Reading about the fatalities on Mt. Everest gave me an idea:
The so-called “Dead Zone”-the last 5,000 feet of the climb, is the most dangerous. Most of the fatalities take place there-the air is thin, it is cold, and mental confusion causes many climbers to become disoriented.
My solution: build a ski lift/chairlift to cover the last 5000 feet. Instead of leaving the last camp before dawn, the climbers take a chairlift to the top (and can ride down). This makes the whole trip safer, and stops the mountain from being littered with all those corpses.
It wold be expensive, but you could charge $3000 a trip. It wold remove a lot of the danger, and allow more clients to get to the top, and with greater safety.
“Because it’s easy.”
It would be expensive, partly because you’d need to pay compensation to the families of those workers who die in the construction of the ski lift.
But if I owned such a ski-lift, I wouldn’t charge $3,000 per trip. I’d charge about $3 for going upwards, and about $300,000 for going back down again.
Or, you could take a helicopter…?
I kinda get the idea that the people who climb Everest these days aren’t just doing it to get to the top so much as they want to prove they can survive the entire climb.
You could charge five bucks for your ski lift and I would bet you still wouldn’t get many takers.
IIRC, the atmosphere at the highest elevations becomes too thin to support a helicopter. I watched an Imax documentary on Everest once that said the highest a helicopter has ever made it up the mountain was somewhere around 20,000 feet.
I think the relevant question to the OP’s proposal is, how would you BUILD the lift? The highest elevations of Everest aren’t exactly conducive to construction labor - the same extreme conditions that kill climbers would be potentially fatal to the workers. Transporting the building materials and equipment up the mountain would be a feat of logistics on par with building a base on the Moon using Iron Age technology. Vehicle travel up the mountain is impossible, and in the upper extremes the foot paths used by travellers are so narrow that only a single person can pass at a time, and, as Wikipedia puts it, " a misstep to the left would send one 2,400 m (8,000 ft) down the southwest face". Much of the ascent besides that is rope-climbing up sheer cliff faces and wading through waist-deep snow, making transporting equipment by foot impossible. (The northeast ascent from Tibet sounds less daunting, but isn’t a walk in the park either and requires lots of climbing up ropes and ladders, and the political status quo vis-a-vis Tibet makes it difficult for other reasons.) As mentioned above, helicopters can’t get that high up to airlift in equipment or supplies, and there are no level areas large enough to land an airplane. Even if you could get the equipment up there, operating heavy machinery in sub-zero temperatures, thin atmosphere, and several feet of hard snow pack would be next to impossible. All of this work would have to be done in a very short amount of time as well, since there’s only a short window of time every year when the summit can be safely at all.
Long story short, if you could even get it built, you’d need to charge a LOT more than $3,000 a ride.
ETA: On further review, a helicopter briefly reached the summit of Everest in 2005, but it was a difficult flight and not something to be achieved easily.
Also, what’s going to power this lift? There isn’t electricity laid on on top of Everest, you know, and carrying fuel up for a generator is going to be very, very expensive.
In short: I think this is a daft idea, to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
I’d suggest making it mechanical, using wind power. As someone who’s seen the snow plume coming off the summit of Everest with my own eyes, from both sides of the border, I can assure you there’s no shortage of moving air up there.
ETA: also you could drop the equipment out of a plane using remote control microlights. Let’s think outside the box here. 
The Man Who Skied Down Everest
!!!
Sure.
And why not a zip-line for the descent?
How you going to get a bunch of construction equipment 29,000 feet up the side of a mountain?
Duh! Robot construction workers.
Tunnel into the cent of Everest and then build an elevator to the top. You’re inside and you could make it pressurized. Then build a geodesic dome around the top of Everest and you could install a snack bar and a souvenir shop and clean up.
Now I’m picturing Maxwell the Pig going “whee! whee whee whee!” all the way down.
Actually I don’t think a lift to the summit could be constructed given the impossibility of getting constuction equipment to that height. But perhaps a lift could be built to go to a base camp, saving on fatigue for the climbers and reducing the amount of supplies they’d need to carry.
The solution to running is a car.
The solution to swimming is a boat.
Ralph, what you propose defeats the purpose of mountain climbing.
Speak with some mountain climbers about why they climb.
I think there are some people who would be interested in paying just to see what it’s like to be at the “top of the world”. It wouldn’t be really any different from the “space tourism” that Virgin Galactic is trying to promote, would it? Or even from paying to go to the top of the Empire State Building or the CN Tower or the Burj Khalifa, for that matter.
It’s certainly an unfeasibly huge and dangerous project, though.
Once it’s built, you could send fuel up using the lift itself - every fifth car is a fuel tank, or something like that. No, this does not violate any laws of thermodynamics.
But a lift is a dumb idea anyway. The only reason to go to the top of Everest is that it’s difficult. If you want to make it easy, it would probably be better to cut the top off the mountain and move it down to sea level, with full access for everyone and a huge car park and gift shop. That makes about the same level of sense, anyway.
Well, these bogus “expeditions” pay local poor people (sherpas) to hump supplies up the mountain-you would think that a more “authentic” “Everest experience” would be to carry the supplies yourself. What I am proposing would:
-save lives
-reduce the risk of losing YOUR life
-reduce the ghastly littering of the mountain (with dead bodies)
Plus, it wold open the Everest experience to fat, out-of-shape tourists-more money coming in for the poor Sherpas.
The descent is the most dangerous part of the journey because of exhaustion and so on. I don’t know if a zipline of that length would be feasible though.
Paragliding from the summit of Everest has proved doable.
Man, you really never read anything do you?
It’s absolutely impossible to climb the mountain without teams of people providing backup to the camps all the way up. Naturally many of the people hired are from the Sherpa ethnicity in Nepal, who have a lot of experience with mountain climbing.
You may be unaware, but Tensing Norgay was a Sherpa too.
Or perhaps you do read stuff but it all just falls into a crevasse.