09/13/2018
How do they get all of the trash off Mount Everest?
If you believe everything that’s written, then you probably imagine Everest to be a pile of garbage, but that’s not true.
Everest is the centerpiece of Sagamartha National Park and trash on the mountain is carefully managed today. It hasn’t always been that way and some of the old trash can still be seen on the mountain.
Every team that climbs Everest has to pay a substantial garbage deposit to the Park Service in Namche. They also need to itemize in a list all the supplies they are bringing, such as how many tents, stoves, chairs, cylinders of gas for the stoves, bottles of oxygen, radios and more. All of these items need to be accounted for when the team leaves the mountain or they will not get back their deposit and may receive hefty fines. Each expedition is also assigned a Liaison Officer. One of their responsibilities is to see that the basecamp of the expedition is cleaned up. They can also wander around the entire EBC and if they see trash, they can try and find out who is responsible and ask them to clean it up.
These measures are in place to help control trash in the modern-day EBC, where there may be close to 1000 people camped for close to two months. Does it work? Yes, mostly. Frankly, most of the trash found at EBC after the climbing season has been left behind by porters: broken baskets, wrappers for food or to***co, and the like.
Up on the mountain it is a different story. Today almost all the teams bring down all their trash. There are a couple of notable exceptions. The first is at Camp 2 (C2). Here climbers often stay for many days, even weeks and camps can get quite elaborate. As a result, there are sometimes bits of trash left here. Additionally, C2 has been in about the same spot for 60 years and in the early days, trash was dumped into crevasses. Now some of that trash is “coming out” of the ice near lower C2. A few years ago the Nepal government offered money, I think it was 100 rupees per KG, for any trash brought down from above EBC. This bounty enabled the authorities to collect an immense amount of trash. The other are is Camp 4 (C4) at the South Col. Life is desperate near and conditions are extreme. Tents get broken and stripped apart by high winds, people struggle to carry down their own supplies and sometimes leave things behind. The scouring winds rid the col of most of it in no time, but the last time I stood at the South Col and looked around I could see broken tent poles, small pieces of fabric and a few empty gas cylinders for stoves, but that was looking hard.
The rest of the mountain above EBC is really very clean. You might see the occasional wrapper from a candy bar, but its soon gone, either picked up or blown away. People also think there are bodies strewn everywhere. This is also not the case. Yes, there are bodies on Everest, but most of them are in inaccessible areas where people don’t go, they’re all very high on the mountain, and some are buried under snow or ice. Most people could climb Everest and never see a body unless it was pointed out to them, or unless it was someone who died recently.
So to finally answer your question, most of the trash on Everest is brought off the mountain by the teams that brought it in the first place. Old trash is sometimes brought off the mountain by Sherpa climbers who are looking for a bounty either from the government or selling the Everest artifacts and the cleanliness (or not) of the mountain is the responsibility of the Sagamartha National Park folks, part of the Ministry of Tourism.
