A Mount Everest trekking guide has called for "strict rules" imposed by Nepal's government to combat the "huge problem" of trash on Mount Everest, including banning litterers from all mountains for "a lifetime." Officials of Nepal’s Mountaineering Association are warning that climbers leaving human waste on Mount Everest are causing real health issues. The problem is deemed to be so serious that it could even lead to the spread of diseases. So, how much poopy and other garbage calls the planet's highest mountain home? A Tech Times story describes the mountain as "the world's highest garbage dump." But Alton Byers, a mountain geologist at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, said this description is not entirely accurate. The problem, he told Live Science, is worse in areas off the mountain than on it. In surrounding areas, you'll find dozens of landfills at various lodges and villages throughout Sagarmatha National Park, where Mount Everest resides. The peak of Mount Everest rests at 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, on the northern edge of Sagarmatha National Park, within the Khumbu region of Nepal. Everest is part of the Himalayas, a mountain range in Asia stretching about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) across the countries of Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The range resulted from the Indian subcontinent crashing into the Tibetan plateau 40 million to 50 million years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1922, several mountaineers and others who were part of the British Mount Everest expedition made the first attempt to reach the top of the world, but were unsuccessful. In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to successfully reach the summit. Since then, thousands of adventurers have followed in the expedition's footsteps. In the late 1990s, Everest became a major destination for adventure tourists. More recently, Sagarmatha National Park has seen upwards of 150,000 visitors every year, with several hundreds attempting an Everest climb, according to Byers. [Photos: The World's Tallest Mountains] Climbers traveling to the bottom of the majestic mountain for the first time might be surprised to find half-buried fluorescent tents, fuel bottles and other miscellaneous pieces of old camp sites strewn about the base camps. For the most part, other climbers and porters will clean up the camp sites before the climbing season ends, Byers said. "It's remarkable how clean they've been able to keep it of litter," he said. The real problem is what happens with that litter. Many (selfish) climbers believe that harsh weather, the monsoon snows, or disposal in a crevasse will keep the mountain clean—that the crap they leave will somehow harmlessly dissolve into the mountain. This may have been true during the first four decades after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved the first summit, in 1953, when only a handful of climbers attempted the summit each year. But traffic has dramatically increased with the emergence of commercial guided trips in the past 20 years, and so has the amount of human waste we’ve left on the mountain. Decades worth of shit is just sitting up there. As 700 climbers and Sherpas gear up to attempt the mountain over the next six weeks of the climbing season, now is an appropriate time to ask: How much longer can we ignore Everest’s waste problem?
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