Mount Everest and Pollution

canadafreepress.com ^ | 8/22/2014 | Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

[rktman]

Environmentalists have switched their assault on the world economy to a new frontier, previously unaffected by their agenda – peaks, Mount Everest to be more specific, located between China and Nepal in the Himalayas. The 29,029 feet mountain is in danger. What is the crisis? According to the National Geographic team, the mountain is “overcrowded with inexperienced climbers and polluted with waste.”

The nature of the pollution includes human corpses, human excrement, garbage leaking from glaciers, abandoned equipment, and overcrowding. How crowded could it be? Mark Jenkins described at 26,000 feet the dangerous inconvenience of more than 100 climbers moving slowly, forcing everybody else to move at the same pace.

[Scoutmaster]

So if you were climbing it you could set Fred and Jim’s bodies as waypoints?

Yes. For years, one of the guidepoints above Camp IV of the Southern Route was Hannelore Schmatz's body.

[rktman]

LOL! Still serving a purpose. Thanks Hannelore.

[Scoutmaster]

Earlier this year, Nepal added an additional requirement to the permit to climb Everest - each climber must pack out eighteen pounds of trash with them.

Like you, I've seen the photos of trash at basecamp. What people may not realize is that the established routes up the mountain are littered with empty gas canisters, empty oxygen canisters, remains of tents and sleeping bags, and the remains of whatever was used to carry that equipment up the mountain.

Post Krakauer, the rush to climb Everest by people with money and limited climbing experience has exploded. Want to enjoy nature? Climbing Everest isn't that place for nature any longer. You must stand in line.

[IronJack]

The Sherpas go up and down the mountain 20 times for every time a tour climber does. Let the governments pay them for each pound of trash they bring back down. And let them keep the trash to do with as they will. You’re right: someone can probably put it to good use.

[Scoutmaster]

Hannelore's not sitting there any longer. After spending a quarter century as a waypoint marker for Southern route Everest climbers, her body was finally blown off the face by a storm, perhaps a decade ago. I believe the same storm blew 'Green Boots' off the mountain as well. Green Boots was the Indian climber who died right at the face of the little cave close to the summit. The cave (really an overhang) is described in almost any Everest literature - climbers often seek refuge there. Green Boots was a waypoint marker for a decade or so.

As a result of the storm, Hannelore is gone and nobody ever claimed the $100,000 reward her husband offered to anyone who would bring down the body - that was considered by climbers to be suicide. The Sherpa and Nepalese police officer who attempted to do so in 1984 died.

[metmom]

read the article? before commenting?

how long you been at free republic?

He's a noob. You'll have to forgive him.

[Scoutmaster]

So many climbers have died trying to summit Chomolungma, but for some reason I have a fixation on Marty Hoey.

She died in '82 as part of the first Everest attempt by the Dick Bass/Frank Wells team - Bass being the first man to have climbed the highest mountain on each of the seven continents*.

You come to love her as a character in Bass's nonfiction work Seven Summits. In an instant, in a sentence, she falls two or three miles to her death. As a reader, you're shocked.

*Depending on whether you count Mount Kosciuszko as the highest mountain in the Australian mainland (the "Bass" list) or Carstensz Pyramid (the "Messner" list) in the Australian continent.

[jetson]

SEND IN THE PROS!

[Oratam]

Post Krakauer, the rush to climb Everest by people with money and limited climbing experience has exploded.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. It was great book. Can you recommend any other published accounts of climbs that are written as well as Into Thin Air?

. . . particularly if there are deaths and dismemberments.

[Scoutmaster]

Few books on mountaineering are as well-written as Into Thin Air, even if Krakauer was somewhat carefree with the facts. However, if you've read Into Thin Air, then you should read The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, by Anatoli Boukreev.

Boukreev is the Russian guide who was blamed by Krakauer for much of the 1996 tragedy. Many people, including me, believe Boukreev was a superhuman hero that night.

The book's not well written, but it's certain a good rebuttal to Krakauer's account.

Dark Summit: The Extraordinary True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season, by Nick Heil, is an interesting story of Lincoln Hall. Hall was left to die close to the summit of Everest but survived the night. That was during 2006, a year that saw a large number of Everest deaths.

Most of the great climbers have written books with ghostwriters, but no ghostwriters match Krakauer's talents.

You may also want to read Seven Summits, by Dick Bass, which I linked in a comment above. The true story? Two millionaires, Dick Bass and Frank Wells, are looking for an adventure and way to spend their time. Bass learns that no man had ever climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents, so Bass and Wells set out to do so - and Bass finally succeeds. It's an everyman story written by two millionaires who weren't climbers when they started. Marty Hoey dies.

I became fascinating with climbing nonfiction in the mid-1990s and spent six or seven years reading whatever I could find. Almost all of the Everest books written before or during that period mention Hannelore Schmatz's body.

[JimRed]

Whatever happened to the “pack it in, pack it out” mentality of outdoorsmen?

[dfwgator]

Think of Everest as the world’s highest landfill.

[Oratam]

Thanks for the reading list. I've still got some vacation time left and those fit the bill.

Lincoln Hall's night on the mountain is very nearly unbelievable. There were times when I thought Krakauer was drifting into fiction, maybe even science fiction. I can only surmise Hall willed himself to live.

[Scoutmaster]

'Nearly unbelievable' sums it up.

I've read the Everest books by most of the 'firsts' - first American woman, first ascent without supplemental oxygen, etc. - but most of them are very poorly written.

I've enjoyed some of Rick Ridgeway's books. Ridgeway is a mountaineer and photographer and was part of the first American team to climb K2. He was also on the Seven Summits team. His documentaries are outstanding.

Anything about Reinhold Messner is worth reading, just because of his climbing accomplishments.

[rktman]

LOL! I didn’t know disney had an “experience” in the Himalayas now. Standing in line......yuck!