Mount Everest’s highest campsite is strewn with abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles and human waste, footage has shown. A social media video clip of Camp IV, the highest campsite on Earth, shows battered tents flapping in gale-force winds, and mounds of rubbish left behind by people on climbing expeditions. The camp is situated at around 26,000ft and is the final place to rest before mountaineers attempt their push to the 29,032ft summit of Everest. “What should be one of the most extraordinary places on the
planet has, in many ways, become one of the ugliest faces of Everest’s commercialisation,” Everest Today, an account dedicated to climbing the mountain, posted on X. “Abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles, food cans, torn gear and other waste are scattered across the South Col [mountain pass], turning the world’s highest campsite into a graveyard of climbing equipment. The mountain deserves better.” Everest has a well-documented waste problem, with the Himalayan peak littered with empty gas canisters and discarded camping equipment. Thousands of mountaineers have climbed
the peak since it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. There have been periodic attempts to clean up the rubbish, but the high altitude and extreme weather make the task highly challenging. Good weather can swiftly turn into blizzard conditions, and oxygen levels are about a third of the normal amount. Two years ago, a team of Sherpas and Nepalese soldiers removed 11 tons of rubbish and retrieved four bodies from the mountain. Recovering the waste and bodies is not
easy, because they are often encased in ice and require painstaking digging. It took two days to dig out one corpse during the 2024 operation. “The garbage left there was mostly old tents, some food packaging and gas cartridges, oxygen bottles, tent packs, and ropes used for climbing and tying up tents,” Ang Babu Sherpa, who led the team of Sherpas, said at the culmination of the clean-up effort. Some of the rubbish found by the team dated back to 1957. The increasing popularity of
climbing Everest is only likely to exacerbate the rubbish problem. On a single day last month, 274 climbers reached the top of the mountain, setting a new record for the highest number of successful ascents in one day. Drone footage of long queues of climbers making their way in single file towards the summit revived the debate about overcrowding and commercialisation on the mountain. The traffic jam of climbers was caused, in part, by Nepal issuing a record 492 permits this season. Everest is increasingly
attracting people with minimal fitness and experience who are more motivated more by showing off their achievements on social media than the joy of mountaineering, said Tim Mosedale, a British expedition leader who has reached the summit seven times. “There are more and more people with a drone and an Instagram account who are looking for content,” he told The Telegraph. “If you have unfit or incompetent people on the mountain, then they are putting the lives of Sherpas at risk. There are a lot
of people who are out of their depth, who don’t realise how close to the edge of safety they are.”
Everest, Camp IV, South Col, rubbish, oxygen bottles, overcrowding, permits, Sherpas, Nepal soldiers, commercialisation, climbing season