A group of Asian and European mountaineers will climb Mount Everest this spring to clean up tons of garbage left on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain…
“We will try to bring down as much as five tons of garbage from the higher camps,” team leader Han Wang-yong of Seoul, South Korea, said in Nepal’s capital, Katmandu.
Climbers say the South Col is littered with tents and other equipment, food packaging, ropes and even the bodies of people who have died in the past but have been preserved by the cold weather.
“We will try to bring down the bodies too but our main goal will be to collect the items like tents, oxygen tanks and plastic wrappings,” Han said.
Although estimates vary, some say there are 50 tons of trash on the Nepalese side of the mountain.
Neatness counts.
Someone could get really rich if he could build a helicopter pad on the summit and airlift tourists (in an astronaut suit of some type) there on a day trip. It costs, I heard, about $50,000 for a mountaineer to do it. You could charge $20,000 (with, let’s say 5 people on board) and make about $100,000 per lift.
David,
You could become much, much, MUCH richer by building a helicopter that would fly that high. There is ONE helicopter, and ONE pilot in that region that can fly to Camp 1, 10,000 feet BELOW the summit.
And he can only carry enough fuel for ONE try, maybe TWO at a landing. Otherwise, he’s too heavy. There have to be other climbers at the landing site to put an injured climber into the heli, and then, they can’t ride back down with the injured climber, because the weight of 2 bodies is too much for the helicopter to reliably lift at that altitude.
Ryan
Used to be a Japanese-owned hotel up near the lowest base camp. They made money hand-over-fist.
Good point, Ryan.
They should build an air-strip. I know planes can fly that high.
Build an air strip?!?! Who’s going to schlep the equipment and supplies for building the strip to the top? Then the planes should land at 500 MPH (800 km/h)? The denser air nearer sea level helps planes land comparatively slowly.
maybe an A-10 type of plane with vertical thrust?
“We will try to bring down the bodies too but our main goal will be to collect the items like tents, oxygen tanks and plastic wrappings,” Han said.
Talk about proirities.
well krypto, at least the bodies are bio-degradable.
Is anyone going to bring down all the dead bodies?
I thought the Sherpa guides forced expeditions to leave the bodies undisturbed for spiritual reasons.