KATHMANDU, Nepal-With the crowd of aspirant climbers and their guides attempting the Everest, eying to hold new records, World’s highest peak Mt. Everest has been polluted day-after-day. Many foreigner mountaineers have showed their serious concern towards existing dirty environment and criticized to the crowd as well as the heap of garbage gathered on Everest. ‘Everest which wore a deserted look only on previous evening while peeping through a tent was jammed with the crowd of mountaineers, ’ Mark Jenkins of National Geography writes on The Call of Everest about the scene which he saw on the Camp three.
Jenkins has expressed his bitter experience of passing through the heap of bodies in the Everest at his blog.
According to Tilak Ram Pandey, an official at the Mountaineering Section of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, he has been heeding the swelling complain of jam at Everest annually. environmentalist have complained about the rising piles of garbage that could be seen everywhere in Everest due to the crowd of aspirant mountaineers. According to Jenkins, the dead bodies of mountaineer, oxygen cylinder and the pieces of tin and iron are scattered around Everest. There are dozens of bodies of the climbers dispersing above the Camp 4 alone.
A team of people led by veteran mountaineer Appa Shrepa had collected huge piles of garbage and dead bodies from the peak while launching a cleaning drive last year. ‘The image of Everest would not remain no longer if we failed to curb the filthy at the peak’, Appa had told at that time.
Unwittingly, many mountaineers have been transforming the Everest into a big laboratory in the pretension of creating new records. Last year, a Japanese mountaineer had knocked the door of the Tourism Ministry, calling for a recommendation on a new record of singing a song on the peak. Similarly, a European woman visited the Mountaineering section at the Tourism Ministry just two years ago in a bid to register her laughing record there. Likewise, a Nepali mountaineer had reached the Ministry requesting for testimonial on his so called record of dancing naked on Everest.
Many mountaineers have also performed various activities sans taking any nod from the government agencies. Due to these activities, Everest has been transformed into a lab, mountaineering experts have warned. ‘Any one can perform any action on top since there is no presence of the government at the Everest,’ an official at the Ministry told Nepal Mountain Focus. According to him government officials assigned to monitor the expedition don’t lodge in the base camp.
There is no criteria and condition apart from requirement of minimum 16 years age for scaling the Everest. The negative message has been spreading across the globe while performing unnecessary activities freely in the excuse of ‘branding’ Everest.
Last year world’s celebrated channel National Geography had aired that the charm and the challenges of the Everest was decreasing slowly. ‘The recent activities in the Everest has reminded of a wholesale shop at a department. Mountaineering quality needed to upgrade shortly ,’Dipendra Paudel , an official at the Tourism Promotion Section opined, ’ the esteem of the peak has been decreasing in international level with the trend to take the Everest as a stage to perform drama. ‘
The number of the mountaineers returning from Everest is relatively low in the latest days. According to Pandey, hardly 10 percent mountaineers returned from Base Camp sans scaling the peak. A total of four thousands and two hundred people have scale the peak since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa stepped foot on Everest in 1953. More than five hundred mountaineers have scaled the peak till Saturday, this season.