A Nepalese expedition has embarked on a high-risk Everest clean-up to bring down rubbish left by climbers and possibly retrieve the bodies of some who died in the "death zone" of the world's highest peak.
Twenty professional Nepali climbers, including some top summiteers, on Saturday headed to the Everest Base Camp, from where they will begin their ascent of the mountain.
Their target is the "death zone" above 8,000 metres (26,000 feet), where successive expeditions have, over the years, left an ugly legacy of discarded climbing equipment, including tonnes of empty oxygen cylinders.
Almost 4,000 people have climbed Everest since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
There is no definitive figure on how much rubbish has been left on the mountain, but the debris of 50 years of climbing has given Everest the name of the world's highest dumpster.
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As well as oxygen canisters, the detritus includes food containers, discarded tents, ropes and backpacks.
"Everest is losing her beauty," said Namgyal Sherpa, 30, the leader of the team.
"We are taking a big risk. Nobody has ever tried to clean up Everest at that height," he said.
"Coping with extreme weather conditions like freezing temperatures, strong winds and blizzards will make our task difficult. But we are confident that we will rise to the challenge."
The team is also considering bringing down the bodies of several climbers who perished near the mountain's summit, such as Gianni Goltz, a member of a Swiss expedition who died in 2008.
Other corpses in the "death zone" include those of New Zealander Rob Hall and American Scott Fischer, who were guides on Everest during the infamous 1996 disaster described in the best-selling book Into Thin Air.
Since 1953, there have been 300 deaths on Everest, according to Ang Tshering Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
Many bodies have been brought down, but those above 8,000 metres have generally been left to the elements - their bodies preserved by the freezing temperatures.
"Lifting a corpse is no mean feat," Tshering told AFP.
"It's all ice up there, the team has got to chisel away chunks of ice before they can actually lift an object and they are going to be doing this under extremely harsh weather conditions," he said.
Some of the relatives of those climbers whose bodies remain on the mountain have raised concerns over the expedition's plans to retrieve the remains.
"Rob didn't have a desire to have a grave on Mount Everest certainly, but he wouldn't want anyone to risk their lives to bring his remains down," Hall's widow Jan Arnold told the BBC.
"The chance of anyone a) locating it and b) then being able to retrieve it would be crazy - a needle in a haystack, so I think it's unlikely," she said.
