We all know that people do sometimes die while attempting to climb Mt. Everest. But it’s easy to overlook what happens to those people after they’ve died. You can’t bring a body down from the mountain. In fact, many of the people who have died there had to be abandoned before they were dead because they couldn’t walk and no one could carry them safely back to a place they could get medical care. And that means Mt. Everest is littered with dead bodies.
Between 1922 and 2010, 219 people died on the mountain. In death, many of these bodies have become famous — some even serving as landmarks that help climbers gauge where they are and how far they have to go.
Smithsonian.com has a fascinating short piece about the lives and afterlives of the dead on Mt. Everest. This excerpt is about the body whose boots are pictured above:
The body of “Green Boots,” an Indian climber who died in 1996 and is believed to be Tsewang Paljor, lies near a cave that all climbers must pass on their way to the peak. Green Boots now serves as a waypoint marker that climbers use to gauge how near they are to the summit. Green Boots met his end after becoming separated from his party. He sought refuge in a mountain overhang, but to no avail. He sat there shivering in the cold until he died.
Read the rest at Smithsonian.com
Image: detail of a photograph of Green Boots by Dominic Goff
