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Climbers must now haul their feces down to Base Camp in plastic wag bags. How will this change life on the world’s highest peak?

For the first time in over a year, the sounds of yak bells and foreigners’ footsteps are filling the  foothills of Mount Everest. As the coronavirus spread last spring, Nepal locked down its borders on March 24, 2020. The country stayed closed until this month, when it fully opened its mountains to climbers who pass a COVID-19 protocol. According to Nepal’s Department of Immigration, nearly 15,000 trekkers and tourists arrived in the country in March, over half of them coming from nearby India. (In normal years, that number is usually closer to 150,000 for the same time frame.) As ...