Mount Everest climbers must now rent a tracking device before their ascent

Adventurers climbing Mount Everest this year will need to rent a tracking device from the government before their expedition begins. — Pixabay

Climbers must wear tracking devices when attempting to scale Mount Everest, officials in Nepal have announced in a measure aimed at helping rescuers to reach stranded climbers.

The mandating of the chips comes after one of the deadliest years for climbers of the world’s highest mountain, with 12 confirmed fatalities and five other people declared missing on its windswept, icy slopes in 2023.

The satellite-linked chips are to be rented from the government as part of the permit issuing process for climbers. Stitched into the mountaineer’s clothes, the devices are to be handed back after the descent from the 9km-high mountain.

Eight of the world’s 10 highest peaks are in Nepal, where mountaineering tourism is an important business. The short Everest climbing season usually comes, weather-permitting, in May, though some daredevils attempt riskier winter climbs. The first of this was completed in 1980, almost four decades after Edmund Hillary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s first successful summer summit.

Over 330 people are estimated to have died while trying to reach the top of Everest, with around 200 corpses remaining on its slopes as it is deemed too risky to try take the deceased down.

Everest is far from the most dangerous mountain to climb, however, with a fatality rate of around six in 100. Only one in three climbers have survived to tell the tale after trying to reach the summit of Annapurna, an 8,000m-high peak in Nepal, while for K2 on the China-Pakistan border, the ratio is around one in four, making it the world’s second most dangerous mountain as well as the second-tallest.

And while Europe’s highest mountains barely reach half the height of those in the Himalayas, some are notoriously tricky and perilous climbs, with Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Eiger – the latter being the vertigo-inducing setting for The Eiger Sanction, a 1975 Clint Eastwood film – claiming the lives of hundreds of climbers. – dpa