Everest: Nepal, before the complicated task of recognizing corpses destroyed by the mountain

KATHMANDÚ.- Eleven people
This is the balance (the highest in four years) that left in 2019 the
cross to climb

Everest.

The government of

Nepal

is in the middle of a
controversy since the end of May because of the growth of tourism in the mountains: there was a record number of permits to climb,
congestion in the tracks and a large number of non-athletes who had to cope with extreme conditions, both climatic and survival.

Now the government faces another challenge: identifying the bodies found. Worn by the wind and the low temperatures almost to the point of becoming skeletons, four bodies are in a mortuary, having been removed in the middle of an operation two weeks ago, and the authorities are badyzing the method to use to find their identities.

Police and officials admit that they face a daunting challenge with the dead mountaineers, who should be sent to their home country. However, the officers do not even know how long they stayed on the mountain.

A government-organized team carried out a clean-up operation in the area slightly above the base camp. In addition to the 11 tons of waste, they found several corpses dead mountaineers. "The bodies are not recognizable, they are almost reduced to the bone, there is no face to identify them," said police chief Phanindra Prasai. "We asked the hospital to collect DNA samples that could be compared to those of relatives who are manifesting themselves," he added.

Faced with this situation, the Nepalese police are preparing the administrative process so they can ask for help and inform the foreign embbadies about the bodies. But solving the mystery could take several years.

"It's a difficult task," said Ang Tsering Sherpa, former president of the Nepalese Mountaineering Association. The authorities, he said, "need to share more information about the bodies, especially about where they were found, and seek the cooperation of the shipping operators" .

More than 300 people have died trying to reach the summit of Everest, at 8848 meters altitude, since the beginning of the expeditions in the 1920s. Until now, it is unknown how many bodies are still hidden in ice, snow and rocks.

The body as a guide

Given the number of deaths occurring in the heights and the impossibility of lowering the corpses, due to the disadvantages of the road and the high costs that result, some of them, still covered colorful clothes of mountaineering on the way to the top, and they even have names.

An example is the one known as "Green Boots", because of the green boots that he still wears. Another body that stays in the mountains is known as Sleeping Beauty.

It is believed that "Green Boots" is the body of an Indian mountaineer who died during an expedition in 1996, and it was proven that the body had been moved in 2014 to remove it from the main road.

In sum, "The Sleeping Beauty" is apparently the body of Francys Arsentiev, the first American to make the hood without the help of an oxygen tube, in 1998, although he perished in the descent.

AFP and AP agencies