On October 17, 2025, a 17-year-old high school senior named JC declared to his family that he would climb Mt. Everest at 20. Since he was seven, JC has scaled mountains, summiting 15 peaks. His tallest conquest so far is Mt. Rainier, a formidable Washington mountain that rises about 14,410 feet.
“When my peers were busy scrolling on TikTok, I climbed Mt. Rainier with no oxygen tank. They can undermine me in academics, but no one can reach the physical heights that I’ve experienced,” JC said while packing his North Face Wawona 4 tent and ample servings of Mountain House Beef Stroganoff for his next climb. “Pain is temporary. Seeing the peak is forever. Hiking is not a hobby. It’s a lifestyle.”
JC’s extraordinary ambitions reflect a universal question for non-climbers: why do people gamble their lives to conquer the highest summits? For JC, personal glory drives his quest. For others, the motivations are more nuanced, steeped in British colonial history, culture and pure obsession.
Since records began in 1922, at least 322 people have died attempting the climb. The average is 4.4 deaths per year, but there have been catastrophic outliers: a 2015 earthquake killed 19 people at base camp, and an avalanche in earlier years killed 16 Nepali guides. Still, the dangers don’t deter JC or the broader mountaineering community.
“I love climbing more than anything, and it’s my biggest dream to climb Everest. The risks outweigh the costs,” JC says. “And even if I died during the journey, I would be fine.”
The mountain’s pull keeps drawing visitors: base camp receives about 100,000 people annually, with around 600 attempting the summit each season. Climbers travel from every part of the world to chase what many consider the ultimate human challenge.
“I know Everest is not ordinary,” JC said. “But if Alex Honnold can solo climb El Capitan at 33 years old, then Everest would be routine. I would book a flight to Nepal today, if my parents didn’t stop me, or think I wouldn’t make it out alive.”
Climbing Everest looks more complicated once you examine the colonial roots of the expeditions. The mountain’s modern climbing history begins on May 29, 1953, when Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were commissioned to attempt the summit. That expedition also erased “Qomolangma,” the native Tibetan name, replacing it with a tribute to Sir George Everest, the British Surveyor General of India.
Even today, the British-imposed name prevails over the native one which is an ongoing instance of cultural erasure that leaves Nepalese communities unable to reclaim their own language for their own land.
The expedition was also, unmistakably, an act of British self-glorification. British newspapers hailed the “conquest” of Everest as a coronation gift for the Queen, and BBC Radio called it a victory “worthy to resound through history, for long centuries to come.” That framing of Everest as a stage for Western triumph becomes even clearer in how differently its two summiteers were rewarded: Hillary was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, while Norgay received only Britain’s George Medal with no monetary award attached.
That exploitative legacy persists, and in some ways has worsened. Sherpas are rarely paid fairly for their labor, despite carrying nearly twice their body weight in equipment and food for foreign climbers. Meanwhile, the expedition “operators” who broker these trips can earn up to $80,000 from a single client, while the sherpas who do most of the physical work see only a fraction of that. Many agencies make Sherpas do 70% of the work while they are paid not even 10% of what expedition agencies earn from the clients,” Sherpa Dawa Sonju has said.
“I know I will have to be back on the mountain next climbing season because I have no other job and Everest means money,” one sherpa said.
The environmental toll compounds the human one. Each climber generates roughly 18 pounds of trash per expedition, leaving trails littered with empty oxygen canisters, abandoned tents, food containers and human waste. In 2024 Kanchha Sherpa, the last surviving member of Hillary’s original expedition crew publicly criticized Everest’s overcrowding, saying climbers now “dump their trash in crevasses.”
For the Sherpa people, who revere the mountain as Qomolangma, the “goddess mother of the world,” this isn’t only environmental damage — it’s cultural and religious desecration. “Qomolangma is the biggest god for the Sherpas, but people smoke and eat meat and throw them on the mountain,” Kanchha Sherpa said.
The ritual of summit flag-planting carries its own colonial echo. JC’s own ambition includes staking a flag at the top to mark his Korean heritage a gesture former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once captured when she said a climber “may climb Everest for himself, but at the summit he plants his country’s flag.” Personal achievement, in other words, has always doubled as national conquest. The act of marking the mountain with a foreign flag plants a claim of possession over land the Sherpas consider sacred.
Everest also exposes its climbers’ mortal arrogance. “Summit fever” describes the blinkered judgment that pushes climbers to ignore clear signs of physical breakdown in pursuit of the peak, most visibly in the so-called Death Zone, where climbers risk cerebral edema, cardiovascular strain, organ failure, frostbite and hypoxic seizures despite repeated warnings.
That same stretch of mountain is nicknamed Rainbow Valley for the colorful gear still visible on the bodies of climbers who never made it down. Hikers don’t just see them they step over them. “Death. Carnage. Chaos. Lineups. Dead bodies on the route and in tents at camp 4… Walking over dead bodies,” one hiker recently said. The 2006 death of climber David Sharp remains a stark example: more than 40 climbers passed him, including a commercial team that recognized his condition but chose to continue toward the summit rather than help.
JC’s ambitions sit at the intersection of the personal and the symbolic — shaped by both historical hubris and human fragility. He says he understands the history, the ethics and the risk.
“The urge to climb is a calling that not everyone understands. It’s an acquired sport that leads to self-discovery,” he said. “I know that this climb is personally driven. But my goal would be to climb without burdening any sherpas, desecrating the land or working with Western companies — so that the natives are given fair payment.”
JC combs his bleached-blond hair and throws his pack into his car, already imagining himself atop Everest. He thinks of Icarus, flying too close to the sun, ignoring his father’s warnings. He knows Everest’s warnings too: its colonial legacies, its valley of corpses, its imposed name, its underpaid sherpas. But he isn’t climbing to fulfill that old myth — he’s climbing, he says, to rewrite it.
“To climb Everest is the greatest reverence we can give to Qomolangma,” he said. “And I will show how that can be done.”
