Mount Everest climbers are being stuck for hours in human traffic jams as they are seen shuffling from shoulder to shoulder amid a record number of visitors to the major landmark.
Footage published on social media shows hundreds of people in a huge queue slowly making their way up Hillary Step, a 40-foot vertical rock on the path of the mountain – many who were stood still waiting around to move.
The caption of the video read: ‘Nearly 3 hours to cross this area due to congestion and difficult movement conditions at high altitude.
‘Is this serious? Spending all this money on carriers and guides just to get stuck in a traffic jam!’
Sitting at 8,790 metres above sea level on the southeast ridge, Hillary Step is halfway between the South Summit and the true summit.
It is located in the ‘Death Zone’, considered the most technically difficult part of the Everest climb and the last challenge before reaching the top of the mountain.
A record number of climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest in a single day from the Nepal side of the mountain, officials said.
An estimated 275 people scaled the 29,032ft peak on Wednesday, marking the highest ever number of single-day summits recorded from the route.
Mount Everest climbers are being stuck for hours in human traffic jams as they are seen shuffling from shoulder to shoulder
A record number of climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest in a single day from the southern face of the peak in Nepal
The milestone has surpassed the previous record set on May 22, 2019, when 223 climbers scaled Everest from its southern side in Nepal.
It has renewed fears about overcrowding on the world’s highest mountain, with huge queues of climbers snaking towards the summit during the narrow weather window.
Experts often criticise Nepal for allowing large numbers of climbers on the mountain, which sometimes leads to risky traffic jams or long queues in the area just below the summit, where the level of natural oxygen is dangerously below what is required for human survival.
Expedition organisers have acknowledged the dangers of congestion but say the risks can be managed.
‘If teams carry enough oxygen it is not a big problem,’ Lukas Furtenbach of the Austria-based Furtenbach Adventures told Reuters news agency.
‘We have mountains in the Alps like the Zugspitze where we have 4,000 persons on top per day. So 274 is actually not a big number, considering this mountain is 10 times bigger.’
The record number of visitors has seen Mount Everest’s highest campsite transformed into a garbage heap, with a video showing abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles and human waste littering the snow.
Social media footage shows Camp IV, the highest campsite on Earth, full of piles of rubbish left behind by climbing groups, with scores of worn-out yellow tents flapping in gale-force winds.
Mount Everest’s highest campsite has been transformed into a garbage heap, with a video showing abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles and human waste littering the snow
Video published on social media shows Camp IV full of piles of rubbish left behind by climbing groups, with scores of worn-out yellow tents flapping in gale-force winds
Situated on the South Col, Camp IV can be found between Mount Everest and Lhotse, the highest and fourth-highest mountains in the world, respectively.
‘What should be one of the most extraordinary places on the planet has, in many ways, become one of the ugliest faces of Everest’s commercialisation,’ Everest Today, an account dedicated to climbing the mountain, posted on X on Monday.
‘Abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles, food cans, torn gear, and other waste are scattered across the South Col, turning the world’s highest campsite into a graveyard of climbing equipment.
‘The mountain deserves better.’
While attempts have been made to clean up the waste that has built up over the years on the mountain, the high altitude and extreme weather make the task highly dangerous.
Good weather can quickly descend into blizzard conditions and oxygen levels are about a third of the normal amount.
Thousands of climbers have ascended the peak since it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
Almost 500 foreign climbers have been given permits to scale the peak this year – also a record high – as experts continue to raise the alarm about overcrowding and other safety risks.
In 2024, a group of Sherpas and Nepalese soldiers managed to clean up 11 tons of rubbish and retrieved four bodies from the mountain.
The mission wasn’t easy: it took two days for the team to recover one corpse which had been completely covered in ice.
‘The garbage left there was mostly old tents, some food packaging and gas cartridges, oxygen bottles, tent packs, and ropes used for climbing and tying up tents,’ Ang Babu Sherpa, who led the group of Sherpas, said at the culmination of the clean-up initiative.
Some of the debris that the team found dated back 69 years.
Since September 2025, mountaineers have had to pay $15,000 (£11,164) for a permit, up from the longstanding fee of $11,000, in the first price increase in nearly a decade.
