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Fifty years
after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first
reached the top of Mount Everest, climbing to the “roof
of the world” is still a popular challenge.
Perhaps too popular.At a guess, more than 10,000
mountain climbers and sherpas have so far tried
to make the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) ascent up
the legendary mountain, some 80% of them since
1990.
Some of them, not wanting to add to the risks by
carrying back their rubbish (at that altitude, climbers
only have about 20% of their normal physical capacity),
have opted for the ecologically-unsound practice
of leaving it behind, littering Everest with empty
oxygen bottles, ropes, ripped tents, empty cans,
food packaging, batteries, and so on. The amount
of rubbish that has accumulated on the mountain’s
slopes in half a century has been estimated at nearly
fifty metric tons.
Over the past ten years, there have been a number
of initiatives to remedy this situation. A Nepalese
association called the Sagarmatha* Pollution Control
Committee now requires every new expedition to leave
a $4,000 deposit before setting out for the summit,
to be refunded only if the climbers bring back all
their rubbish. And in a move to clean up existing
pollution (helicopters can’t fly at these high
altitudes), a number of mountaineers have turned
rubbish-collector. One of them, Japan’s Ken
Noguchi, has single-handedly cleaned up some seven
metric tons of rubbish.
But there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly
as the rubbish is becoming more widespread now that
climbers are also using the northern route from Tibet.
Unless climbers really change their ways, it may
one day be necessary to limit the number of visitors
to the so-called Roof of the World. Or even, as some
have suggested, to ban access altogether for a number
of years.
* Sagarmatha is the Nepalese name for Everest. |
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