Four more die on Everest

BODIES FOUND IN TENT IN LAST CAMP BEFORE SUMMIT

Almost every year, the reports filter down from the highest mountain in the world, and talk among the climbing teams at Everest Base Camp turns to the latest person to die.

On Everest, tragedy is almost normal. Ten people have died so far in a series of accidents this climbing season, four more than mountaineering officials expect in a typical year.

On Wednesday, authorities said Sherpa rescuers found the bodies of four climbers inside a tent at the highest camp on Everest, a few thousand feet from the summit. The rescuers were in the area to recover the body of a Slovak mountaineer who had died over the weekend.

“Some years there are more, and some years there are less, but deaths on the mountain are normal,” said Jiban Ghimire, who runs a prominent expedition company, Shangrila Nepal Trek. Most in the climbing world know tragedy will touch them at some point. “It is the nature of work. We can’t say what will happen on the mountain,” he said.

“I have lost many good friends on the mountains, which is very difficult to deal with, but that is the reality of mountaineering,” Ghimire said.

The weather on Everest, already one of the most unforgiving places on Earth, was especially hard this year.

“This year it was colder, windy and snowed much more than in previous years,” said Ang Tshering, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association. “Even now climbers are struggling with weather.”

The worst years are even more deadly. In 2014, the year an avalanche swept through Everest’s Khumbu icefall, there were 16 deaths. In 2015, when an earthquake and subsequent avalanche struck during the climbing season, 19 people died.

The four bodies found in the tent were at Camp 4 at the South Col, located at 8,000 metres (26,247 feet). That is the last stop before climbers make their final push for the 8,850-metre (29,035-foot) summit.