Braving barely survivable conditions, volunteers have removed 24,000 pounds of trash from Mount Everest – along with four of the estimated 300 bodies that are interred there.
With the climbing season over, the cleanup of Mount Everest has begun.
The cleanup team, organized by the Nepali government, retrieved the bodies two weeks ago from the region between the Everest base camp and the area called the South Col, which is 26,300 feet above sea level. The final push to the mountaintop, where most of the bodies lie encased in snow and ice, is above that 26,000-foot mark, in the so-called death zone.
This year proved especially lethal, with 11 climbers dying, two of them Americans. A shorter-than-usual summiting window – five days instead of the usual seven to 11 – plus a growing number of inexperienced (and often fumbling) climbers, plus a higher number of permits issued by the Nepalese government, all contributed, climbers and experts said.
Normally the bodies are left there because of the exertion of bringing them down would risk the lives of the living. The same goes for the trash. But decades of climbing by thousands of mountaineers of varying experience have blemished the once pristine peak.
The bodies are near-skeletons at this point, authorities told Agence France-Presse (AFP), and identifying them will be a gargantuan task.
“The bodies are not in a recognizable state, almost down to their bones,” senior police official Phanindra Prasai told AFP. “There is no face to identify them. We have directed the hospital to collect DNA samples so they can be matched with any families who come forward.”
The bodies are in a hospital morgue in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, Reuters reported. Authorities don’t know who they are or when they attempted the summit.
The trash in question consists of used oxygen bottles, torn tents, ropes, broken ladders, cans and plastic wrappers left behind by climbers, according to Reuters. Human excrement is another problem, climbers told the news wire.
The combination of trash, deaths and overcrowding led may have stripped away the mystique for the masses.
“Everest is over,” The Atlantic declared this week, citing the crowds, rubbish and summit selfies in alleging that “the once untamable mountain has lost its cultural power.”
Reports notwithstanding, the mountain has not lost a shred of its divinity or dignity. Not to the Nepali, anyway.
The very top of Mount Everest is sacred to the Nepal, said veteran mountaineer Alan Arnette in a recent interview with the Daily News.
After all, it’s home to the Mother Goddess of Earth.
The Sherpas and the Tibetans believe that she lives on the summit, and she takes care of the Earth, and it’s a desecration to tromp all over her aerie, he said.
“Most people stand a meter below, not on the actual top,” said Arnette. “But you’ll find the westerner who has to stand on the very top for their selfie.”
Cleaning up is part of the Sherpa community’s practice of caring for and revering this deity.
“We worship and have deep respect for the mountain,” Mingma Tenzi Sherpa told BBC News. “We trust it will save us from whatever comes.”
Indeed, what thrill-seeking climbers are doing to the mountain is what the rest of humanity is collectively doing to the planet, according to an op-ed in The Sacramento Bee.
“Everest is just a very visible version of what we do here on safer ground all the time. In fact, the worst thing that’s happening on the jagged peaks isn’t the climbers, whose numbers could be reduced with stiffer permit rules, or even trash, which can be picked up, as hard a task as that is,” wrote journalist Karin Klein. “It’s this: What enables the volunteers to find long-buried bodies is the melting ice from climate change. That warming comes from the billions of us who would never dream of donning crampons.”
Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13% in the past 50 years, the American Geophysical Union reported in a 2013 study. In addition the snowline has shifted upward by nearly 600 feet.
The findings were presented by then PhD student Sudeep Thakuri, who suspected, though he did not empirically connect, the changes were related to an increase in greenhouse gases altering the global climate, the Geophysical Union said.
The issues go way beyond garbage and corpses. Besides exposing even more trash and unveiling heretofore buried bodies, the loss of ice threatens the water supply of communities down the mountain that depend on the runoff for drinking water.
“The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season,” Thakuri said in the Geophysical Union’s statement at the time. “Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking, and power production.”
Meanwhile there is the matter of identifying the deceased who have been brought down from the mountain. And there is also still an estimated 60,000 pounds of trash up there.
“It is a difficult task,” said Ang Tsering Sherpa, former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, to AFP. “They need to share more information about the bodies, especially the locations of where the bodies were found, and reach out to expedition operators.”