Can Anyone Save Everest? 2026 Is The Biggest Test Yet

I want to start with a number: 31,797 kilograms.
That is the amount of human waste that was removed from Mount Everest in the spring of 2025. One season. One mountain. 

Can anyone save Everest? That question has never felt more urgent than right now. With the Tibet side closed, record numbers of climbers heading for the summit, and a waste crisis decades in the making — 2026 is the year that puts everything to the test. Here's what's really at stake.

**THANK YOU TO OUR CAMP FOUR SPONSORS HERE AND ON PATREON**:
Barbedwire 
Henriette Pi
Mike Nicholson
Tom McLeod
Geoff (mountain climber)
Ursula Dimberger
Noelle Dud13y

This video discusses new regulations for climbing Mount Everest, requiring climbers to first ascend a 7,000m peak in Nepal. It highlights significant environmental concerns and the potential impact of climate change on the mountain. These changes could alter the appearance of Mount Everest, addressing issues like pollution and ensuring a more sustainable future for mountaineering.

FOR THE LINK TO THIS EPISODE ON EVEREST MYSTERY FOLLOW THIS LINK:

https://youtu.be/676yCestIKg

RESOURCES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

POLL QUESTION about most important issues facing Mount Everest today:
https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxtVWxuLgVI4Fe8mCF8G8EENzuj3MsEK5l

Everest 2026: More Dangerous Than Ever — But Now There Are Drones:
https://youtu.be/Jqh3UA_ml1Y



=======================
Check out our Everest Mystery merch page at www.everestmystery.com

Here are some ways you can help support this channel:
Our Patreon for access to exclusive content:
https://www.patreon.com/everestmystery

Channel Membership for access to perks and exclusive content:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEk3e_XGyNnqwK2ZlxH7fEA/join

Tip Jar for anyone who would like to help:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/EverestMystery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I want to start with a number. 31,797 kilograms. That is the amount of human waste. Yes, it's exactly what you think I said. That was removed from Mount Everest in the spring of 2025. One mountain, one season, nearly 32 tons of excrement. That's enough human waste to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool to your knees. And that's just one season. And here's the thing that should make everyone watching this sit up straight. 2026 is going to be worse. Significantly worse. Because more climbers are heading to Everest this spring than almost any season in history. The Tibet side has closed, funneling everyone onto the same route. And the organization trying to clean this mountain up is fighting a battle that the math may simply not allow them to win. This is the story of what's actually happening on the world's highest mountain right now. We've covered this in previous videos for the last several years, but it's coming to a head. Things are getting more difficult because this could be the most crowded year on the mountain ever. The waste, the regulations, the enforcement problem, and the perfect storm of 2026 that is about to test all of it. If you care about Everest, you definitely need to see this video, but if you care about the planet, or if you're a human being on the planet, and you are, this video is very important to you because Everest is a microcosm of what's happening everywhere on the planet, and how they handle it here on the world's biggest mountain may tell us something about how things are being handled throughout the world. So what happens here, how people try to fix it, really matters. It's easy to wave this away as a minor inconvenience on a big mountain, but it's not a minor inconvenience, and it's been growing every year since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit in 1953, over 70 years ago. In 2025, the Sagar Matha Pollution Control Committee, the SPCC, the organization responsible for managing waste on Everest, and among their responsibilities managing the ice fall doctors who set the ropes up through the ice fall to camp two, they removed 83 tons of garbage from Mount Everest in total, and that's just in one spring season. And to put that into perspective, that's roughly the weight of eight fully loaded school buses left on a mountain just in a few months. And in that 83 tons was nearly 32 tons of human waste. And unless that human waste is removed from the mountain, well, we can just erase that picture postcard perfect image of Mount Everest from our minds forever, because those glaciers are slowly moving downstream and they're reaching villages below, reaching into the drinking water, and impacting thousands upon thousands of lives of people who live below the mountain. The people who live at the base of this mountain year-round, they didn't sign up for any expedition. They're drinking water that's been filtering through 70 plus years of mountaineering waste. But that water down below, that's water that communities depend on. So let's talk about where specifically this waste is concentrated, because not all of Everest's camps are equal when it comes to this problem. Camp 3 sits on a steep slope of ice on the Lotze face at about 7,400 meters. Climbers get there and then suffer through a miserable night with some of the most spectacular views known. Camp 4 is a completely different story. Camp 4 sits at about 8,000 meters on the south coal. And many of you have seen images of Camp 4 before. It's a wide, flat, brutally windswept plateau where climbers stay and get ready to make it on their last stage to the summit. And because it's so flat and windswept, nothing seems to really ever get buried there properly. You can see from some of these images that the tents are exposed, oxygen bottles exposed, even human bodies are up there if not removed, and human waste excrement and any garbage that people are too lazy or unable to carry down the mountain. Explorer's web Angela Benavides, she covers Mount Everest and the 8,000 meter peaks as accurately and as intensely as just about anyone, described Camp Four in terms that I think are worth dwelling on. She says that the relentless winds and rising temperatures have exposed the underlying scree, piled with garbage and the ragged shreds of tents that have accumulated over the years. And she goes on to say 70 years of expeditions, 70 years of decisions that something wasn't worth carrying back down. This is not a campsite. This is an archaeological site of the commercial era of mountaineering, but it's located at 8,000 meters or about 26,000 feet higher than most of the world's other mountains in one of the most remote and hostile environments on Earth. There's a version of this story that is actually darkly so pretty funny. People pay between$50,000 and$150,000, sometimes even more, for the privilege of climbing Mount Everest. These are some of the most motivated, ambitious, and usually well-to-do individuals, very goal-oriented, and they've trained for years and thought about climbing this mountain sometimes for most of their lives. And so while they've spent all this money, still one of the defining features and experiences of climbing Mount Everest is squatting over a wagbag at 8,000 meters in below zero freezing temperatures, sometimes high winds, while trying not to fall over while squatting. Then the requirement of zipping that bag back up, putting it in your pack, and carrying it back down the mountain. The wag bag, for those of you who are not familiar with it, stands for waste alleviating gel. They're heavy-duty portable toilet bags that have a chemical compound inside that solidifies the human waste, making it easier to carry around and then carry down the mountain at the end of the climb. Every single climber on Mount Everest is now required by the SPCC to carry one of these wagbags. No ifs, ands, or buts, pun intended. And as gross as this might seem, or many of you thinking I would never do such a thing, let alone climb Mount Everest, to me, this is one of the great developments on the mountain. This is how change is made and we start to take control of the problems that have been accumulating all these years. And so now, imagery and joking all aside, let's get into why this really isn't a joking matter in 2026. The SPCC has done something significant in the 2026 season. They've implemented the most detailed, demanding waste management regulations on Mount Everest. It is a game changer. For all those comments that I've read over the years, Everest is a garbage heap. These people don't care. Just take a breath. Every climber, every Sherpa, every support staff, every porter on the mountain that goes up high is now required to bring down a minimum of eight kilograms of garbage at the end of their expedition. And that's the existing rule carried forward from past seasons, but new for 2026 is that at least two of those eight kilograms must come from above camp 2. Camp 2 is at about 6,400 meters. And last week I spoke a lot about the drones, and the drones now can fly to about 6,000 meters. So this is still above the level where drones can safely operate and carry garbage down. You might ask now how do people prove that the waste came from up above on the mountain? And the SPCC is going to keep a group of people stationed at camp 2 that will literally go through the garbage, measure it, and see how much each of it weighs, and determine whether two kilograms did come from above camp 2. Now you take a look at this footage from down below. All of this material is segregated down below. Tin cans in one pile, paper, in another, glass bottles, organic waste, hazardous materials, and human waste, which I've shown previously, and is basically carried in gigantic blue barrels and dumped into open pits near Goric Shep, which is the nearest village from Everest Base Camp. And in these open pits, the idea being that in the open air it will dry and dematerialize over time. This is a very imperfect way to do things, but it is certainly better than leaving it on the glacier. And the wag bags that people will be carrying up there, these are bags that you have to hand back in to the SPCC. You don't own these bags, you don't bring them yourself. And so basically you return the bag that they give you, and this is how they track compliance. The ultimate idea is the SPCC, they want to make sure that everything that goes up the mountain comes back down the mountain. I've spoken at length about people getting lazy and leaving things behind. Interviewed Damien Benegas at one point, who said that it is just tragic that there are expedition operators cutting their logos out of tents and leaving things behind up there, boxes and garbage that they're too lazy or unwilling to carry back down the mountain. So the SPCC is getting very serious about how they are looking after what takes place up on the mountain. Now, this is all in addition to each climber paying a$600 fee for permission to use the fixed ropes that the SPCC oversees through the icefall doctors. They are literally on the mountain as we speak, working to get those ropes fixed up to camp two. But for now, the SPCC is doing everything that they can, and you can imagine keeping track of waste and garbage and human waste is no easy task. So it takes the cooperation of everybody on the mountain, and I would imagine it starts from the top. The expedition operators need to ensure that everybody that they hire is following these rules and everybody that they accept money from on their permits is following these rules strictly. So one of the big problems here, as I had mentioned earlier, is the enforcement wall. Now what the SPCC is doing is they are adding a$4,000 per person tax that goes directly towards supporting the SPCC in their efforts. But here is the clause in the SPCC's own regulation that tells you just about everything about where the system can break down and the extreme nature of the environment of Mount Everest. Retrieval is only required when conditions are safe. We encountered this also on the north side of the mountain. The same rules apply. If you have a ton of your own personal gear up there, but if you're threatened and your physical safety is in danger, you are allowed to abandon everything up there. One of the other things that the SPCC says you can do, you can employ staff to go up there and carry this equipment down. But as Angela Benavidez has pointed out, the problem here is that it costs more to hire staff to go get the equipment up on the mountain than it does to just leave the equipment up on the mountain and buy entirely new gear the following season. So you can see that we've got a little problem here. And so, perfectly spoken, Angela says that until operators feel the real financial pain for leaving things behind, and when the cost of non-compliance exceeds the cost of compliance, some of these operators will keep doing the math and choosing to abandon the equipment up high. The entities with the most power really to enforce these rules are the expedition operators themselves. A committed, serious operator is the most effective enforcement mechanism on the mountain. And until the consequences of not following these rules are real and swift and made public, maybe banning an expedition operator from the mountain for a year, then these things will continue to go on. Now, here's why this season the equation changes even more so in 2026. As I've reported earlier, the Tibetan side of the mountain has closed. That's about a hundred people that will be moving from the north to the south to do their climbing. So there's going to be more stress on the south side of the mountain, more people, more garbage, more human waste. And Alan Arnett, the most authoritative voice on Mount Everest statistics, he projects that somewhere between 850 and 900 summits could take place on the mountain from the Nepal side this spring alone. That compares to 731 in 2025. That's an additional 170 people on a route that is already, by any objective measure, operating beyond a comfortable capacity. And you add into that climbers like Ryan Mitchell, a guest on our channel, who many of you are familiar with, who, with his friend and guide Justin Sackett, is attempting to climb the mountain without the use of bottled oxygen. The potential for failure with so many people on the mountain on an attempt like that really increases dramatically and exponentially. Now, here's another thing that is theoretically putting some pressure on the mountain this year. Nepal legislature, the parliament has debated what's called Tourism Bill 2081. I did talk about this briefly in my previous video, but let's just peel back a layer. If it passes in its current form, it wouldn't take place this year, it would be 2027. It says that for a climber to be given a permit to climb on Mount Everest, they would need to prove that they had climbed previously a 7,000 meter peak. And so theoretically, when people heard this, they went on the mad rush to try to get permits this year. I personally think it's a wonderful rule. I hope that they employ it. I don't have a lot of faith that it's going to happen because 400 to 500 permits is upwards of six to seven million dollars. That goes right into the coffers of Nepal. But what this rule does underscore is that there are a lot of inexperienced climbers on the mountain, which magnifies by a great order the dangers on the mountain. As I've also said many times on this channel, the most dangerous thing on the mountain when climbing Mount Everest is not a falling sarak, is not a crevasse, is not a storm, it's other people. And less people on the mountain can only be a good thing for the safety of not only the climbers, but the mountain workers, the Sherpa, the guides, everyone involved. Thirty-two tons of human waste, eighty-three tons of garbage, nine hundred climbers projected to stand on the top of Mount Everest this year, but new regulations with an intent to help protect the mountain for the future. The SPCC is doing more than it ever has. It needs cooperation and the help from all the expedition operators on the mountain. The technology exists now to help carry garbage from the mountain. More emphasis should be put on the use of drones. We have yet to know what will happen in 2026, but I'll certainly keep a close eye on it and be reporting here frequently so you can keep up to date on what's happening on Mount Everest. I want to know what you think about what's going to happen in 2026. Be sure to leave a comment in the section below. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And in the meantime, if you're still watching, I hope you'll take a moment to subscribe to this channel and click the bell icon so you'll be notified every time a new video comes out. And why don't you consider checking out our merch page at EverestMystery.com. I've got some real cool things, including this hat that you can purchase, not this exact one. Check it out and support your favorite YouTube channel and let people know where you stand on Mount Everest. And in the meantime, do a good deed. Don't ask for anything in return. Make the world a better place one tiny step at a time. Peace be with you.