The staggering cost of dying on Mount Everest
Magazine reports more than 200 bodies remain as dangers of retrieval can reach $91K
Five people have died attempting to climb Mount Everest this month, and one is missing.
Dutch climber Eric Arnold, 36, reached the mountain’s summit after four previous attempts, but died during his descent last week. On Thursday, his body was taken from the mountain by helicopter and brought to a hospital in Kathmandu. The body of 34-year-old Australian climber Maria Strydom, who died last Saturday, was also brought to Kathmandu Friday. This is a bit of an anomaly. While Arnold’s body was removed, scores have not been. More than 200 bodies dot the mountain, according to Smithsonian magazine.
Some of them are there per their final wishes. Many climbers wish to remain on the mountain should they perish, much like a captain going down with his ship, BBC reported. For those who wish for a traditional service, the costs and obstacles of retrieving bodies from the mountain are staggering.
“It’s expensive and it’s risky, and it’s incredibly dangerous for the Sherpas (inhabitants of the park surrounding Everest),” to whom the task generally falls, Fort Collins, Colo., mountaineer Alan Arnette told CBC.
The price tag can range between $39,000 to $91,000 (Canadian) and the quest to reclaim bodies has taken lives in the past. In 1984, 36-year-old Yogendra Bahadur Thapa and his 35year-old guide, Ang Dorjee, died during an attempt to recover the corpse of 39-year-old German mountaineer Hannelore Schmatz.
The first problem is the obvious one: Sherpas have to reach the body in question.
Most of Everest’s more than 250 deaths have occurred on the portion of the mountain above 26,000 feet, which is referred to as the “death zone.”
Until 2010, the death zone had never been cleared of the many bodies and trash littering it and making the path more treacherous for future climbers, the Guardian reported.
“This is the first time we are cleaning the death zone,” Namgyal Sherpa, leader of the Extreme Everest Expedition 2010, told the newspaper. “It is very difficult and dangerous.”
And it’s not a one-man job. As Arnette explained, it requires multiple — generally six to 10 — Sherpas most of a day to bring a body down the mountain.
Adding to the level of difficulty is the time crunch Sherpas experience there. One of the death zone’s more inhospitable features is its low oxygen levels, which are one-third those at sea level. Because of this, climbers aren’t supposed to spend more than 48 hours in the zone, Gizmodo reported. The act itself isn’t easy, either. “Even picking up a candy wrapper high up on the mountain is a lot of effort, because it’s totally frozen and you have to dig around it,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told BBC.
“A dead body that normally weighs 80 kilograms might weigh 150 kilograms when frozen and dug out with the surrounding ice attached.”