“Although the early British expeditions to Everest in the 1920s were ambivalent about bottled oxygen, considering it less sporting, climbing with a mask on your face and a cylinder in your pack has been the norm on Everest ever since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s oxygen-assisted first ascent of the mountain in 1953. The gold rush of commercial mountaineering that began in the late 1980s could not have happened without bottled oxygen, which has facilitated thousands of Everest ascents, helped fuel an economic boom in dozens of Sherpa villages, and brought millions of dollars in climbing fees and tourist revenues to Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world.But veteran mountaineers like Dujmovits argue that the expanding use of bottled oxygen by commercial expeditions has eroded the alpine ethic of self-reliance—and on Everest in particular has created dangerous traffic jams of often less-than-qualified climbers who have no margin for error if their apparatus malfunctions or their gas runs out. Descending from the South Col in 2012, Dujmovits took a widely published photograph that captured the rush-hour madness promoted by supplemental oxygen: hundreds of climbers queued up conga-line style on one fixed rope on the Lhotse face. Of course, he could have jogged to the summit with the oxygen Namgyal was carrying but he’d vowed he wouldn’t use it even if he were just 10 meters from the top. No summit meant anything if he couldn’t reach it under his own power, autonomously, without a mask, or for that matter without someone belaying him on a short-rope to keep him from stumbling to his death. It wasn’t the top of Everest that mattered, it was the way you got there.”
