from "that same ice bulge" and killed 16 Sherpas. As for the outsize dangers Sherpas face, some standout points: Between 1921 and 1996, the mountain's death ratio was a treacherous one death for every four completed ascents. Between 1997 and present, the death ratio was one for every 60. Among the reasons it's gotten safer: Climbers tend to pack and use more bottled oxygen, and some take the robust steroid dexamethasone once they hit 22,000 feet, which pares down the risk of developing the often fatal high-altitude cerebral edema and high-altitude pulmonary edema. Sherpas typically have less of the former and none of the latter (and are, of course, the ones lugging those extra oxygen bottles up the mountain). Krakauer points to an Outside piece that shares the professions with a lower calculated fatality rate than that of Sherpas: US soldiers stationed in Iraq between 2003 and 2007, miners, and commercial fishermen.