A sherpa who went missing on Mount Everest for six days and believed to be dead has been found alive after crawling back alone to almost Base Camp.
Mountaineer Dawa Sherpa – who is in his 50s and known as “Hillary”, like famed climber Edmund Hillary – vanished from the mountain early on May 30 in treacherous conditions.
At the time, Dawa Sherpa was guiding a group including Chris Thrall, a former British Royal Marine, who had recorded them reaching the 8,849-metre peak around 5pm the day before the sherpa went missing.
On May 30, they had begun to descend and at around 7,950m, just below the low-oxygen “death zone”, when Dawa Sherpa stopped to rest with his backpack.
“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 suffering frostbite.
“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 recalled how he had to share his oxygen cylinder and it took them 11 hours to get to Camp Three, which would usually take two hours.
“I realised we had a really serious situation,” he said.
The climb was one of the last of the season, meaning that there were few mountaineers on the peak.
Search teams set out to find Dawa Sherpa, but they had no luck, with Thrall later posting a video mourning what he thought was the death of he mountaineer.
He called him an “absolute gentle giant of a man and a true ‘tiger of the mountains’”.
Dawa Sherpa’s wife had even begun to offer puja -last rite prayers for his soul- according to the AFP.
He was discovered on Thursday morning close to Base Camp by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), a Nepali team that help set routes and clean up waste on the mountain.
“He was found by a team of SPCC this morning close to the base camp – he was crawling down,” Pemba Sherpa, who was overseeing the rescue efforts said.
Dawa Sherpa was flown out to Kathmandu’s HAMS hospital.
“He is awake and undergoing treatment,” Nishant Dhakal, a doctor in the intensive care unit of the hospital said.
“We are managing his frostbites, cold injuries, hydration and trauma. He is being further evaluated and will be in our ICU.”
Dawa Sherpa’s wife, Damu Sherpa, said: “We were very happy to hear the news, we had given up hope.”
His daughter, Mendo Lhamu Sherpa, said they were in disbelief when they received a phone call saying they had found him.
“At first we were not sure if it was him — but they sent us photos to confirm, and then I was happy,” she said.
More than 1,000 climbers reached the summit this season, according to Nepali officials, making it the busiest season on record.
At least five people have died this season including two indians and three Nepali climbers involved in the preparations.
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