Accused of fakery, mountaineer seeks vindication on Everest’s peak
For two years, the Indian climber was banned from mountaineering in Nepal, accused of faking a summit of Mount Everest by doctoring photos of his ascent. A steep fall followed: A major award was revoked hours before he was to receive it from India’s president. People in his home village, he said, called him a fraud.
Now, the climber, Narender Singh Yadav, has found redemption. On Wednesday, five days after he scaled Everest — documenting it with dozens of photos and videos taken from various angles, as well as testimony from Sherpas — he was handed a certificate by the authorities in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, attesting to his achievement.
Yadav, 26, said he reached the peak of the world’s highest mountain early on Friday, just a few days after the end of his ban — a six-year prohibition, applied retroactively to his disputed climb in 2016. As the news spread, people offered sweets to each other in the northern Indian state of Haryana, where he lives with his parents. “This time I summited in six days, without acclimatization,” Yadav, who maintains he did not fake his previous climb, said. For years,
Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest nations and the site of most Everest climbs, has been struggling to root out fraudulent summiteers. Tourism officials in Kathmandu said dozens of those faking their Everest credentials came from India, where successful climbers are often given national awards and jobs in state government, as well as other perks.
In recent years, expedition organizers say, the number of people, including amateur mountaineers, trying to climb Everest has increased. This has prompted Nepal’s government to start screening potential climbers more rigorously. The fraudulent summiteers are often called out on social media by veteran climbers and Sherpas after they publish claims of their ascent. In the case of Yadav, when he and another climber, Seema Rani Goswami, asserted that they had reached the top of Everest, Sherpas and other climbers questioned their claim.
After Yadav’s pictures appeared on Facebook, mountaineers pointed out an oxygen mask with no tube connecting it to an oxygen tank, no reflections of snow or mountains in a man’s sunglasses, and limp flags in a place known for lacerating winds. Nepal’s tourism department, the body responsible for expeditions, proceeded anyway with providing Yadav a certificate recognizing him as an Everest summiteer, based on briefings from a liaison officer and an expedition agency. — NYT