The only surviving member of the mountaineering expedition that first conquered Mount Everest says the world’s highest peak is too crowded and too dirty and the mountain is a god that needs to be respected.

Nepal’s government is honoring record-holding climbers during celebrations of the first ascent of Mount Everest 70 years ago.

NEW YORK – Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94. Morris died in Wales on Friday morning, according to her literary representative, United Agents. The British author lived as James Morris until the early 1970s, when she underwent surgery at a clinic in Casablanca and renamed herself Jan Morris. Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. Born James Humphrey Morris in Somerset, with a Welsh father and English mother, Morris remembered questioning her gender by age 4.