EVEREST RESISTS RETURNING THE DEAD

Retrieving bodies a harrowing struggle for loved ones and rescuers

KATHMANDU: The mountain is speckled with corpses.

Nearly 300 people have died on Mount Everest, with at least 100 of them still on the mountain.

Most of the bodies are hidden in deep crevasses or covered by snow and ice, but some are visible to every climber who passes by.

The most famous corpses get nicknames – “Green Boots”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “The German” – becoming warnings of what can go wrong on the 8,850m peak, even though they become part of the mountain’s dark sense of humour.

No grieving family wants their loved one to become a punchline, but taking down to the dead is no simple thing.

“It’s extremely difficult and dangerous,” said Arnold Coster, expedition leader for Seven Summit Treks, which lost two climbers this year.

“The terrain is steep and the weather is bad,” he said, as a team of Sherpas struggled to get the body of one climber, Maria Strydom, low enough to be carried by helicopter.

It can take 10 Sherpas more than three days to move a body from Everest’s South Col, at 8,000m, to Camp 2, a rocky expanse at 6,400m where helicopters can take over.

It’s an exhausting process, with the bodies often much heavier because they are covered in ice.

Given the risks involved, many climbing teams lower bodies into crevasses or cover them with rocks, so they won’t be gawked at.

Coster said that Strydom’s body was in a highly visible area, and that her family wanted it brought down.

After being carried down the mountain, her body was flown to Kathmandu on Friday.

But over the years, it is Sherpas who die most often on the mountain.

In just the past two years, at least 28 of the dead were from the ethnic group that has lived for centuries around Everest, and who have become an integral part of the Himalayan mountaineering world.

When a Sherpa dies on Everest, relatives also working there will normally rush to recover the body.

But sometimes, they are never found. Chhedar Sherpa, a guide who has scaled Everest seven times, lost his brother and nephew when an Everest avalanche killed 16 Sherpas in 2014.

His brother’s body was recovered, but his nephew has never been found.

“We believe that the bodies should be properly cremated for the peace of their souls and so the family gets closure,” said Sherpa, who gave up highaltitude work after an avalanche.

Sometimes, the mountain itself brings back the dead, as shifting glaciers or melting snow reveal bodies that have been lost for years.

The body of George Mallory, the great English climber who disappeared on Everest in 1924, was not found until 1999. The corpse of a Sherpa guide emerged near Base Camp in 2013 after eight years.

Ang Tshering, head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, predicted that warming temperatures will reveal many new corpses.

“In the next 10 years or so, bodies could begin turning up,” he said.