An image of an old abandoned beer can escorted by a strong message. This is all that Joan María Vendrell, a guard at the Góriz refuge, in the heart of the Aragonese Pyrenees, needed to give a lesson in civility to those who betray one of the basic premises of all good mountaineers: leave everything as you find it. "Significant progress has been made in this fight, but it must not be taken for granted," he assured this newspaper.
Vendrell, a 46-year-old from Barcelona, found the container last week between a rocky crevice at the foot of Tobacor, a 2,700-meter peak near the hostel where he has worked for two decades, in the heart of the Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park. “They usually say that an aluminum can degrades in 10 years. But when I cleaned it, I saw that the expiration date was 1975. It's been here for almost half a century and it's still in good condition, so I thought I could use it to raise awareness and show that garbage doesn't just disappear," he tells the other side of the phone.
To do this, he resorted to the shelter's social networks, where he posted the image of the rusty can - Águila Imperial brand, to be more precise - with a direct message: "Try not to be remembered as a @ pig @ 47 years after your actions ! Garbage is not carried away by the wind, nor by rain, nor by snow... it will remain there forever on the mountain with your bad conscience”. The thousands of reactions and dozens of endorsement comments harvested endorse his broadside.
For years, guards like him have insisted to visitors on the need not to leave any type of waste and to take their own rubbish. “What you raise, lower it. Here the sweeper or the garbage truck will not come to pick it up, ”he sums up. These are behaviors that should fall under their own weight and that the vast majority comply with, but not all. “I am amazed with those people who are capable of lifting a full bottle of wine, which weighs one kilo, but who do not lower the empty helmet, barely 200 grams. And the same with a can”, adds Vendrell.
In this national park, the signs warn that the abandonment of garbage can cause the direct death of species, spread diseases, cause the colonization of a place by invasive alien species or affect the health of wildlife and humans.
Inside the refuge, Vendrell and his partners are responsible for managing the waste they generate, including products for sale, at a considerable cost that includes their transfer by helicopter for treatment and recycling. Outside, in the mountains, he maintains that the solution is not to install more bins, but to have more awareness, and that everyone take their own.
“In the Gradas de Soaso, on the way to the Cola de Caballo waterfall (the most popular route in Ordesa), they once put a green container. When they went to look for it a week later, they couldn't find it because it was covered by a mountain of rubbish. Garbage calls for garbage, and more bins do not solve the problem, ”he maintains.
Seasoned mountaineers commented in line with their publication that decades ago, in initiation courses for high mountains or ice or rock climbing, they were told that, in order to get rid of their waste during excursions, they had to dig a hole and bury it, something unthinkable today.
Vendrell also remembers how 20 years ago, when he started working at the refuge, he saw groups of scouts collecting the garbage generated in the camp in large bags and then covering them with stones. "That has changed, you no longer see images like that and people recycle a lot."
Even so, he comments that during the pandemic it was common to find masks thrown away by the bush, and that in other settings, such as some music festivals on the beach that thousands of people attend, that looks like "a recycling center." “I think that in the mountains we have made a little more progress, people are more aware, but there is still room for improvement”, adds this nature lover.
