Mexico is seeking compensation from the producers of a MrBeast video and has accused the US YouTuber of exploiting its ancient pyramids for commercial gain.
Adrian Ballinger, who heads another expedition team climbing Everest from the Chinese side to the north, also makes his clients undergo pre-acclimatisation training like using hypoxic tents to shorten time on the mountains. But he opposes using xenon gas."If you're promoting xenon as a performance enhancer, but you're not also willing to examine what that means for fairness and integrity in the mountains, it's a problem," he told the BBC.
"People are grasping at shortcuts instead of doing the real work of acclimatisation and training."But now that the British team have made their groundbreaking Everest ascent, expedition operators think, and some worry, that this method may be used by other climbers too."If that happens then it will certainly have a direct, negative impact on the tourism industry as the length of time mountaineers stay will come down significantly," said Damber Parajuli, president of the Expedition Operators Association of Nepal.
"Also, acclimatising on the mountains is the basic rule of mountaineering. If that is not done then authorities should not be giving them certificates certifying that they climbed the mountain."Nepal's tourism department officials said they were not aware the British team were climbing Everest without acclimatisation.
"Now that we know about it, we will be discussing the issue and decide on our future course of action," Narayan Regmi, director general at Nepal's department of tourism told the BBC.
But why climb the highest peak at such speed?As he enjoyed the flattery of his Saudi hosts and the obeisance of visiting dignitaries, the president signed - with his fat felt tip pen - deals that the White House claimed represented $600bn of investment in the US.
This was Trump in all his pomp; applauded and rewarded with immediate wins he could sell back home as good for American jobs.Some diplomats privately questioned the value of the various memorandums of understanding. But the show, they said, was more important than the substance.
Absent from Trump's speech was any mention of possible collective action by the US and other countries; no talk of multilateral cooperation against the threat of climate change, no concerns about challenges to democratic or human rights in the region. This was a discourse almost entirely without reference to ideology or values except to dismiss their significance.Rather, he used his speech to Saudi leaders to make his clearest argument yet against Western interventionism of the past, attacking what he called "the so-called nation-builders and neo-cons" for "giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs".