Travel News: Mount Everest Art Exhibition

Mount Everest is defined by its thrills, heights and sublime experiences, but what about its rubbish? Matt Dickinson, author of the Mortal Chaos series and Mount Everest summit reacher, remarked in an interview with The Telgraph, “When you get up to the very top of Mount Everest there is a remarkable amount of rubbish that has been left behind – old rope, discarded oxygen cylinders, broken tents, beer cans and bottles.”

However, thanks to a team of fifteen artists, who worked for a month with some 1.5 tonnes of climber’s cast-offs collected,(nearly 4,000 people have climbed the 29,035-feet mountain), Everest’s waste has become 75 sculptures.

Although climbers need to deposit around £2,500 with the government before they climb (refunded only after they provide proof of having brought their rubbish down from the mountain), activists say effective monitoring is somewhat difficult. The rubbish used in the exhibition was collected by Sherpa climbers in 2011 and earlier this year, and then subsequently carried down by trains of long-haired yaks, commemorated in one of the pieces. View the sculptures in the slides below: