Everest is losing snow and becoming “dry and rocky,” said top British climber Kenton Cool, who this week made his 17th ascent of the world’s highest peak, a record for a foreigner.

Cool, 49, who first climbed the 8,849-meter Everest in 2004, told Reuters shortly after his last ascent that the giant mountain appeared to be drying up.

“If you go back to the mid-2000s, there was a lot of snow,” he said in an interview in Kathmandu, just after the end of his success this year.

“The general trend I’m noticing is that Everest is getting rockier and there’s less snow,” he added. He noted that he had never seen such rockfalls before, which he encountered this year when passing the Lhotse face on the way to the summit.

Write down

It is noted that this spring a record was set for the number of climbers trying to reach the highest peak on the planet. In total, 466 climbers from 43 teams received permission to climb the summit. Of these, 98 are women and the remaining 368 are men, the ministry in Kathmandu said.

According to the ministry’s statistics, climbers who want to climb Everest (or Sagarmatha as the locals call it) this season come from 65 different countries, including Nepal.

More than one in five (96 climbers) from China. Another 89 from the US have been licensed and 40 from India. Similarly, 33 people from Hungary, 21 people from Canada, 18 people from Russia and 15 people from the UK and Nepal were licensed.