Clean-up expeditions have become somewhat commonplace on Everest’s Nepal (south) side for several years now. But they have usually focused on the normal route from Base Camp to the South Col. Today in an article via AFP, a team of Sherpas will conduct a clean-up above the South Col:
The 20 climbers, led by seven-time Everest summiteer Namgyal Sherpa, will brave thin oxygen and temperatures well below freezing to clear more than two tonnes of rubbish discarded by mountaineers.
Environmental activists say Everest is littered with the detritus of past expeditions, including human waste and mountaineers’ corpses, which do not decompose because of the extreme cold.
“Everest is losing her beauty,” Sherpa, 30, told AFP. “The top of the mountain is now littered with oxygen bottles, old prayer flags, ropes, and old tents. At least two dead bodies have been lying there for years now.”
Last year an expedition lead by Dawa Steven Sherpa from Asian trekking paid Sherpas a bounty to bring down trash through a “cash for trash” program . They brought down brought down to base camp 6000 kilos of garbage for proper disposal. In addition wreckage parts of the Italian Army helicopter were also recovered from the edge of the Khumbu Icefall. The helicopter crashed at Camp 1 (6100m) on Mt. Everest during the Italian Everest Expedition in 1973.
Great job by all these clean-up teams but the real answer is to stop the pollution in the first place with efforts led by progressive expeditions like Tim Ripple’s Peak Freaks.
Climb On!
Alan
