RIP Sir Edmund Hillary

I knew that's what you meant with your original post and it does make sense, but let's face it, yes, it's easier due to technology but people are still dying trying to do it. It's not a guaranteed feat.

 

Well, they even have guides on how to climb it now...

http://www.ehow.com/how_17485_climb-mount-everest.html?ref=fuel

 

Just because people know how to get up doesn't mean it's any easier, a.k.a, it's lost its luster, to get up.

I think that's a claim that only someone who's never tried it would ever possibly make.

 

From Wikipedia...

 

Yeah, it's that easy :

Read Jon Krakauer's masterful "Into Thin Air." As you do, keep in mind two of the most experienced guides ever to summit Everest: Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, died trying. At the time, Hall had more successful summits than any non-Sherpa and he never made it down that fateful day in May of 1996.

There is nothing easy, cheap or comfortable about climbing Everest. Not when Hillary did it 55 years ago, not when Hall and Fischer tried in '96 -- and not now.

 

The problem with Everest is the guide services that will short-rope a client to a Sherpa to get him up the mountain. You got $100,000 and zero mountaineering experience? No problem for some guide services.

Yes, it's still dangerous. It's even more dangerous these days with so many guides running so many unprepared clients up and down the mountain.

Outside and Men's Journal have reported extensively on the problems at Everest over the past few years.

 

I don't understand how being the first to accomplish a task becomes less noteworthy because others followed. We don't sit around talking about how Alexander Graham Bell's invention really isn't all that great because hundreds of companies now make phones.