Hillary's Gone. Everest Still Here. Still a Good Show Sir Edmund. Wish They Had Stopped After You.

Sir Edmund Hillary died today at age 88. Mount Everest had changed since his climb. “‘It is hardly mountaineering; more like a conducted tour,’ Sir Edmund Hillary told reporters in Katmandu in 2003, celebrating the anniversary of his and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 climb of the 29,035-foot summit.
‘Commercial climbing has developed, with many inexperienced enthusiasts, dozens of aluminum ladders, thousands of meters of fixed rope,’ he said. . . .He lived long enough to see the Himalaya, once an impossibly isolated region, become a popular destination for anyone with the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to join a commercial expedition to the highest peaks.
‘I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top,’ he told a newspaper in New Zealand in 2006, after a young British mountaineer died high on Everest after dozens of climbers passed by him and did nothing to help.” After Hillary: Commercialism, Courage By BINAJ GURUBACHARYA