The world's highest mountin is losing snow and turning "dry and rocky," said UK climber Kenton Cool, who completed his 17th ascent of Qomolangma this week, the most achieved by a foreigner.

The 49-year-old climbed the 8,849-meter peak – also kown as Mount Everest – for the first time in 2004 but thinks the iconic mountain now attracts too many other climbers. 

"The mountain as a whole was definitely a lot drier," he told CGTN after returning from his record-setting expedition which was confirmed by Nepali and hiking officials this week. "It's not had snowfall over the monsoon or even the winter time. And with that came quite a lot of rock fall, which we wouldn't normally experience."

He added: "Whether this is actually indicative of global warming and climate change, who knows? But the mountain was definitely a lot less snowy than we would normally expect." 

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Cool said he had never before seen the types of rock falls he witnessed on the Lhotse Face, along the route to the summit.

"That shows how dry the mountain is now... I think that is because of the lack of precipitation, a lack of snowfall. It could be global warming or any environmental change of some sort," he said.

Climate scientists say the earth's temperature has increased by an average of 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years, but warming across the Himalayas has been greater than the global averages. Officials have said the average temperature in Nepal was rising by 0.06 degrees Celsius annually.

Also this week, a 53-year-old Nepali guide, Kami Rita Sherpa, improved his own record of most summits after scaling Qomolangma for the 27th time.

Cool said his 17th ascent might not be the last and he would return to the mountain next year. But the mountaineer wants to bid goodbye to Qomolangma after two to three years.

He wants to climb Nepal's Kanchenjunga – the world's third-highest peak at 8,586 meters – and the 8,481-meter Makalu, the fifth-highest.

Cool pointed out that there was a record number of permits issued this year so more people climbed. He said having large numbers of people on the mountain "is a bit of a concern." 

"We are seeing more and more adventurous tourists who perhaps don't necessarily have the depth of experience that you'd expect to see on Mount Everest and that's partly down to the commercialism of the industry," explained Cool.

"So we have to be quite clever in how we manage [these climbers]."

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