Tragedy turned to joy on Thursday, when a clean-up team found a man crawling across the glacier, exhausted and showing signs of frostbite, but alive.
A mountain guide, who was presumed dead in the high areas of Mount Everest, was found crawling back to Base Camp after spending almost a week on the mountain without food or bottled oxygen.
For six days there was no radio contact or sign of 52-year-old Hillary Dawa Sherpa, last seen on May 29 resting above Camp 3, located 7,060 meters above sea level.
The guide was separated from his client and the climbing team, who had already started the descent and were in the last group on Everest before the season ended. The ladders placed over the Khumbu Icefall, carefully fixed by Sherpas to allow crossing the most dangerous section of the climb, had already been dismantled, according to a mountaineering company.
With Hillary Dawa isolated on the highest mountain in the world in extremely dangerous conditions for so long, the family began the funeral rites.
However, tragedy turned to joy on Thursday, when a clean-up team found him crawling through the glacier zone, exhausted and showing signs of frostbite, but alive.
“When we first heard (of the rescue), we weren’t sure if this person was really our father,” Hillary Dawa’s daughter Mendo Lhamu told the Associated Press. “To be sure, we asked them to send photos and only after that we had confirmation and we were very happy.”
He was given food and water and taken by helicopter to a hospital in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, where he was treated for frostbite and other complications, according to Reuters.
Videos posted on social media show Hillary Dawa being carried on the back of another climber during the descent through rocky terrain. Still wearing the yellow and blue mountaineering jacket, he later appears in new images being taken on a stretcher from the HAMS hospital heliport in Kathmandu.
Many in the mountaineering community considered Hillary Dawa’s survival miraculous.
“It is nothing short of a miracle to survive so many days on the mountain, facing such harsh conditions,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, a prominent figure in the community, told AP.
This rescue comes at the end of the busiest season ever on Everest, with more than 1,000 climbers reaching the summit from the south side of the mountain, including a record 274 in a single day on May 20.
Images of rows of climbers in an area known as the “death zone” — where the air is too thin to breathe without assistance for long — have returned to circulation, along with new record ascents by Nepalese and foreign climbers.
A miraculous story of survival
Hillary Dawa’s remarkable self-rescue has raised questions about the absence of a search team when she was reported missing a week ago.
When search helicopters looked for him this week, they found no sign of the climber, according to the Nepal Mount Everest company.
Those who encountered Hillary Dawa were members of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), responsible for setting routes, ropes and ladders in the Khumbu Icefall at the start of the season, as well as removing waste after climbers leave.
Lama Kazi Sherpa of the SPCC told Reuters that his team located Hillary Dawa above Base Camp, near the icefall, and transported him to safety.
In a video after the rescue, Hillary Dawa stated that she had slipped and fallen into a crevasse near Camp 1, at around 6,000 meters, and spent two days trapped in the ice before managing to free herself, according to local media.
Hillary Dawa, a high-mountain guide for a small Kathmandu company called Himalayan Traverse, and her Polish client were descending Everest after failing to reach the summit on May 29, according to the AP.
British climber Chris Thrall, also a client of the Himalayan Traverse and the last person to see Hillary Dawa before her disappearance, said in an Instagram post that he was “elated and so happy for him and his wonderful family” after he was pronounced dead on the mountain.
In a video posted from Kathmandu, Thrall said the Polish climber was battling frostbite and descended with the Sherpa Thrall was climbing with, leaving Hillary Dawa and him to descend together.
Hillary Dawa “sat down to rest with her backpack” during the descent from Camp 4, at 7,900 meters, he said.
“I turned around and said, ‘Hillary, are you okay, brother?’ And he said ‘yes, I’m fine Chris, please go’,” said Thrall, adding that the guide was carrying a satellite radio and phone.
According to Thrall, it was customary for Sherpas to take breaks and he expected him to catch them later.
On the descent to Camp 3, the climber said he found the Polish client without oxygen and with signs of frostbite. The descent was more difficult and took much longer than expected.
“What should have been five days to the summit and back ended up being 11 days. It was so difficult,” he said.
Thrall, a former British marine, also explained that he decided to help the struggling climber and descend with him for around 19 hours to Camp 2, in weather conditions that went from snow to intense fog.
“No time when I looked up the mountain did I see Hillary coming down,” he said. “To say alarm bells were ringing is an understatement — I thought the worst had happened.”
CNN was unable to independently verify these reports.
The incident has once again raised concerns about the safety of Nepali mountain workers, in a context of growth in commercial climbing operators.
Experts have previously warned of risks associated with inexperienced operators and cuts in safety, equipment and monitoring, including a lack of qualified guides and a poor assessment of customer experience.
