Watch your step.
Nothing like the smell of human feces in the morning! For those who decry human impact on the environment and shout from the rooftops that the world is going to shit, you may have a point — and a quite literal point at that. The proof? According to the Associated Press, “Human waste left by climbers on Mount Everest has become a problem that is causing pollution and threatening to spread disease on the world’s highest peak, the chief of Nepal’s mountaineering association said Tuesday. The more than 700 climbers and guides who spend nearly two months on Everest’s slopes each climbing season leave large amounts of feces and urine, and the issue has not been addressed, Ang Tshering told reporters.”
Forget the towering ascent casting a shadow over base camp. Instead imagine poop as far as the eye can see; now that is a sight you don’t see every day.
The report continues: “Climbers spend weeks acclimatizing around the four camps set up between the base camp at 5,300 meters (17,380 feet) and the 8,850-meter-high (29,035-foot-high) summit. The camps have tents and some essential equipment and supplies, but do not have toilets.”
So what happens in the Himalayas, stays in the Himalayas… albeit much to the chagrin of sherpas and other locals who do this year-round, and not as some one-off bucket list occurrence.
That being said, base camp hosts a number of toilet tents with removable and disposable drum. And the government did impose new rules last year in an attempt to address this issue of waste. They now require each climber to bring down eight kilograms, or 18 pounds, of trash to base camp on their descent. Eight kilograms is the amount the government estimates each climber discards along the route. How is it enforced? Climbing teams leave a $4,000 deposit with the authorities, a deposit they lose if they don’t comply with these rules.
As for the “fecal time bomb”? A 2012 Washington Post opinion piece by Grayson Schaffer quoted in a more recent story elaborates: “Everest even has a sewage problem. When base camp’s outhouse barrels are filled, porters haul them to open pits near Gorak Shep. Meanwhile, above base camp, most climbers straddle small crevasses to relieve themselves. The result: The peak has become a fecal time bomb, and the mess is gradually sliding back toward base camp. In 2012, Swiss climber Ueli Steck told me that he won’t even boil snow for water at Everest’s Camp II, because he thinks the lower boiling temperature at that altitude won’t kill germs.”
Oh, the legacy Edmund Hillary left! You not only still feel his presence, but smell it as well!
Read the original article on Associated Press. And head over to Washington Post for more color on the problem.
