A Nepali climbing guide who miraculously survived almost week stranded on the perilous slopes of Mount Everest says he sustained himself by “chewing ice”.
The 52-year-old guide, named Hillary Dawa Sherpa, was spotted crawling back to Base Camp on Thursday six days after he went missing.
Dawa was found by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning around the Khumbu Icefall, located just above Base Camp.
A rescue helicopter flew him to Hams Hospital in Kathmandu, where he reunited with his family. They had all but given up any hope of his return and had begun to arrange funeral rituals for him. He is now being treated for frostbite, dehydration and a fractured bone.
“I didn’t think I would be alive,” he told BBC Nepali. “I thought I would perish this way.”
open image in galleryFormer British soldier Chris Thrall was the last person to see Dawa on 29 May before he went missing. Thrall had descended 50 to 100m in search of a Polish national who was part of his expedition group, and who was battling with severe frostbite and no oxygen.
When Thrall looked up, Dawa was not behind him.
The guide himself ran into trouble as his own oxygen ran out, Dawa told the BBC.
open image in gallery“I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I didn’t eat anything for the first two days. Then I began chewing ice. It hurt my teeth. I chewed the ice hard.”
A ray of hope emerged when he found chocolates in one of his pockets – enough to give him the energy to descend and a chance of survival. But his optimism was short-lived as, during his descent, Dawa got trapped in a crevasse and for two and a half days was not able to find his way out.
It was then that he was saved by an avalanche, which sent enough snow tumbling down into the crevasse for him to step on it and find a way out.
open image in galleryAnother avalanche came close to hitting him but he persevered and “walked throughout that night” to the point where he saw another person for the first time in nearly a week.
The veteran climber was found by an organising team “close to the base camp … crawling down” with “some frostbite” but otherwise in good health, Pemba Sherpa of 8K Expeditions, overseeing the rescue efforts, told the AFP news agency.
Amid their relief that he is safe, Dawa’s family are angry that a rescue operation was not launched much earlier and allege that he was discriminated against because he is a local guide. They have filed a police complaint against Dawa’s employer, Kathmandu-based Himalayan Traverse, and a formal grievance with the Department of Tourism, which oversees mountaineering in Nepal.
“Action needs to be taken by the mountaineering department. It was negligence of the company that resulted in so much delay in starting rescue,” stated Dawa’s nephew, Karma Gelje Sherpa. “If he had been a foreign climber, rescue would definitely have been organised much faster and [more] promptly, but he happened to be an old Nepali.”