New Delhi: Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mount Everest in 1953 along with Tenzing Norgay, feels that the world's highest mountain peak has become too commercialised.

Speaking at a seminar celebrating the golden jubilee of the event on May 20, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, he expressed concern over the tonnes of garbage left at the mountain site.

"With an enormous increase in expedition, Everest is becoming littered with empty oxygen bottles and other rubbish. Commercial climbing has developed with many inexperienced enthusiasts being conducted by guides with dozens of aluminium ladders and thousands of metres of fixed rope," he said.

The 50th anniversary of the ascent of the 8,850-metre peak falls on May 29.

Over the years, many mountaineers have remarked that there are too many inexperienced climbers on guided expeditions, and the mountain has become a place of record-book stunts - the youngest, the oldest, the first ski descent and the first to snowboard from the summit.

Officials say an estimated minimum of 290 tonnes and a maximum of 1,115 tonnes of garbage have been left in the area.

For years, the slopes of the world's highest peak, which locals call Chomolungma or Mother Goddess of the world, were littered with heaps of oxygen bottles, food packets, tents, batteries and other climbing paraphernalia left behind by mountaineers.

A clean-up is due this year when nine US climbers and nine Nepali sherpas have planned to haul 1,000 kg of paper, cylinders and other rubbish down from a camp at 6,300 metres, which is the most frequented after the base camp.

A total of 1,201 people from 63 countries have climbed Mount Everest so far and hundreds have turned back without reaching the roof of the world.

ANI