Meet “Green Boots”.
“Green Boots” is just one of the 200 or so dead bodies on Mount Everest’s ‘Death Zone’ and because the recovery of corpses like Green Boots is pretty much impossible, each one like him is named and used as a landmark on the Death Zone.
Climbers attempting to reach Everest’s summit will typically spend substantial time within the ‘Death Zone’ (altitudes higher than 8,000 metres (26,000 ft)), and face significant challenges to survival.
Temperatures can dip so low in the Death Zone that any part of the human body exposed to the air can result in instant frostbite. Another major threat to climbers is the atmospheric pressure which at the top of Mount Everest, is about a third of sea level pressure or 0.333 standard atmospheres, resulting in the availability of only about a third as much oxygen as normal to breathe. A lot of the people lying in the Death Zone simply went to sleep and never woke up.
Although, who’d want to?
The extreme weather conditions on Everest mean that a lot of the bodies are discovered showing little signs of decay…
This is George Mallory:
George Herbert Leigh Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s.
During the 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine both disappeared somewhere high on the North-East ridge during their attempt to make the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain. The pair’s last known sighting was only a few hundred metres from the summit.
Mallory’s ultimate fate was unknown for 75 years, until his body was discovered in 1999 by an expedition that had set out to search for the climbers’ remains. Whether or not Mallory and Irvine reached the summit before they died remains a subject of speculation and continuing research.
This is how George Mallory looks these days:
Climbers on Everest often stumble upon injured men and woman along the way but have no way of helping them because of the location and the dangerous conditions and so, there is no choice but to leave them to die. Two climbers once stumbled upon one such unfortunate woman who yelled at them “Please don’t leave me!” The climbers promised the woman that they would return whilst knowing that there was no way they possibly could.
Consumed with guilt and after spending many years saving money, the climbers returned to the woman and gave her a proper burial.
This is not her:
It can cost anything between $25k and $6ok to make a trip to the summit of Mount Everest and many Everest climbers have said that the hardest part is passing all of the graves and human remains.
And who can blame them?
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