Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa cannot forget the dead body he saw just metres from the summit of Mount Lhotse in the Himalayas more than a decade ago.
The Nepali was working as a guide for a German climber trying to scale the world’s fourth highest mountain in May 2012. The body blocking their path was thought to be Milan Sedlacek, a Czech mountaineer who’d perished just a few days earlier.
Mr Sherpa was curious why the Czech climber had died so close to the top. One of the gloves on the frozen corpse was missing.
“The bare hand might have slipped awa
from the rope,” the guide says. “He might have been killed after losing his balance and crashing onto the rock.”
The body stayed where it was – and every climber scaling Mount Lhotse thereafter had to step past it.
Mr Sherpa, 46, had no idea then that he would return 12 years later to retrieve the climber’s body, as part of a team of a dozen military personnel and 18 sherpas deployed by the Nepali army to clean up the high Himalayas.
There have been more than 300 deaths in the Everest region since records of mountain climbing there began a century ago, and many of these bodies remain. The death toll has kept increasing: eight people have been killed so far this year; and 18 died in 2023, according to Nepal’s tourism department.
The government first launched the clean-up campaign in 2019, which included removing some bodies of dead climbers. But this year was the first time that authorities set a goal to retrieve five bodies from the so-called “death zone”, above an altitude of 8,000m (26,247 feet).
In the end the team – who subsisted on water, chocolate and sattu, a mixture of chickpea, barley and wheat flour – retrieved four bodies.
One skeleton and 11 tonnes of rubbish were removed at lower attitudes after a 54-day operation that ended on 5 June.
“Nepal has received a bad name for the garbage and dead bodies which have polluted the Himalayas on a grave scale,” Major Aditya Karki, the leader of this year’s operation, told BBC Nepali.
The campaign also aims to improve safety for the climbers.
Maj Karki says many have been startled by the sight of bodies – last year, one mountaineer could not move for half an hour after seeing a dead body on the way to Mount Everest.
Cost and difficulties
Many people cannot afford to retrieve the bodies of relatives who have died on mountains in Nepal. Even if they have the financial means, most private companies refuse to help get bodies from the death zone because it is too dangerous.
The military allocated five million rupees ($37,400; £29,000) this year to retrieve each body. Twelve people are needed to lower a body from 8,000m, with each needing four cylinders of oxygen. One cylinder costs more than $400, meaning that $20,000 is needed for oxygen alone.
Every year, there is only about a 15-day window during which climbers can ascend and descend from 8,000 metres, as the winds slow down during the transition between wind cycles. In the death zone, the wind speed often exceeds 100 km per hour.
After locating the bodies, the team mostly worked after nightfall because they did not want to disturb other mountaineers. In the Everest region, which also consists of Lhotse and Nuptse, there is only one single ladder and ropeway for people climbing up and down from base camp.
“It was very tough to bring back the bodies from the death zone,” Mr Sherpa says. “I vomited sour water many times. Others kept coughing and others got headaches because we spent hours and hours at very high altitude.”
At 8,000m, even strong Sherpas can carry only up to 25kg (55 pounds), less than 30% of their capacity at lower altitudes.