All a bit grim

A Polish chap I know has climbed in the Everest area was telling me about the dead bodies and how gruesome it was see.   I’ve just seen this article regarding the clean up… pretty horrendous.

Couldn’t see a link but here’s a generic one from BBC on the operation for context

BBC News – How bodies of frozen climbers were finally recovered from Everest ‘death zone’

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9r31g50xqdo

Couldn’t see a link but here’s a generic one from BBC on the operation for context

BBC News – How bodies of frozen climbers were finally recovered from Everest ‘death zone’

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9r31g50xqdo

Thanks for fixing that for me…. yes, that’s the link I put in but for some reason hasn’t appeared.

I was reading about the clean up/body recovery after the Mount Erebus/Flight 901 disaster. Seriously grim.

And all because the flight computer had been reprogrammed without the crew being notified

I’ve read a couple of articles about the Everest cleanups, and the increasing demands to make climbers take their (literal) crap back down the mountain with them.
Of course, dead bodies are a different matter, some are buried in packed snow and ice, some, well, it’s known roughly where they are, but that’s all.
It’s incredibly hard on the Sherpas, having to make repeated trips up and back to clear the trash left behind by entitled Westerners, and having to spend hours digging out corpsicles and then get them back down to where they can be safely dealt with. They are literally shifting tons of debris like oxygen bottles left behind.

Removing Dead Bodies from Mount Everest Is Dangerous and Expensive. Here’s Why.

There’s a good documentary on amazon (and I think also apple) called Death Zone: Cleaning Mount Everest, inside one of the earlier all-sherpa high level cleanups. It’s almost all fly on the wall footage filmed by the sherpas with gopros they learn how to use on the way, so it’s excellently rough and ready and gives you loads of views and access that you’d not normally see. The messaging is both OTT and fake which is annoying, the real story is definitely more than enough, but it didn’t take away from the reality of it for me. It shows really well both how bloody disgusting some of the climb areas are especially the camps, but also does a really evenhanded job of showing how that happens- I was just starting to get really irate at what looked like totally careless dumping then a storm comes in and blows everything to ****, frinstance. And it shows how hard it is to recover a beer can let alone a body. It’s made extra sad and poignant as the lead sherpa died on the mountain not long after

Left me thinking “sod the bodies, clean up the junk” though. And also, quite a lot, “isn’t it pretty routine now to fly helicopters to camp 2, some climbers use it to shorcut the return leg? Why are they having to haul literal tons of crap down the khumbu?”. The restrictions on flight are mostly artificial and get waived pretty damn fast when they have a short season and the outfitters want to build the lines faster. Though in fairness I think they’re experimenting now with cargo drones.