This year, among the climbers who will go on theEverestnot everyone will aim for the top. The Nepal this year has mobilized a team of 12 soldiers and 18 mountaineers to recover the bodies remained on the ice of the “Roof of the World”, increasingly visible to the snow meltingcaused by climate change. «If we continue to leave them there, our mountains will transform into cemeteries», dice Aditya Karkia Nepalese Army major who led the team.
The tragedy of the dead
Since the 1920s, I have 300 people who they lost their lives on Everest. In the last season alone, 8 died. Falls, bad weather, illnesses (from 8,000 metres above sea level you enter the “death zone” because of Freddo and the very low presence of oxygen), some of the causes of deaths.
Many bodies remain hidden because covered from the snow or fallen into crevasses. Others remain visible or partially visible. Among climbers, expressions such as “green boots” or “sleeping beauty” are used to provide landmarks and orient climbers who come close to a corpse.
The recovery of the bodies
To recover a single body on Everest, it takes 8 rescuers because it can be complicated to extract a body trapped in ice. It can take hours and is sometimes used to extract it asce or to the jet of hot water. Bodies can be found almost skeletal or with the limbs rigidly apartA body can also weigh 100 chili considering the clothing, the equipment still on and the ice that remains attached. The body, once extracted, is wrapped in a sacco and brought back down with one sled.
Among the bodies waiting to be found, there is that of Andrew Irvineclimbing companion of George Mallory In the 1924. If the latter’s body was found in 1999, the same was not true for Irvine or their camera which could rewrite the history of mountaineering by demonstrating that the first to climb to the top of the mountain 8,848 meters it was them and not Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
