But those feces should freeze pretty quickly, reducing the smell.
You also forgot to mention things like urine and rotting food - if the waste ever gets warm enough to rot. I dunno. I’ve also heard they’ve put in porta-potties, but that would be at a place like base camp, not in the upper reaches, where I’m sure there are piles of discarded equipment, empty oxygen bottles, food waste, human excrement, and yes, dead bodies. Ever notice how the documentaries seem to film around that stuff?
The Discovery channel program did have a short sequence where they showed the dead lying close to the route up and down the mountain. Maybe prospective climbers should be shown graphic pictures of those corpse-strewn trails as a cautionary thing. Granted, it won’t stop everyone but making a few of these guys think twice might be a good thing.
Who allows it? The Nepalese government, for one, which charges significant fees to climb the mountain. I think Tibet and China also have a laissez-faire approach, something along the lines of “if the idiots want to pay to die on the mountain - let them”.
Several people have successfully completed (that is, up and all the way down alive) solo Everest climbs. It can be done - but not by everyone. Not even by every climber.
A number of the guys on the Discovery team made mention about it being safer to climb in a team, and some of the advantages of being on a team. Most climbers do attach themselves to teams.
If you really want something bad you’re willing to make sacrifces in other areas of your life to afford it. Some of the middle-class climbers who attempt Everest will scrimp and save for years - driving old cars, living in smaller houses than their co-workers, taking cheap or no vacations, working extra, and so on.
Yes, I was interested to learn why a guy like this chooses such a personal goal. He (Jensen) looked terrified after his failed summit attempt-he must of had an asmhatic attack, and had a great deal of trouble breathing. Check out the pictures of his face-he looked like he aged 30 years! And he wants to cheat death again-good luck to him!
I watch the entire series on New Year’s Eve (thank you Tivo) and was enthralled, both by the sheer courage in attempting to scale Everest and the sheer stupidity of many of those who tried. (The French dude taking his gloves off to snap a photo at 28,000 feet comes to mind.) And can you imagine the agony that the doctor went through as he waited for 1 hour and 20 minutes to get down the Second Step due to the bottleneck, knowing all the while that he was running out of oxygen and still in the Dead Zone? Wow!
There’s a book called “I Should Have Stayed Home - The Worst Trips Of The World’s Greatest Travel Writers” and one of the stories is about standing on a scenic outlook at Everest which is also where everyone seems to choose to take a crap. Evidently quite fragrant.
I attended a slideshow/lecture by Tenzing Norgay’s son, Jamling. He was up on the mountain with a group doing cleanup and he had plenty of photos of the massive piles of junk left behind by climbing teams - I was amazed at all the oxygen bottles, there must have been tons and tons of the things. They brought down a lot but I can’t imagine how hard it is to do cleanup duty under those conditions.
Or better yet make them watch the videos of the team leaders begging some of those guys to turn around and come back before they get hurt, then show the people like the French writer who lost his finger & toe tips, then the frozen bodies and then perhaps an interview or two with surviving family members. I’m firmly of the opinion that if people want to take a calculated risk then they can do so, but they should really understand the risks in addition to being great climbers/athletes.
The problem is, showing photographs from a “corpse-strewn trail” would only increase the interest in climbing Everest. If you’re going to impress fellow cocktailers with your “Death Zone” adventure stories, you damn better have encountered plenty of dead and mangled bodies during your climb. Death gives commercial climbing a gravitas that 4-color brochures just can’t rival.
Human waste is indeed a problem on 8000 meter peaks, but once you’re high into the climb, the good news is that your body essentially shuts down and you start consuming your own fat reserves and muscle tissue. You’re too tired to eat and can’t digest food terribly well anyway, so your bowel movements are far and few in between. Best of all, dead climbers are slowly pecked at by high-altitude Himalayan birds, while cosmic radiation bombards bodies into a dessicated shell. In short, nature recycles even in the Death Zone.
Here’s a summiter’s words on this process. It’s not a very scientific artcle, but it stresses water intake as one key to reducing the physiological effects of high altitude. It also gives basic definitions of HAPE (High Altitide Pulmonary Edema) and HACE (High Altitude Coronary Edema), two common causes of death on Everest. HAPE is the lungs filling with fluid and HACE is a swelling of the brain. I’m not sure if they are necessarily always fatal. I am hoping my copy of *Into Thin Air * arrives tomorrow for a more detailed explanation. The other articles are pretty interesting too, I’d recommend them. The last set dealing with the climb is the best.
When discussing Oxygen or “Oz” use, the author mentioned it comes out of the bottle very dry and recommends using moisturizing cream to prevent frostnip. I was wondering why Brett Merrell, the LA fire fighter, had a white substance on his face during his climb to camp 2, and think this might be the explanation, unless it’s zinc oxide for the UV rays. I remember him mentoning his Oz use at a relatively low altitude as one reason to eventually turn back, so he would have been on the mask.
I ran across an Everest victim’s picture and really wish I hadn’t. The body was in a sit-up type position leaning against a rock. Everything from the neck down was proportional to a live climber (the “bulk” was the same and the clothing showed little weathering) but the face and top of the head had been eroded down to the skull. Worst of all, the poor man’s ears and hands were still intact - very bizzare and sad picture.
As far as cleanup and body removal, I recently saw a video of a French helocopter pilot “landing” on the summit. He really could only hover with one skid in the snow to qualify for the record, but a hell of a feat. Obviously the helo was stripped down, but it’s a good sign for potential rescues and cleanup in the future.
I live at sea level and will probably never see anything close to even Base Camp altitudes outside of an airplane, but the Everest show has really sparked my interest in this sport. Like I said, I have one book on the way as well as the Everest IMAX DVD. I have always struggled in cardiovascular sports (no endurance), and hearing about others’ 2-3 hour struggles to go 200-300 FEET is fascinating to me.
From what I’ve read, Everest’s problems far exceed those of the other thirteen 8000+ meter mountains in the world. All mountains have fatalities, but not nearly as many as Everest. While K2, the world’s second-highest peak is a more technical climb, the lure to conquer Everest brings more traffic, more competition amongst expeditions and non-commercial climbers and more deaths due to many factors. For one, climbers spend the longest time in the death zone than at any other peak making oxygen rationing critical (especially when faced with traffic jams). Secondly, we all saw Tim and his French partner get summit fever (not as uncommon as I first thought). One of the contributing factors to the '96 disaster was the culture of guaranteed summits that may have pushed some guides and climbers too far (all six perished on descent). One side of the David Sharp controversy accuses Russell Brice of trying to monopolize the North Face as a money making enterprise (his company takes in $10 million a year). There’s alway two sides to a story, and I’m sure I’ll never get the whole picture, but the more I find out, the more there is to know.
I haven’t seen the Discovery show, but having somehow stumbled on to these discussions, I have to say that it’s fascinating. I have to confess that I’ve even started to check into costs and physical requirements to make the trek to Everest Base Camp. I think even that hike would be a life changing experience. The life changing part may from the cardio health required and seeing Nepal than actually going to EBC.
It takes a while. There was a show a while back where an expedition went looking for Mallory. He went missing sometime in the 20’s IIRC. They found him, and quite a bit of his corpse remained. His clothes had deteriorated and his back was exposed, it was white as porcelin. He was basically freeze dried it appeared.
Mallory’s body has been on Everest longer than any other, but the reason his corpse looks so good–never mind the hole chewed into his buttock by resident goraks–is probably because it was covered by snow pack for almost all of the last 80 years.
