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Mount Everest: Climbers will need to bring poo back to base camp
- bell-cot 3y agoWhen there is a literal line of narcissists and bucket-listers up the side of the mountain...at some point they need to dig a vertical tunnel, and install a pressurized glass elevator system. That'd let everyone (with money) check their boxes, without making a huge, ugly mess of a beautiful bit of remote wilderness.
- ncr100 3y agoHow about a Baba Yaga style drone which just carries sightseers to the top and takes them and their poop back down again?
- jebarker 3y agoOr we could all send them a daily e-mail telling them how great they are and/or they're not really going to die at ~80, depending on their particular neurosis. Then they wouldn't need to go at all.
- SMAAART 3y agoI am going to make a VisionPro app "Mt Everest climb", free to use, there's a $1,000/year charge for the certificate, available online.
- erhserhdfd 3y agoThis is a common practice in other high altitude, high traffic mountains, such as Aconcagua. Rangers actually watch you deposit your excrement bag and fine you if you do not do so or they catch you leaving your waste on the mountain. I'm frankly surprised its just now becoming a policy on Everest. It sounds gross, but in practice it is not as bad as it seems. For anyone interested in the details, it is stored in multiple bags (one bag per movement, then multiple larger outer bags) and freezes pretty quickly, so there isn't really any smell.
- TomMasz 3y agoRecent photos of the ascent look like the lines at Disney theme parks. One can only imagine how much waste that many people can generate. This seems an overdue requirement.
- gumby 3y agoI've been packing out my poo for decades. Sure, I started when camping in the snow, but when I learned how bad human crap is in the back country I decided to do it in the summer too (you already have to pack out the rest of your trash, including used TP). Learning that people don't do this on a place like Everest says more about the human trash who climb it than it does about anything else.
- barbazoo 3y agoI've been mildly interested in Everest but never thought about human waste. What else are they doing there, just literally leaving their shit on the mountain? It's not that you can easily bury it even. I know of the garbage issues up there but with this, it must be really gross.
- sigwinch28 3y agoThey leave oxygen tanks littered up there. They leave human bodies up there, too, but those are usually moved out of view.
- lm28469 3y agoThat's what I was going to comment, if they don't even bother bringing back the deads you can be sure they leave everything they can to save weight
- gumby 3y agoI admit I haven’t climbed Everest but an important principle of the backcountry (or elsewhere in nature) is “Leave no Trace”. But Everest sounds like an urban environment.
- rolph 3y agothe need for basic hygiene has been in play for a while. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-content-bally-cleaning-up-everest https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/partner-c... [2020]
- luqtas 3y agoi hope bourgeois don't leave this task for Sherpas...