{"id":674,"date":"2011-05-13T16:14:58","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T20:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thequicksliver.wordpress.com\/?p=674"},"modified":"2011-05-13T16:14:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T20:14:58","slug":"5-13-11-worlds-highest-garbage-dump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/5-13-11-worlds-highest-garbage-dump\/","title":{"rendered":"5.13.11 World’s Highest Garbage Dump"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A man went up a mountain to pick up the trash.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>He had become concerned by the amount of junk which visitors had left behind.\u00a0 The mountain was becoming more famous for being a dumping ground than for being a nice place to hike.\u00a0 So the man grabbed his coat and his gear, and headed up the mountain to do something about it.\u00a0 He started cleaning up old campsites filled with broken tents, aluminum cans, and empty cooking stoves.\u00a0 He’s cleaning up trails littered with plastic bags.\u00a0 But most importantly, he’s picking up dozens and dozens and dozens of oxygen containers.\u00a0 The kind you need to keep your brain from hemorrhaging at high altitude.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>The man’s name is Apa Sherpa, but most of the climbing world knows him as “Super Sherpa.”\u00a0 This week, at the age of 51, he made the summit of Mount Everest for the 21st<\/sup> time, breaking his own record.\u00a0 He first started climbing at age 12, helping mountaineers move their gear up and down the mountain, and first ascended Everest as a guide in 1989.\u00a0 Since then, he’s reached the summit almost every summer, and helped many others to do so.\u00a0 But recently he has realized what happens when the world loves a place too much.\u00a0 Tens of thousands of people have gone up some part of the mountain.\u00a0 Almost 3000 have made it to the summit at least once.\u00a0 But as they did so, they left behind tons of equipment.\u00a0 Mount Everest, which the sherpas call Sagarmatha, had achieved a dubious new nickname:\u00a0 the world’s highest garbage dump.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>And the problem was only getting worse. \u00a0With global warming, much of the snow that used to cover the trash has melted, exposing many old dump sites.\u00a0 More and more climbers meant the problem was going to get worse.\u00a0 The Nepalese government has tried imposing fines for dumping, with only minimal effect.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>So Super Sherpa has assembled a team which plans to remove 4 tons of junk from the lower mountain, and another ton along the route to the summit.\u00a0 And, unfortunately, part of the task will be gruesome.\u00a0 Over 200 climbers have died on Everest, and many of their bodies remain along the trail in open view, especially in the “death zone” above 25,000 feet.\u00a0 Some of them may be retrieved for cremation or burial, while others will be covered with stone cairns.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>In a larger sense, Super Sherpa is doing more than cleaning a mountain, he’s purging a bad attitude in the climbing community.\u00a0 It’s not about conquering the mountain.\u00a0 It’s about having respect for it.\u00a0 Upon reaching the summit, he said, “If my ascent promotes the cause and helps to protect the mountain, I am always ready to climb.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man went up a mountain to pick up the trash. He had become concerned by the amount of junk which visitors had left behind.\u00a0 The mountain was becoming more famous for being a dumping ground than for being a nice place to hike.\u00a0 So the man grabbed his coat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[68,368,407,473,1068,1188],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6","tag-apa-sherpa","tag-dump","tag-everest","tag-garbage","tag-sagarmatha","tag-super-sherpa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}