Rubbish on Everest

[Crazycatladywithnocats]

This evening I saw a video showing the rescue of some poor hikers caught in a blizzard on Mt Everest and that led to another video showing drones collecting people’s rubbish that had been left lying about. The two were not related so I’m not saying these hikers had left the crap.

I mean, what the hell are people doing desecrating such a pristine environment? It should be one of the remotest places on Earth yet there appears to be nowhere that’s safe from this behaviour. For heaven’s sake people, just take it with you!

As the saying goes, “leave only footprints, take only photographs” .

They do however manage to kick out of view any rubbish or other kind of undesirable effects for their instagram feed. Total legends.

By the looks of it, Everest is covered in bodies, shit (several tons of it) and rubbish. Some of the photos make it look like a landfill site, and nothing breaks down because it is so cold and dry. I think climbers have to pay a deposit that they only get back when they present their own rubbish plus 8kg extra of historic crap that they have brought down. But I don't know how rigorously that's enforced.

I'm sure most people going up probably set out with the best of intentions and think that they are going to take only photos and leave only footprints in the wild romantic sacred landscape blah blah. But as Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face". This was interesting I thought:
https://www.quora.com/How-hard-was-it-to-scale-Mount-Everest-for-the-first-time-Any-accounts-of-the-journey-made-by-the-early-climbers-who-were-successful

I imagine that if you're exhausted, sick, cold, still a bit afraid till you're back at base camp, the weather isn't great, and maybe you even had to abandon your summit attempt having spent all that money....and you've been queueing up at the bottlenecks for aaaages with hordes of others (not really helping the beautiful wild solitude vibe)....and the place looks like a shit tip anyway....well, plenty of people probably think fuck it I am not going to use precious reserves of energy carting 8kg of somebody else's frozen shit off the mountain. In fact, maybe I'll just curl out a turd on this rock behind my tent amongst all the other turds and leave it, fuck it, it's dark and windy and nobody will see or care.

I bet when they get back home to do their slideshow to their climbing club, or they're some sort of demi-sleb adventurer doing after dinner motivational speaking, they leave that bit out, or dress it up as "We were all worried about Dave who was looking peaky so we left the polythene bags of shit on a rock, fecked the spent oxygen canisters into a crevasse and did a heroic mercy dash against time down the mountain to get Dave back to his grateful wife and kids before the storm blew in and killed everyone".