Retired teacher and veteran mountaineer Katsusuke Yanagisawa, 71, (Foreground-C) rests along with others from his party on the summit of Mount Qomolangma, 22 May 2007. More climbers have conquered Qomolangma (Everest) this year than in any year since the world's highest mountain was first scaled in 1953, Nepal's chief mountaineeering official said Thursday. (AFP/HO/HIRO)

More climbers have conquered Qomolangma (Everest) this year than in any year since the world's highest mountain was first scaled in 1953, Nepal's chief mountaineeering official said Thursday.
 
As the narrow Spring window for climbing to the top of the world draws to a close, Ang Tsering Sherpa said 514 climbers had scaled Qomolangma from the Nepal and China's Tibet sides as of May 28.

"This is the highest number in the history of climbing Qomolangma since the first ascent in 1953," the president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association told AFP.

"We have had various world records broken this season, so it has been an outstanding year for mountaineering," he added.

Climbers use a narrow window in May ahead of annual monsoon rains to scale Himalayan peaks, and attempts are also made in October after the monsoon ends and before the onset of winter.

Although one or two expeditions remain on the northern approach to Qomolangma from Tibet, the fast approaching monsoon, which sweeps the sub-continent from June to September, means they only have a few more days to reach the top.

Famously conquered for the first time by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) peak has since been summited a total of 3,514 times, Sherpa said.

The most impressive of this year's records is the 17th successful summit of Qomolangma by Appa Sherpa, a Nepali high altitude guide, beating his own previous record.

An American 18-year-old became the youngest foreign woman to climb to the top, and a retired Japanese teacher became the oldest person, at 71.

But a combination of bad weather, avalanches, exhaustion and high altitude sickness claim a number of lives every year, and the final approaches to the summit are littered with corpses.

This season alone, seven people, including six from South Korea, the Czech Republic, Japan and Italy, have died.

Last year, 11 people perished on the peak in what was the deadliest year since 1996, when a fast-moving storm killed 12, and this year's total so far has brought the overall number of deaths since 1921 to 217, Sherpa said.