I've long held that climbing Everest has become a gross display of wealth and vanity and basically nobody should do it. There's no glory in being the 4000th person to do so. It's not glamorous. You're basically climbing over trash and dead bodies to do it.

Often inexperienced people with too much money are putting themselves, their sherpas and other climbers are risk by doing so.

Using bottled oxygen already made this substantially easier. But this Xenon is on a whole new level. I went looking for the cost and found [1]:

> After a week, the Brits could be back at their desks at home. They still pay an introductory price of an undisclosed amount. In future, such a short trip to Everest will cost around 150,000 euros.

From my understanding, that's 50-100,000 more than usual. The whole thing just reeks of Oceangate.

And for what? To take a selfie at the top and to brag to you're equally vacous and wealthy friends? It would be more ethical to stay home and just Photoshop yourself into a photo. ChatGPT can probably do it for you.

Nepal is a very poor country. Being a sherpa is one of the few (locally) high paying jobs there are. Sherpas risk their lives for this. At least on K2 or Annapurna you're more likely to find experiernced and technically capable mountaineers who won't endanger your life for a selfie.

Everest is not a technically difficult climb, as far as I understand it. The death zone and general conditions make it a challenge. Negate those with Xenon and it's just a really expensive walk.

[1]: https://abenteuer-berg.de/en/with-xenon-to-mount-everest-and...