Bodies remain on Mount Everest. Why?

[Urbanredneck]

Could they possibly just be burned and maybe only some ashes removed?

[Colibri]

@Urbanredneck

Could they possibly just be burned and maybe only some ashes removed?

With what fuel? I don’t think a dessicated body would maintain combustion very well without some additional flammable material.

[Urbanredneck]

@Colibri

With what fuel? I don’t think a dessicated body would maintain combustion very well without some additional flammable material.

Well yes. I’m talking soaking the body with say gasoline first.

[Colibri]

@Urbanredneck

Well yes. I’m talking soaking the body with say gasoline first.

Gasoline burns hot enough (1500 F) for cremation, which takes 1400-1800 F, but cremation usually takes 2-2.5 hours or more. I think you’d need a lot of gas, which would be heavy to carry up.

[Nava]

@DrDeth

You try *your damnedest *until it’s no longer safe for you. Then you retreat back down the mountain.

@coremelt

Ordinary climbers don’t have the equipment or skills to attempt that kind of rescue and if they do the most likely result is that there will be two or more bodies at the bottom of a 40 foot crevasse.

Or in other words, “your damnedest until it’s no longer safe for you” begins a lot sooner than people who’ve never been there think.

[Jaguars]

The Sherpa are also generally anti- body recovery. They have very strong cultural reasons for doing this. From another message board:

I wanted to kick in a couple of things about the Sherpa. Though six weeks twenty years ago does not an expert make by any means, so bear that in mind. I was told by the sirdar of our climb, Jimi Ryu, that the major reason why body recovery is such an issue is that Sherpa have a strong belief that touching a dead body is extremely unlucky and brings the wrath of spirits down on you. It’s possible to hire a team to recover a body, but it’ll take a lot of doing, a lot of persuading, and a lot of money offered, and that’s not because of the (considerable) physical risk, but because whoever you hire to bring back a body is going to see his ordinary business disappear for at least a year, if not forever. It’s virtually impossible to get a truly skilled and experienced sirdar to agree to head up a body recovery expedition.

Someone mentioned the average salary of a sirdar (climbing Sherpa) earlier in the thread; they make incredible bank by Nepali standards and they’re respected and admired, they’re more or less the rockstars of their community. It takes years of experience and of consistently showing above-average climbing abilities, making good decisions, and playing lesser roles in successful expeditions to get to the point where other Sherpa will recognize you as a qualified sirdar, expedition outfitters will hire you as a one, etc. Go on a body recovery effort and you’ve tainted yourself with bad luck and angry spirits. Porters won’t want to work for you. Sherpa-run outfitters take you off their list of available sirdars. When Western people ask about you, other Sherpa just sort of smile and nod and point them elsewhere. You have to go through a fairly rigorous and long-lasting (sometimes years) set of purification actions before other Sherpa consider you not to be tainted any more, and even then if something bad happens on your first expedition out after purifying yourself, you’re done. You now have a reputation for being cursed and unlucky. No Sherpa will want to work with you or hire you any more, and your lucrative career and community status just vanished. No matter how much money someone is offering for a body recovery, there are always very, very few takers, and the people who agree are either Hindu and usually from the Newari Valley (ie, not nearly as familiar or capable as a Sherpa), or completely desperate. It’s almost impossible to get a Sherpa to do the actual body recovery. Even just heading up the expedition, with other people doing the actual work with the corpse, is massive bad luck in their eyes.

That ties into why the Sherpa didn’t climb Everest earlier, though they certainly could have. They believe mountain summits are sacred and that spirits live there, and to go to a summit is to risk disturbing those spirits and pissing them off. If you look at photos of base camp (any climbing base camp, not just Everest) you’ll see long strings of brightly-colored flags all over. Those are Buddhist prayer flags. A big part of any summit expedition (at least if you want to keep your porters and sirdar happy) is religious observances. Just for a small peak like Kusum, we still paid a visit to Tengboche monastery first and asked for the lama’s blessing, so that going to the summit wouldn’t anger the mountain spirit into taking revenge. This might sound goofy to Western ears but the Sherpa aren’t kidding. If the climbers on a trip refuse to do whatever observances the sirdar feels is necessary, chances are the first time the tiniest thing goes wrong you’ll wake up to find that half your porters have left in the night and aren’t coming back. The Sherpa also believe very strongly that if you die on the mountain, you should stay on the mountain. It was your fate, you chose it, it’s not for someone else to try to mess with it.

That said, don’t think of Sherpa as ignorant or superstitious. All of the Sherpa I met during my time in Nepal were intelligent people who were very aware of the modern world and what was going on outside of Nepal, but they have a tightly-knit and ancient culture and a set of beliefs that are very deeply meaningful to them and central to their lives. They’re also some of the friendliest, most genuinely kind, hospitable, gracious people I’ve ever known, ethical and loyal to a fault, incredibly brave (Jimi once got avalanched while he was fixing protection on an ice face; while we all panicked and freaked out, he suddenly popped out of a drift with a big grin, waving his ice axe and announcing “Sherpa!! Tigers of the snow!!!”), utterly uncomplaining, smart and tenacious, and tough as old boots. When they refuse body recovery, it’s not out of fear or inability. Just about everyone who visits that part of Nepal leaves with a very deep and sincere admiration for the Sherpa in general. They’re amazing people.

I haven’t read Krakauer’s book or seen the documentaries, so this might have already been thoroughly covered there, sorry if so. I did find this link, which I think is a very good explanation of both why body recovery is such a culturally fraught subject, and also illustrates the difficulty of it. This is an account from a member of an IMAX film crew of the recovery of the body of a Sherpa who was killed just above Camp 2. It details just how difficult the recovery was even relatively low on the mountain. It’s not hard to extrapolate from this account how much more difficult this would be in the dead zone.

Everest politics is a surprisingly diverse and complex area. The answer to any question that starts “Why don’t they…” is usually “It’s stunningly impractical to do at that altitude” Climbers attempting the summit have virtually no carrying capacity - they can effectively only carry what they need to survive and very little else. They effectively exhaust themselves walking a mile, which takes all day.

The more you read on Everest, the more you realize that it’s not that people turn savage, but in fact the decisions that get made there are logical in the context.

(E: That’s not me in the quote! I’m way too lazy to climb everest!)

[Guinastasia]

@Colibri

Gasoline burns hot enough (1500 F) for cremation, which takes 1400-1800 F, but cremation usually takes 2-2.5 hours or more. I think you’d need a lot of gas, which would be heavy to carry up.

It could also be really dangerous, depending on the weather conditioins.

[Broomstick]

In these discussions I always find it odd how worked-up people get about corpses on a mountain half a world away. No one winds up in the Everest death zone by accident, you not only have to want to go there, you have to work your ass off to get there at all.

Certainly by now it’s well know that those who die on the mountain stay on the mountain. Certainly, anyone going up towards the summit sees the dead lining the way. They make their choice, no one is forced to take that path.

Again - why is it so disturbing to people that people who chose to attempt the summit, or made it and died on the way back down, are still there?

[snfaulkner]

@Broomstick

In these discussions I always find it odd how worked-up people get about corpses on a mountain half a world away. No one winds up in the Everest death zone by accident, you not only have to want to go there, you have to work your ass off to get there at all.

Certainly by now it’s well know that those who die on the mountain stay on the mountain. Certainly, anyone going up towards the summit sees the dead lining the way. They make their choice, no one is forced to take that path.

Again - why is it so disturbing to people that people who chose to attempt the summit, or made it and died on the way back down, are still there?

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I personally don’t care morally about them staying up there. I’m interested in the engineering/problem solving aspect of the discussion. Regardless of how impractical, it’s a fun thought exercise.

[coremelt]

@snfaulkner

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I personally don’t care morally about them staying up there. I’m interested in the engineering/problem solving aspect of the discussion. Regardless of how impractical, it’s a fun thought exercise.

Yeah well, but if money was no object, you could make a special lighter / higher power versions of the Eurocopter AS350 / B3 which would be capable of taking off from the peak of Everest carrying a passenger. The issue is no one is willing to pay for such a specialised helicopter as the currently available version is already fine for all rescues in the Alps and the US. It’s only the himalayas where you’d need an even more powerful / lighter version.

The B3 can already take off with a single passenger at altitudes of up to 7000 meters and it was a stripped down version which landed (with no passenger) on the peak of Everest. It would seem to be only a matter of more power / less weight to increase it’s maximum take off altitude to above 8000 meters with a passenger.

[Mangetout]

@snfaulkner

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I personally don’t care morally about them staying up there. I’m interested in the engineering/problem solving aspect of the discussion. Regardless of how impractical, it’s a fun thought exercise.

Me too. If there was a compelling case for removing them on moral/economic/hygiene/safety grounds, there would probably be a solution in place already - open discussion of stuff like this - regardless of how impossible/impractical it really is - is how people learn stuff, which is what this board is supposed to be about.

[Ranger_Jeff]

I suppose if you had a ST type transporter…

[Machine_Elf]

@coremelt

Even in the far more common case where someone just sits down and can’t move any more on the side of the trail, its impossible for a single person to safely carry their weight. In such cases other climbers stop and provide oxygen or food, but ultimately they have to get going again and rescue themselves, its usually too late by the time a team gets there.

See for example the case of David Sharp.

[Northern_Piper]

That was a very interesting post, Jaguars! - thanks!

[Bricker]

@Morgenstern

Makes no sense to me.

One of those links has an image of Jack Nicholson’s frozen body from “The Shining.”

[dr_zippermeyer]

I guess you have all seen Terminator 2. When frozen liquid metal robot is shot even once, it explodes to pieces. Wouldnt frozen climber react the same way? After that it would be really easy to carry back. Naturally you would have to glue it back together before it starts to melt. And not tell the relatives how you retrieved it of course!

[Telemark]

Being frozen by liquid nitrogen isn’t quite the same as being frozen on Everest. You’d have to carry up a lot of liquid nitrogen, perhaps via helium balloons?

[Colibri]

@dr_zippermeyer

After that it would be really easy to carry back.

If that were the only consideration, then a chain saw would be the way to go.

[Kobal2]

@Colibri

If that were the only consideration, then a chain saw would be the way to go.

Nah. Dynamite. That way the stiff does his own trekking back down, too !

[snfaulkner]

@Kobal2

Nah. Dynamite. That way the stiff does his own trekking back down, too !

Speaking of which, is there any sort of anti-avalanche devices up there by Everest like the recoiless rifles they use in the Rockies (I think) and other areas? And by “anti-avalanche” I mean “avalanche-causing”.