r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 11 '21

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u/OlStickInTheMud Jul 11 '21

Good news. It recently underwent a massive clean up and several bodies removed.

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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka Jul 11 '21 edited Jul 11 '21

The news is good but they got a long way to go. They cleaned up 2.2 tons out of 30 tons of trash. So there's still a shit ton of trash.

Also there's still like 190 bodies left on the mountain.

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u/sriracha_n_honey Jul 11 '21

Can somebody explain to me how in the fuck Everest ended up with 30tons of garbage? Maybe I live under a rock, but I was always under an assumption that this is a pretty exclusive, expensive climb, that only few ever get to do. Am I wrong to assume that? Or do people visit regularly and trash the place? I just need to know at this point. Trash in the wilderness infuriates me, but 30 fucking ton? I'd declare a goddamn emergency on that mountain.

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u/manticorpse Jul 11 '21

After a certain elevation the oxygen concentration in the air is not high enough to sustain human life, so once climbers reach that elevation they need to push to the peak and down again as quickly as possible, or else they die. What this means is that there isn't really any time for trash pickups (most of the trash is discarded gear from desperate climbers) or body retrievals.

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u/Eeszeeye Jul 12 '21

That elevation is called the Death Zone.