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FILE 117 · VOL XIX · Nobody Came Back Out
Climbers Use the Dead on Everest as Trail Markers. One of Them Moved.
Above 8,000 meters, you walk past the dead. Sometimes they walk past you.
Based on: The Bodies on Mount Everest
Intake record
| Recovered from | Climbing jacket recovered during a cleanup expedition, Everest North Col route, Tibet |
|---|---|
| Contents | A helmet camera memory card, a Sherpa guide's handwritten statement, an expedition oxygen log, a summit photograph with one person too many |
| Finder | Pemba Norgay Sherpa, high-altitude guide (name changed) |
| Status | The bodies on Everest are documented. The footage is not explained. |
Recovered file
Mount Everest is the highest place on Earth. Its summit is 8,849 meters, about 29,000 feet, above sea level. [1] Above about 8,000 meters, climbers enter what is called the death zone. There is so little oxygen in the air that the human body starts to die. Not slowly. Within hours, the brain swells, the lungs fill with fluid, and thinking becomes slow and strange. [2]
More than three hundred people have died on Everest since records began. [1]
Many of them are still there.
It is extremely hard to bring a body down from the death zone. It can take a team of climbers days, and it puts their own lives in danger. So for decades, most of the dead were left where they fell. [2]
Climbers walk past them. Some of the bodies have become landmarks. Climbers give directions by them. Some lie right beside the fixed ropes on the busiest routes. Their bright jackets are still bright. On the north side of the mountain, there is an area people have called Rainbow Valley, because of all the colors scattered across the snow. [2]
In 1999, a search team found the body of George Mallory, a British climber who vanished near the summit in 1924. He had been lying on the mountain for seventy-five years. [3]
In recent years, Nepal has started sending teams to clean up the mountain. In 2024, soldiers and Sherpa climbers removed several bodies and many tons of trash, from old tents to oxygen bottles. [4]
The cleanup crews say the hardest part is not the weight, or the cold, or the altitude.
It is how many of the dead look as though they just sat down to rest.
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