“We are heading straight towards a great catastrophe,” Marc Batard, high mountain guide and former record holder of Everest. Nobody listens, however, to the French mountaineer but to the access to the mountain itself, to the passage through the Khumbu waterfall, a glacier as chaotic as it is dangerous, a labyrinth of cracks and masses of ice that hang over tourists and mountain workers. A huge block of ice about to collapse has kept the base camp in suspense for weeks at the beginning of the spring season until the Sherpas in charge of equipping the route have found an acceptable step. Ironically, Batard himself found a few seasons ago an alternative route that avoids the Khumbu and leads to camp 1. But the tour operators do not want to take their clumsy clients along this path, which in their opinion is too technical. Batard will never find a way to avoid queues on the way to the top, queues to leave it. It is something that is exclusively the responsibility of the Government of Nepal, which looks the other way and lies.
