Posted on 03/04/2015 11:07:03 AM PST by Brad from Tennessee
When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest in 1953, it was arguably the loneliest place on Earth — an oxygen-deprived desert perched atop an icy, 29,000-foot ladder of death.
Over the last 62 years, more than 4,000 climbers have replicated the pair’s feat, with hundreds more attempting to do so during the two-month climbing season each spring, according to the Associated Press.
Along the way, people have left oxygen canisters, broken climbing equipment, trash, human waste and even dead bodies in their wake, transforming the once pristine peak into a literal pile of … well, you get the idea.
“The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps,” mountaineer Mark Jenkins wrote in a 2013 National Geographic article on Everest. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What an unpleasant visual.
Sounds like a halloween prank I used to pull...
Where are all the mother-earth huggers crying in their kool-aid over this??
Great name for a band!
$#*+ rolls down hill.
That’s a lot of night soil.
Make the Fools That Go There Clean It Up ,D’oh
WOW !!
Talk about “Upper Deckers” !!
Really?
We just used dog sh!t.
What happened to “you pack it in, you pack it out”?
That’s a real Upper-Upper-Upper decker.
If they play $hitty music...
seriously?
4000 people on an entire mountain over 62 years?
I guess all the IMPORTANT stories have been covered today...
FROM STORY:
Last year, the Nepali government instituted a new rule requiring each climber to bring 18 pounds of trash off the mountain — “the amount it estimates a climber discards along the route,” according to the AP. Climbing teams that don’t comply forfeit their $4,000 deposits.
“Each expedition to Everest is required to take a garbage deposit and bring their waste back,” Everest Summiteers Association general secretary Diwas Pokhrel told CNN. “But this system has not been strictly implemented.”
“An icy, 29,000 foot ladder of death”
Put me at the bottom of that and tell me I had to start climbing and you’d see a lot of poop at the base of that mountain.
“Fecal Time Bomb”
Sounds like the name for any and every band or rap group that produces the vile thumping noise that comes out of cars at a stop light.
Let's quadruple that to 260 people per year since we know the climbing activity has accelerated recently. That is over 100 pounds of poop per person.
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