A Nepali guide who was found crawling down Mount Everest six days after he was last seen alive has told The BBC that he survived by “chewing ice” and eating some chocolates he found in his pocket.
Dawa Sherpa claims he did not “disappear” during the descent, but was forced to “stay behind the others” after running out of oxygen.
He was presumed dead on the mountain, and his family in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, had already begun performing last rites when a mountain cleanup crew spotted him “sliding down” toward base camp.
Mountaineer Chris Troll was the last person known to have seen Dawa Sherpa alive before he was rescued near the Kumbu Icefall on Thursday.
The former British soldier said the fifty-seven-year-old Sherpa was sitting on his backpack above Camp Three, about seven thousand five hundred meters above sea level, “as he had done hundreds of times before when taking a short break”.
Troll continued to descend on his own for another fifty to a hundred meters, when he encountered another member of their group – “a Polish mountaineer without oxygen, with severe frostbite”.
“My attention immediately went to the weakest member of the trio. And that was it,” he told the BBC’s Newswire programme.
“As I was helping that man down, I looked back up the mountain. Hilary Dawa didn’t look like he had moved, and he certainly wasn’t coming down, because we would have seen the light from his lamp.”
Trapped in a crack
Dava Sherpa said that his problems started when he ran out of oxygen.
“When the oxygen was gone, I couldn’t walk,” he said.
“For the first two days I didn’t eat anything. Then I started chewing ice. My teeth hurt. I was biting hard.”
Later he found some chocolates in his pocket and managed to melt some ice to have something to drink.
He continued to descend slowly, but then fell into an icy crevasse, according to two people who spoke to him about his ordeal.
He was trapped in it for two and a half days, unable to find a way out.
Then an avalanche threw snow into the crack and gave him his first hope after many days.
“I stood on the snow, straightened up and looked up … I felt I could get out of there,” he told the BBC.
When he pulled out, he found ropes that helped him continue down the world’s highest mountain. Then another avalanche threatened his progress, but he did not give up.
“I went through the snow and kept going down. I walked all night. And then I got closer to the base camp, after almost a week I saw people. They were guys who were going to collect waste. I met them. They took me down.”
“Unbelievable”
The news that he survived caused shock and delight among the Sherpas, the climbers who were with him and his family.
During this year’s Everest climbing season, five people have died, while since the 1920s, since records have been kept, climbing has claimed more than 300 lives.
Pemba Sherpa, CEO of Eight Cay Expeditions, which coordinated the search, called his feat “a true self-rescue.”
“Dawa managed to survive for days against all odds. It’s a real miracle,” he said.
When a social media troll first saw reports that Dawa Sherpa, also known as Hillary Dawa Sherpa after famed mountaineer Edmund Hillary, had been found alive, he thought it was fake news.
“It’s unbelievable. One moment you can hardly hold back the tears with his daughter, and the next you see him crawling into the neighborhood,” he told the BBC.
His wife Damu Sherpa told AFP that she lost all hope until she saw the photo of her husband.
“We thought he was no longer alive and we have already started the last rites,” she said as she waited for him at the hospital. I was so surprised when I saw the photos and recognized him – he was still wearing the hat I had knitted for him.”
More than a thousand people climbed to the “roof of the world” this season, which is the busiest in history.
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