Tomorrow, a team of expert climbers will set out to summit the world’s highest peak — but they won’t go to test their mental and physical limits. Instead, they will climb 26,246 feet to Mount Everest’s “death zone” on a clean-up mission — to retrieve and rid the mountain of several dead bodies.
The team, comprised of Nepali mountaineers, will carry special bags with which to transport the bodies they find in the area between the South Col and the summit (aptly named the “death zone”) back to the base camp. Their mission is to locate and bag the bodies, which they will then lower down the mountain and across the glaciers to the base camp. Specifically, the team plans to clean up five bodies total, but according to the leader of the Extreme Everest Expedition 2010, Namgyal Sherpa, “Scores of corpses preserved by the freezing temperatures remain on the mountain, some for decades…”
Several teams have set out before to clean Everest of climbers’ bodies, as well other items that litter the mountain — empty oxygen bottles, old ropes and the remnants of tents. However, no one has ever attempted a clean-up at that height. “This is the first time we are cleaning the death zone. It is very difficult and dangerous,” said Namgyal, who has climbed Everest seven times. Let’s hope the climbers who will be working to clean the mountain won’t run into any serious issues while they’re up there, and that they’ll come back having made the “death zone” a little less littered than it is now.
[Via: The Guardian]
