More than half a century after Edmund Hillary first stood on the top of Mount Everest, the ashes of the world-famous mountaineer are to be carried to the summit by a Nepalese Sherpa.
Apa Sherpa, who has scaled the world's highest peak a record 19 times, said Thursday he will carry Hillary's ashes with him when he attempts his 20th ascent this year.
Most of Hillary's ashes were scattered in the sea off Auckland in his native New Zealand after his death in 2008 aged 88, but Apa said some had been kept in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayan village of Kunde in eastern Nepal.
Hillary and Sherpa Norgay Tenzing made history on May 29, 1953, when they became the first men to stand on the summit of the 8,848-metre (29,028-foot) peak.
Hillary later opened a foundation that built schools and clinics in the Solokhumbu region at the base of Everest, and Apa, 50, said he wanted to honour the New Zealander's contribution to the Sherpa community.
"I met Hillary many times, he was a wonderful man who helped so many local people," Sherpa told AFP after announcing plans for his 20th Everest climb at a news conference in Kathmandu.
"Without him we would have no clinics, and we would have no schools. So I am very happy to take his ashes with me to the summit."
Apa is leading an expedition to clean up Everest, which activists say is littered with the detritus of past expeditions, including human waste and mountaineers' corpses, which do not decompose because of the extreme cold.
The 17-member Eco Everest Expedition team will set off from Kathmandu on April 6 and hopes to bring seven tonnes of rubbish down to Base Camp, where it will be sorted for disposal.
It will be the third such expedition -- the first, in 2008, brought down 965 kilos (about a ton) of rubbish, while last year's collected six tonnes, including the wreckage of an Italian army helicopter that crashed on the mountain in 1973. AFP
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