Mount Everest is known for many things: It’s the world’s highest mountain, an often-deadly climb, the experience of a lifetime, and… the world’s highest garbage dump. The waste situation at the mountain has reached a critical point as more and more high-priced climbing groups flock there, exhibiting, in many cases, little regard for their impact on the delicate and extreme environment. For over a decade, the Nepalese government has coordinated high-risk expeditions to help clean up waste on Mount Everest, but there seems to be a never-ending quantity of discarded cans, bottles, oxygen tanks, tents, ropes, human waste, and even dead bodies. A 2019 cleanup attempt removed 24,000 pounds of trash from the base camps.
The fact that a Pringle’s container ended up as high on the list for things to eat on an Everest summit climb, let alone it ending up as illegally dumped on the side of the world’s highest peak, tells you all you want to know about how seriously some of these folks take these climbs.
Spent many years backpacking in the high sierra. Most important rule drilled into me by my father (ex trail crew) was you pack out everything you brought in.
Never been impressed by the mt Everest tourism industry.
Every group of 10 or more going up should be required to bring down a dead body (on the overall odds the chances are about 50/50 that it will be one of their own crew).
Smaller groups should be required to chip into a dead body fund.
An interesting side-light to the people who climb the world’s highest peaks and reached the summits, the “Eight-thousanders” - climbers of all 14 peaks taller than 8000 meters - is that none of the 51 people who are listed as having done so may have really have done it.
There is a woman, Elizabeth Hawley, who is the recognized authority on keeping track of stuff like this and the gotcha with many of these mountains is that it is hard to determine where the summit actually is. She doubts any one has really done it.
On one of them once you get to the “top” in the death zone you have to hike about 2 km on a plateau to reach the real peak, and few climbers who can reach that are in a condition to do this long death-zone trek. On others there are a bunch of hummocks of false peaks, so determining the real one is difficult. Also often visibility is very poor once you get to the top, and finding the true summit impossible to do or verify.
