Mounds of rubbish are being left on the Himalayas by climbers, with one local mountaineer revealing the “dirtiest camp” he has ever seen. With the Instagram username Tenzi Sherpa, he posted the video of the camp on Mount Everest covered with “tents, empty oxygen bottles, steel bowls, spoons, sanitation pads, and paper”. The climber, who scaled the Himalayas under a week ago, said he felt “so sad every time” when on expeditions in the mountain range.
A native of the Himalayan region, he blames “companies” for leaving their “trash on [the] mountain [which is] hard to clean”. He called for the government to punish companies who he claims “cut” their logos from equipment before leaving it behind on the mountain for others to clean up.
Speaking to The Times, Luc Boisnard, a conservationist with the goal of cleaning the peaks, said the Himalayas had turned into a gigantic rubbish dump. The 53-year-old took part in an expedition that cleared 3.7 tonnes of rubbish off the world’s fifth-highest summit of Makalu, and the tenth-highest in Annapurna. Mr Boisnard said: “Behind every rock you find lots of oxygen bottles, tins, canvas and shoes. It’s really appalling.” He added that climbers “threw [rubbish] into the Himalayan glaciers, from where it will re-emerge in 200 years’ time”.
I remember reading somewhere that there are literally hundreds of bodies on Everest, just left there because it wouldn’t be possible to bring them down and that climbers literally use them as signposts as to how far they’ve got
Mt Everest has long been stinking on ice as mountaineers treat it as a garbage dump abandoning oxygen bottles, tents, ladders, cans, wrappers as well as piles of faeces and bags loaded with poop in higher camps, mainly in the South Col (7,900 m) and Camp II (6,500 m), every climbing season. It’s estimated that over 300 bodies of climbers are still entombed in ice on Mt Everest.
Yes it really pi$$es me off how people can be so reckless and lazy but…
I don’t think we can refer to it as ‘buggering up the planet’ Mr Smith. It just applies to some of the big popular mountains and tourist areas. They are a very small representation of the planet.
The rubbish is the main reason why I never climbed Everest…Too dirty…
That’s horrible - if folk can manage to take that stuff up the mountain, there’s no excuse for not bringing it down with them.
The Sherpas must be disgusted by this littering of their home territory.
I’ve walked from village to village in the lower foothills of the Himalayas from the Indian side a couple of times - there was no inorganic rubbish lying around there.
They were delightful journeys, staying in a small basic guest hut in each village, eating the food they cooked, chatting with the locals and discovering their traditional organic farming practices.
(A big bonus for me was that the whole area was vegetarian - nobody was allowed to kill animals in that region - so I could try every delicious dish the local men cooked for us without worrying about whether it contained bits of animals.)
We reached up to 10,000 feet on our walks, which enabled us to view some of the high snow covered peaks quite clearly - they looked magnificent from a distance but I had no desire to go on a climbing expedition up to the high peaks of the Himalayas - and I have even less desire after seeing that the routes are littered with that load of rubbish.
I don’t understand why what goes up with the climbers doesn’t come down .
The bodies are grim but at least frozen for ever ( until global warming thaws them )
It’s a big industry , it costs thousands of pounds to climb Everest so some of this money could be spent on cleaning it up .
I’ll bet the local economy doesn’t turn climbers and walkers away rubbish or not…
Come on Muddy, you will have to wait a long time if the clean up of bodies waits until ‘Global Warming’…
The bodies are at least organic and a sad reminder of man’s folly in climbing mountains that don’t need to be climbed .
It’s all the rubbish at base camp that is apalling .
