A seasoned Kiwi guide says Nepal's fight for the bottom of the mountaineering market is one of the reasons why the…

The rise in influencer behaviour has stretched literally to the top of the world - with social media gurus looking for the cheapest, but not always the safest, ways up Everest

The incredible survival story of Hillary Dawa Sherpa on Mt Everest is being hailed a miracle. It is also being called Everest's dirty secret, as anger builds over the fact that he was left for dead high on the mountain.

Hillary Dawa's family were holding funeral rites for him when they got word earlier this month that the mountain's cleaners found him alive after he crawled into Base Camp.

He had been missing for six days, staying alive by chewing on ice and chocolates he found in his pocket.

News of his survival hit headlines around the world. Then came the questions about how and why the 52-year-old camp cook was called on to guide clients to the world's highest peak.

One headline read, "The Sherpa who went missing and nobody lifted a finger", as it emerged that he stayed back on the mountain because he ran out of oxygen. He was last seen just above camp three, around 7500 metres.

He told BBC Nepali that he didn't think he would live.

"I thought I would perish this way," he said.

Almost as shocking as the fact that Hillary Dawa was left for dead is that those in the know are not surprised.

Mountaineer and guide Guy Cotter of Wanaka-based Adventure Consultants says incidents like this happen frequently on Everest.

"There's many, many stories like this involving climbers from the West, the East as well as Nepalese that nobody hears about," he says.

"He was deemed missing but this is a very common term that's used by a lot of the Nepalese operators that people go missing quite regularly. It's really good to hear this case where Hillary Dawa was found again, where he survived and made his way down the mountain. Amazing," he says.

Cotter speaks to The Detail 30 years after the disaster on Everest that killed eight people including New Zealanders Rob Hall and Andrew Harris.

He was involved in the rescue and says the tragedy led to big changes on Everest, but they haven't stopped incidents like Hillary Dawa's.

"In this day and age there are a huge number of Nepalese operators who offer expeditions to Everest and its like a fight for the bottom of the market, they're all trying to get in to run expeditions because the successful ones are making a lot of money.

"So everyone's having a go at it and they'll sell really cheap trips and reading between the lines it's exactly what happened on this expedition."

Cotter says under the structure of many local expedition companies, in which the Sherpa supports the foreign climber as they make a summit attempt, the foreign climber will collapse because they're exhausted or they've run out of oxygen.

"That single Sherpa isn't enough to bring that climber off the mountain so they get left behind, the Sherpa comes back to the high camp and says my client's missing."

By contrast Cotter says Adventure Consultants and other high end operators work with teams, which gives them strength if there's an incident.

He says his company and other pioneering operators opened up the mountain in the early 90s. That "democratisation" gave keen, everyday climbers the chance to get to Everest for the first time. But there are also "trophy hunters" lured by the prospect of social media fame if they get to the top and other clients who do not have the skills to be there.

"It's a dangerous enough place even with the best management in place but layer on top of that people who have no or very, very little mountaineering experience."

Hillary Dawa's incident is being investigated by authorities in Nepal but Cotter is uncertain whether it will lead to changes on the mountain.

"For those of us who have been doing this for many, many years none of this is new," Cotter says. "This was happening 30 years ago with some of the cheap Western operators who were under-resourced, with lack of qualified guides, lack of good equipment, not good communication equipment."

The 2026 season on Everest has finished with more than 1000 summits. Despite the record numbers the mountain is a safer place now because many operators work together and collaborate on rescues, and technology used for weather forecasting and communications has improved, he says.

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