Breathing in the thin and misty monsoon-season air, Kanchha Sherpa gazes over his hometown of Namche Bazaar, en route to Mount Everest. He is the only surviving member of the expedition that first summited the mountain back in 1953, when this town had only 12 homes. Today, it is filled with dozens of hotels, shops, and cafes.
Since his first expedition, Everest-related tourism has brought in transformative revenue for the region, Kanchha Sherpa says. During the offseason, there are more cows and yaks roaming the streets than tourists, but the constant construction of roads and new hotels on every block show the work that goes into preparing for the roughly 50,000 visitors to Everest National Park every year.
“Everest is in Nepal, but is the pride of the world,” says CEO of the Nepal Tourism Board Deepak Raj Joshi. “Everyone likes to see, touch, or experience Everest.”
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The world has a fascination with Mount Everest – one that brings both money and destruction to Nepal’s Himalayan region. Now, long-awaited regulations could transform how the mountain operates.
But the people living in the Everest region think the mountain needs a break. For years, mountaineering experts and local officials have criticized overcrowding on Everest as dangerous and environmentally destructive, and have demanded that Nepal’s central government do more to balance sustainability and safety with the insatiable interest in the world’s tallest peak.
The government might soon answer these calls, as the Nepal National Assembly has introduced a bill with a host of new regulations that aim to address overcrowding, safety concerns, and pollution on Everest. If passed, it would create additional hurdles for aspiring climbers and international mountaineering companies, and transform the Everest experience.
Dawa Steven Sherpa – who, like many people native to this Himalayan region, uses Sherpa as a surname – helped craft the bill back in 2017, after years of advocating for greater regulations on Everest.
“We’ve been at this for decades,” says the CEO of Asian Trekking, Nepal’s oldest mountaineering company. “Everything takes a long time in Nepal, and then suddenly it happens. You have to keep knocking on that door.”
Tackling trash and safety
During the 2025 climbing season, 468 people obtained the required individual permit to climb Mount Everest from the Nepal side, and the permit fees alone generated $5 million in revenue for Nepal’s central government, according to the Department of Tourism. With them comes a host of guides, sherpas, and other support staff, who gather every spring at base camp.
Standing atop the bare, uneven ground of Khumbu Glacier, it’s hard to imagine the tent city that 2,000 people build here every March – and then break down every June. But along the trail, and higher up on the mountain, signs of their presence linger well after the climbing season ends. During the summer, the harsh sun melts food wrappers and tent fabric out of the Khumbu Icefall that overlooks base camp. Scraps of plastic litter the trail to the nearest airport, where hikers pass dozens of horses marching single file, cowbells clanging, carrying heavy canvas bags full of garbage strapped to their backs.
The Integrated Tourism Bill attempts to ease this pollution by requiring climbers to pay a nonrefundable garbage fee, replacing the current system that refunds a $4,000 garbage deposit to climbers who return from the mountain with at least 8 kilograms (17.5 pounds) of trash. It would also require every Everest climber to first summit a different 7,000-meter peak in Nepal – a measure aimed at lowering the number of casualties on the mountain by reducing the number of inexperienced climbers.
There have been five deaths on the mountain this year. In 2023, when the most climbers ever attempted the summit from Nepal, a record 18 people died.
“Everyone wants to climb Mount Everest, but they don’t all have the skills,” says Mingma Chhiri Sherpa, chair of Khumbu Rural Municipality. “When there’s more climbers, there are more accidents and more pollution. So now we have to control all these things.”
The Department of Tourism hopes the 7,000-meter summit requirement will also incentivize more climbers to take on some of Nepal’s other 461 mountains that are open for climbing but do not get nearly as much tourist attention.
Other provisions of the bill require that all lead guides and helpers on every expedition be Nepali citizens, and would ensure that all non-Nepali guides pay permit fees, like any other climber.
Long-awaited regulations
There are other changes on the horizon, unrelated to the bill. The Department of Tourism recently put forth its own plan to identify the annual “carrying capacity” of Everest, following instructions from the Nepal Supreme Court, says Dawa Steven Sherpa. This would allow the Department of Tourism to cap the number of permits it grants annually. And starting in September, the spring season permit fee for climbing Everest will increase from $11,000 to $15,000.
Tshering Sherpa, Kanchha Sherpa’s son and a Namche hotel owner, hopes this money will go toward the Everest National Park Committee. Right now, this group only gets 16% to 17% of the national permit fee revenue, he laments, and government ministers rarely visit Namche to understand the challenges they face.
“We take this problem [of overcrowding] to the central government, but they don’t listen,” says Tshering Sherpa, who oversees a subcommittee on pollution control for the park committee.
Dawa Steven Sherpa is feeling hopeful. He sees years of advocacy – by local leaders, business owners, and environmentalists – starting to materialize. “In the long run, it’s going to be worth it,” he says.
The bill is subject to change before it passes both houses of Nepal’s National Assembly, and even if passed in their current form, the new regulations could go unenforced, like some existing mountaineering and trekking rules. In 2023, Nepal mandated that all trekkers hike with a local guide, but according to police officers at the checkpoint to enter Everest National Park, trekking without a guide is “no problem.”
But Mingma Chhiri Sherpa thinks that, amidst more accidents on the mountain, the national government will finally have to act. He’s not worried that more regulation would hurt business, either.
“There’s only one Everest,” he says.
