Nepali climbing guide, Hillary Dawa Sherpa, who went missing on Mount Everest for six days and was feared dead, has been found alive after crawling back to Base Camp, officials told AFP on Thursday.
The experienced climber vanished on the upper reaches of the world’s highest mountain early on May 30.
He was found on Thursday morning close to Base Camp by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), a Nepali team that helps set routes on Everest and clean up waste left behind.
“He was crawling down,” Pemba Sherpa of 8K Expeditions, which was overseeing search and rescue efforts, told AFP. “A helicopter has been sent to bring him to a hospital in Kathmandu.”
Climber Chris Thrall, a former British Royal Marine, said he successfully summited the 8,849-metre (29,032-foot) peak with Sherpa around 5:00 pm on May 29.
He posted a video message on Instagram on Wednesday, mourning what he thought was the death of Sherpa. He called Sherpa an “absolute gentle giant of a man and a true ‘tiger of the mountains'”, in a post that assumed the worst.
Thrall described how on May 30, he had begun to descend from Camp Four — at around 7,950m — and just below the low-oxygen “death zone”.
He said that as he descended, Sherpa stopped.
“He sat down for a rest with his backpack, these guys carry huge loads,” he said. “And I turned, and I said, ‘Hillary, are you okay, brother?’ He said, ‘Yes, yes, fine, Chris, please go, go!’ This is nothing new, you know, I’d go ahead, he’d go ahead.”
As Thrall went down, he found a Polish climber who was struggling after running out of supplementary oxygen and had suffered frostbite.
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“It had been a long summit push. What should have been five days to the summit and back took us 11 days, that’s how challenging the conditions were,” said Thrall.
“So, do I go back for Sherpa, who’s probably going to rock up and be fine, as he has done hundreds of times before?” he added.
“Or do I help my fellow climber, who’s got no oxygen, frostbite in his fingers, and obviously you’re never far off hypothermia up there?”
Thrall described tough conditions, sharing his oxygen cylinder with the Pole as they descended, taking 11 hours to get to Camp Three. It would usually take two hours.
He said: “I realised we had a really serious situation.”
Search teams set out to find Hillary Dawa Sherpa, but he was not seen again until Thursday morning, having made his way down on his own.
The climb was one of the last of the season, meaning that there were few other mountaineers on the peak.
At least five people have died this season, two Indians and three Nepali climbers involved in Everest preparations.
More than one thousand climbers reached the summit of Everest this season, according to initial tallies by Nepali officials, making it the busiest season on record.
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