LONDON: Now look, my purpose is not to mock Steve Colligan, an “extreme unicyclist” from Salford, north-west England, who later this month sets off to ride a unicycle across the Tibetan plateau from Lhasa to Kathmandu via Everest base camp. Personally, I can’t see the point of unicycles – bikes with two wheels are more my cup of tea – but Colligan is doing the 1,000km to raise money for education in Nepal, so good luck to him.“It’s the challenge that drives me,” he told his local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, somewhat predictably. His preparation has been admirably thorough, with long hours spent cycling up and down the East Lancashire Road. “I get a lot of beeps from people,” he says. Marvellous, though even with my hazy knowledge of the geography of north-west England I am guessing that the East Lancashire Road will not be a perfect mirror of the Himalayas. Only the temperatures will be comparable.

My real concern, however, is poor Everest. This once majestic mountain, associated with the heroic names of climbing – Mallory, Irvine, Hillary, Tenzing – is now the plaything of cranks, stuntmen and would-be breakers of obscure records.

In 2006 a Nepali climber took off all his clothes when he reached the summit and claimed the record for the world’s highest display of nudity; in May 2007 Dutchman Wim Hof, aka the ‘Iceman,’ failed in an attempt to scale the mountain wearing only shorts; but in the same month, in an expedition sponsored by a mobile phone company, British mountaineer Rod Baber did reach the summit and achieved his grand objective – to make a mobile call and send a text message from the highest point on earth.

Climbing Everest “because it’s there” (in George Mallory’s resonant phrase) is no longer enough; now you must be towing a fridge, dressed in a kilt or advertising a make of mobile phone.

Everest faces severe ecological damage because of the number of people tramping through; deforestation is occurring and the glaciers are in retreat; it is covered in rubbish – last year Japanese mountaineer Ken Noguchi picked up 500kg of garbage – and uncollected corpses, 188 at the last count; restaurants and internet cafes are springing up at base camp.

“Everest has become too crowded. It needs a rest,” says another Japanese climber, Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit. The last thing the mountain needs is a unicyclist.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service