What’s your biggest personal goal? Imagine spending your life savings on pursuing that goal, then, when you’re just about to realise your life’s ambition, being coerced into some futile diversion out of a sense of duty. Would that be good?
What you’re suggesting is pointless at best, and in reality, potentially dangerous and life-threatening. Even an organised mission with the specific goal of recovering all the bodies would itself risk the lives of its participants.
The dead bodies on Everest aren’t going to be any better off from being recovered. I am not a climber and I guess I don’t completely understand what drives people to pursue such extreme goals, but if I were, I think I would completely accept that nobody should be under any obligation to recover my remains, if I died there.
No they’re not, most of the unrecovered bodies are above base camp IV which is at 8000 meters (26,000 feet). Helicopter operations at this altitude are extremely dangerous.
That’s what I was thinking about. Unlike with the rescue of injured persons, an operation to recover a corpse could be carefully planned and could take all the time in the world. In particular, one could wait for perfect weather conditions.
Again, who is paying for it? Having a helicopter on standby at base camp waiting for perfect weather conditions is extremely expensive. Where families have wanted bodies recovered and paid people to do so, bodies have occasionally been recovered.
Most of the families of the deceased are fine with the bodies staying there. If you think somehow its the job of the Nepalese government to pay for it, then you probably have no idea how poor Nepal is.
Keep in mind these bodies are there because the surroundings kill people on a regular basis. Recovering bodies in those same surroundings is obviously dangerous as well - probably more dangerous than regular climbing. Can you ask people to carry a body down a mountainside where people who aren’t carrying a body die? It’s one thing to ask people to risk their lives to save somebody’s life. It’s something else to ask people to risk their lives just to move a dead body from one place to a different place.
What makes you think a rescue operation would cost less than an ascent? The vast majority of the resources involved are to just to get you within striking distance of the peak, and virtually all of the people who died did so during a summit attempt. Summiting usually takes close to a full day, up and back, even on oxygen. The record one-way is something like 8–9 hours and if I remember right that guy climbed with basically no equipment but oxy bottles, which was risky as fuck. Either way, if you’re not back to lower altitudes pretty damn fast, you’re highly likely to become another body on the mountain.
Economies of scale don’t work with these kind of logistics. Every single person added to a climbing group requires more resources, all of which must be carried up the mountain on someone’s back. Pack animals are only useful to relatively low ascent areas, and require their own fodder and care materials. I’ve never attempted a high peak ascent, but I’m familiar enough with regular hiking/trekking to know every day/person/goal added means more equipment and more supplies for every complication, which adds to the logistical complexity, expense, and effort involved.
You burn calories prodigiously, water practically evaporates out of your pores and, at the higher camps, people have to sleep with oxygen masks. Calculate how much weight you’d need for, say 6000 calories a day, and about double your normal water intake. Just that, forget about the oxygen and other equipment, represents a shitload of stuff if you think about having to carry it 20km at altitude on your back or someone else’s.
And every single day you wait for “good” weather is an added expense and a chance for things to go wrong. The highest you could reasonably stay for more than a couple of days is probably the base camp, which is more than high enough to cause altitude sickness. People * slowly die* just from remaining at these altitudes for too long. Have fun stockpiling fuel when just keeping a stripped bird flying in those conditions long enough to drop off some relatively light people and equipment and bug the fuck out is hard enough. If there’s a really bad storm, you’ll probably have to send the helicopter back down or risk serious damage or even complete loss. Near hurricane-level winds are not uncommon even at base camp.
By the way, in an interview with the pilot, in response to the question, "Does this flight improve the prospects for future rescue operations?” he said:
So, in other words, the guy who landed on the summit doesn’t think it’s actually possible to do anything useful at that altitude repeatedly and safely without a specialized aircraft. Not impossible, but damn expensive.
Never mind getting to the top - schlepping a 180-pound body downhill substantially reduces your chances of making it down alive, even if you never had a summit attempt in mind. Maybe you can drag it a few feet across gentle terrain, but most of the mountainside is not gentle terrain. There are rocky traverses that would make transporting a dead body extremely difficult even if you weren’t already out of breath from the altitude. There are also icy slopes that must be traversed, on which the only reason you don’t slide to your own death is because you have crampons on your boots. You can’t move a dead body “just a little further” in terrain like that; you’d have to move it all the way to the next patch of level ground before you park it again, and you’d likely kill yourself trying.
Search-and-rescue teams in other venues make a distinction between “rescue” and “recovery” efforts. A “rescue” mission means they believe people are still alive, and they will take substantial risks to rescue those people in a timely manner. A “recovery” mission means they believe people are not still alive; they are merely trying to pick up bodies/remains, and the level of risk they are willing to accept for this job is much less. On Everest, there have been debates among climbers about whether the risk incurred by helping struggling climbers is too high to justify the effort (see for example the case of David Sharp) - but among Everest climbers, I don’t think there’s any serious disagreement about whether the risk incurred by attempting to drag a dead body downhill is justified by the goal (it isn’t).
I think things have been answered pretty well, but IMO the main reason that efforts aren’t made to retrieve bodies on Everest is that the families aren’t interested in it. Climbers understand that it’s not worth the effort to retrieve a body at those altitudes and are at peace with their possible final resting place. Their families usually accept that.
I thought Green Boots was identified as Tsewang Paljor but now I see I am wrong. It is most likely Paljor but some believe it was another climber from his expedition.
I know every extra ounce adds risk, but since they are requiring climbers to pack down trash, maybe they could bring up a canvas sack, a balloon, and a bottle of helium. Then they could just load the remains (a lot of them look to be dried-out and in pieces anyway) into the bag, and attach the balloon and inflate, and let the remains float off the mountain - they’ll eventually come down someplace lower and possibly more accessible. Include some sort of beacon than then everything can be found easier.
This could also be used for the trash, and the human excrement - as long as the wind is blowing toward China.
What? I am <halfway> serious. What could go wrong?
Man Everest is one big trash dump-bodies, empty oxygen tanks, human excrement, abandoned tents-what a mess. How about a moratorium for a few years-get the paying climbers to use another mountain for a while-and clean Everest up. Could all of this junk just be dumped into a crevasse? Or would it re-emerge later?