Frozen bodies of climbers who fell while tackling Mount Everest have been left in the ‘death zone’ of the peak for decades – until now.
More than 300 people have died in the region since records of mountain climbing Everest and other peaks in the Himalayas began 100 years ago, with many of the climbers’ remains still there. Even the most skilled of climbers have fallen, with eight people dying this year already and 18 in 2023.
However, due to the problems faced with retrieving their bodies, it means many remain on the mountainside. This means any hopeful travelers who want to scale Mount Everest come across these bodies when they make their own journey.
Now, a team has been assembled, made up of a dozen military personnel and 18 sherpas to clean up the bodies of the Himalayas and Mount Everest.
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Climbers would have to ‘step over’ the bodies forgotten in Mount Everest and Himalayas
Nepali Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa was a guide on Mount Lhotse, who was leading a German climber to the top of the world’s fourth highest mountain when they found a body.
Back in 2012, they came across a body, believed to be a Czech mountaineer called Milan Sedlacek, who died only a few days earlier.
He had passed away near the top, but one of his gloves on his hand was missing. It would mean Sherpa and any other climber scaling Mount Lhotse would have to step past it ever since.
The clean-up campaign was launched in 2019 by the Nepali government, which included removing some of the bodies of those who had fallen while scaling Mount Everest and other peaks.
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This was the first year authorities have planned to retrieve five bodies from the ‘death zone’ in the Himalayas, which reaches 26,247 feet.
As part of the clean-up, at lower altitudes, one skeleton and 11 tonnes of rubbish were removed in a 54-day operation.
Leader of the operation, Major Aditya Karki, told the BBC many climbers reaching Mount Everest are shocked by the bodies on the way to the top. One climber couldn’t move for ’30 minutes’ after seeing one.
He said: “Nepal has received a bad name for the garbage and dead bodies which have polluted the Himalayas on a grave scale.”
Sadly, the families of fallen climbers can’t afford to retrieve their bodies who had passed away on Mount Everest or other mountains in Nepal. Private companies are wary because of how dangerous it is.
However, the military has allocated $37,000 to retrieve each body, but costs are high. 12 people are needed to remove a dead mountaineer from 8,000m, and each of those requires 12 cylinders of oxygen which cost $400 each. Not only that, but they’re working against the clock too, as there are only 15 days when they can carry out the operation due to the wind speeds.
“It was very tough to bring back the bodies from the death zone,” Mr Sherpa says. “I vomited sour water many times. Others kept coughing and others got headaches because we spent hours and hours at very high altitude.”
In the case of the Czech climber, it took the team 37 hours to get the body down to a lower camp, before it was taken away via helicopter.
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