446 days to go
Geologists say the mountain is getting higher all the time but, to judge by the crowds on the top, Everest presents less of a mountaineering challenge than it used to. It took decades of trying before the first successful ascent in 1953, but last year more than 480 people reached the summit and this season's crop may exceed 500 for the first time.
So the Chinese Olympic torch rehearsal team, who are understood to have already summitted this month, raised eyebrows less for the scale of their ambition than for one novelty among many. Sitting at Base Camp on the Nepalese side of the mountain I spoke by satellite phone with Arnold Coster, leader of the SummitClimb expedition on the Chinese side, at the northern Base Camp a few kilometres away.
'There's like 40 Tibetan climbers and another 40 Chinese climbers and their base camp is all fenced off,' he said in a tone of gentle amusement. 'If we go near there an armed guard comes and tells us to get lost.'
I was at Everest Base Camp on the north side a few years ago and it was easy to picture the scene. All around there are huge piles of slowly shifting loose rocks that could pass for mountains in their own right in many other places. A vast dirty glacier keeps the landscape slowly but constantly moving.
Amid all this, the extensive tent-village of Base Camp seems tiny.
