First of all, there’s no way to control the balloon, and the peak often experiences extremely high winds. While the remains will come down somewhere lower, the odds are small that they will come down somewhere easily accessible to retrieval. The area surrounding Everest is a vast wilderness of peaks and glaciers, with only a few scattered villages. You would most likely have to mount a major expedition just to get to the remains. The ultimate effect would just be to put the remains in a less conspicuous location.
I have read that expeditions are now required to bring down more trash than they bring up.
Anyone who feels that strongly about the importance of bringing down the bodies is free to organize an expedition, obtain the necessary permits, and go for it. The people who think it should be done never seem to be able or willing to actually do it. The climbers who have the ability to undertake this kind of operation don’t think it’s worthwhile; they know the dangers of the mountain, and they would be content to remain there if they died during a climb.
As an armchair adventurer, in addition to the many books I’ve read about fatal climbs in the Himalayas, I’ve also read Raising the Dead and several other books about the cave diver who died trying to bring up a body. Where the risk is that great, you have to consider whether it’s worth ending up with two or more bodies in order to give one body a burial.
How about if they secured a pulley at each end, and a long rope in a loop between them. Attach the balloon and its payload to the loop, and pull the loop from the bottom like a closeline to guide the balloon down the mountain. You would have to do it in stages, on days with low winds, but it seems easier and safer than dragging the bodies off the mountain.
Everyone who climbs Mt Everest has to almost literally step over dead bodies as they climb. If you don’t want to see the corpses of the people who died on Mt Everest, then stay home. If you aren’t comfortable with the idea of your freeze-dried body remaining on Mt Everest forever then stay home. If you think the bodies should be recovered then fly to Nepal, climb up the mountain, and drag them down yourself. Just be prepared for the idea that if you die in the attempt they’re going to leave your body up their with the rest of them. These were all people who gambled their lives on the mountain and lost, the rest of us are under no obligation to risk our lives to drag their corpses down the mountain.
And what, exactly, is the point of recovering the bodies? What does it actually accomplish? You can’t climb Mt Everest without spinning the wheel of mortality, and if it comes up “death” then you just die. You put yourself on that mountain on purpose, you get yourself off.
In a discovery series on climbing Everest they go over this issue a few times. One problem is that many of the climbers already have as much oxygen as they can carry for a normal climb, and many of them run out and have to come back down. Considering that happens on a normal single person climb, I would imagine that much more oxygen would be required to do the type of work necessary to return a frozen body aka 200lb hunk of ice.
Some climbers do not use oxygen but they are more of the exception and they are also not doing the type of work necessary to return a body. The climbing alone seems to exhaust everyone, and obviously it leads to deaths by itself.
The other issue is that helicopters cannot operate in the thin air of the death zone. Air rescue is just not an option.
It would be interesting to read feedback from climbers to find out how they feel about being left on the mountain. I’m sure theres plenty of them that find it as a sort of honor to die doing what they love in such a dangerous area. Maybe a sort of “going down in flames” type scenario?
And note that there are significant differences between a rescue operation and one involving cleanup or body retrieval.
Actually, a substantial number have died in avalanches, or on descent, sometimes well below the summit.
Well, it’s typically 10 to 18 hours from the South Col (Camp 4) to the summit and back. But the South Col, at 26000’, hardly qualifies as “lower altitude” in terms of low risk to health. Typical time from base camp (17500’) to the summit and back is 4 days.
Any serious helicopter-based cleanup operation would concentrate on flights to the South Col, some 3000’ lower than the summit. It would definitely be expensive, but probably much more efficient - and safer - than a non-mechanized scheme.
It’s easy to make a case that humans should undertake to leave natural places in something close to their natural state, not littered with trash and corpses. Why should those who will climb noble mountains 50 years from now have to pick their way through the detritus of earlier climbers who, though they had the ability to do so, could not be bothered to deal with the full impact of their presence?
This is such a silly idea that I have to assume it’s an attempt at a whoosh. How much do you think miles and miles of rope weigh? And it’s not a straight shot from the Death Zone down to the lower camps. The rope would necessarily drag in some places and get snagged, unless you constructed poles to keep it elevated. You’re proposing a major construction project an area where people can barely survive at all.
Not at all. It’s not a ride, just a means of guiding a balloon. Doesn’t need to engineered nearly as strong and safe as a zipline. Nor does it have to be 29,000 feet long; Base Camp is at 17,000 feet, and the rest of the way could be broken into several hops. It is still a dangerous undertaking, but less so than dragging them down one at a time.
Break it into hops that are a straight shot. Don’t carry the rope, carry a nylon parachute line, reel it out behind you, and pull the rope up once you get to the top end of the hop.
How many such hops do you think there are? How often do you think there’s even a moderately calm day on Everest? This would still be an impossibly difficult task.
A corpse that has been on the mountain for several decades is not a hunk of ice, it is a dessicated, freeze dried mummy weighing a fraction of its weight at death.
“It’s always cold on the summit but not always windy. From end of May until the third week of October there typical summit winds will range between calm and 15 m/s.”
15 m/s is 33 mph. I’d call that pretty windy! It may not be the jet stream, but I wouldn’t want to be climbing a mountain in that wind. I climbed Grand Teton (13,776). There’s no way I would have done it in a 30 mph wind.
I first read that as “delicate, freeze dried mummy”, which gets me thinking: if it is dessicated, would it survive being dragged or swung? I would think that the relatives would especially want to leave them there rather than get them back in pieces or just half of them. Which isn’t to say if the volume of deaths goes on for many more decades that we won’t have to do something from a climber’s perspective since they may be a navigation hazard by themselves.
