How Mt Everest has become the highest, angriest traffic jam in the world

KNIVES, fists, fury and severe overcrowding. That's the picture up on Mt Everest this climbing season. An Aussie who's climbed it explains why.

Everest mess 12

MT EVEREST has turned completely feral. Climbers on the world's highest peak are behaving like punters at pub closing time in Kings Cross. The only difference is they're wearing Gore-Tex instead of G-strings.

Tensions boiled over recently at Camp II when an Italian climber referred to Sherpas as "slaves". Way to respect the celebrated Nepalese climbing guides and porters.

The Sherpas struck back by throwing rocks at the Italian tent. A knife was drawn. Everest, renowned for its sharp ridges, is on a knife edge in all kinds of new ways.

The reason for the outbreak of climbing rage can be summed up in one word: overcrowding.

Incredible images have surfaced this week showing a seemingly endless line of climbers on Everest's flank. It looks like the queue for the chairlift at Perisher on ski season opening weekend.

With climbers and Sherpas, plus logistics people such as chefs and meteorologists, you can have a mindboggling 1000 people at base camp and as many as 250 people summiting Everest on a single day.

These are numbers which completely blow the mind of experienced climbers like Andrew Lock, who has summited Everest twice, and is the only Australian to conquer all 14 of the world's 8000m peaks. (Everest is 8848m above sea level).

"It concerns me," Lock tells news.com.au. "The mess at base camp, the massive backlogs, the bottlenecks. If something goes wrong, you've got people who can't help because they're not in position to provide serious technical assistance even if they want to help."

Everest traffic

Lock attributes the overcrowding to a massive expansion in commercial expeditions. Before the early 1990s, only hardcore climbers attempted Everest. Now virtually anyone with a fat wad of cash and a parka they bought at Kathmandu (the shop, not the Nepalese city) can give it a go.

"The problem with commercial climbing is it's virtually unregulated," he says. "For $70,000 you can get a permit for up to seven people. Going solo is about $25,000.

"The lack of regulation is allowing unlimited numbers of inexperienced climbers to be guided up the mountain. These people would not be able to climb it under their own steam."

Lock says the congestion is exacerbated by the incredibly brief Everest "weather window".

That window lasts barely two or three weeks in May, when the jet stream winds which normally buffet the mountain briefly drift further north. Meanwhile the monsoon, which blankets the mountain in unstable snow, doesn't set in till June.

In this tiny window, climbers are all "shepherded", as Lock puts it, up Everest's South Col route, which is the route traversed by Hilary in 1953. The route is technically the easiest. But with so many people on the same bit of mountain, relations get seriously tetchy.

"People are pushier," Locke says. "We are talking about vast sums of money that people pay to climb Everest. That means expedition staff are under pressure to succeed. With all that tension, it's quite natural in any human situation that there will be issues."

One of the angriest places is Camp III. It's on the face of Lhotse, the world's fourth highest mountain, which you have to traverse to reach Everest. Lhotse is highly avalanche-prone. Guess what happens when too many people want to camp there? More rock throwing, presumably.

When Everest expeditioners aren't venting their fury, they're becoming plain sneaky.

Lock says members of the smaller, less organised expeditions now hang around the larger expeditions at base camp to see if they can pilfer snippets of information related to weather and other variables.

The big expeditions hate it when the little guys tack on behind them on the climb, so they're now resorting to all sorts of deception tactics to conceal their summit departure date.

In short, it's a big crazy zoo up in the Himalayas these days – and we're not talking about the yaks. But for all that, Andrew Lock says the mountain retains its appeal.

"I love Everest. It is a beautiful mountain, a mighty majestic peak. Unfortunately it has been compromised by this over-commercialisation. But I'd go back when the other climbers weren't there."

Lean more about Andrew Lock, his incredible feat of climbing THE WORLD'S 14 HIGHEST MOUNTAINS, and his upcoming book, right here.