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On Monday, Christopher Kulish, a 62-year-old attorney from Boulder, Colorado, died at Camp 4, located on the South Col at 26,000 feet, after returning from the summit of Mount Everest. According to Kulish’s brother, an initial assessment indicates Kulish died of cardiac arrest, not altitude sickness.
His death brings the number of fatalities on Mount Everest this season to 11 and raises the full death toll on Himalayan 8,000 meter peaks this spring to 21. With several more days remaining in the climbing season—which effectively ends when the monsoon arrives sometime the first week in June—it is possible the number will continue to rise.
A photo captured last week by Nepali mountaineer Nirmal Purja Magar showed a near continuous line of hundreds of climbers bottlenecked on the summit ridge of Everest—all trying to take advantage of a narrow window of good weather. The image went viral, sparking an instant debate about whether the mountain is too crowded and forcing a difficult, if familiar, discussion about whether the high number of casualties was due to too many climbers.
Most of those...
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