KATHMANDU: The deaths of an Irish and a British climber on Mount Everest took the toll from a deadly season on the world’s highest peak to 10, expedition organisers said on Saturday.

British climber Robin Fisher, 44, reached the summit Saturday morning but collapsed when he had got just 150 metres back down the slope. “Our guides tried to help but he died soon after,” said Murari Sharma of Everest Parivar Expedition.

On the northern Tibet side of the mountain, a 56-year-old Irish man died Friday morning, his expedition organisers confirmed in a statement on their Facebook page. The climber decided to return without reaching the summit but died in his tent at the North Col pass at 7,000 metres (22,965 feet).

With two or three more days of climbing to come before hostile weather closes the summit again, the season is on target to be one of the most deadly of recent years.

Four climbers from India and one each from the United States, Austria and Nepal have died on Everest during the short climbing season. Another Irish mountaineer is presumed dead after he slipped and fell close to the summit.

A traffic jam of climbers in the Everest “death zone” has been blamed for at least four of the deaths.

Teams had to line up for hours in freezing temperature to reach the top — risking frostbite and deadly altitude sickness. Indian climber Anuja Vaidya, 21, who reached the summit on Wednesday said her team had to wait over an hour during the descent as a line of climbers stood in the way.

“I was scared and worried,” Vaidya said “It was so cold and windy. But we couldn’t just come down as everyone was just waiting in a long queue.” While Vaidya made it back without injury, she said she saw many frostbite-stricken climbers at the base camp.

Little has changed since a photo of a huge traffic jam below the summit in 2012 prompted calls for better crowd management, and even a cap on the number of permits.

That year, 10 people died on the mountain — one of the worst outside of 2014 and 2015 when an avalanche and an earthquake caused disasters that killed 16 and 18 people respectively.

Nepal issued a record 381 permits for mainly foreign climbers, costing $11,000 each, for the spring climbing season from late April to the end of May. Each climber with a permit is assisted by at least one guide, adding to the summit logjam.

An estimated 600 people had reached the summit via the Nepal side by Friday, a government official said, based on information from expedition organisers.

At least 140 others have been granted permits to scale Everest from the northern flank in Tibet, according to operators. This could take the total past last year’s record of 807 people reaching the summit.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2019