Sherpas find four climbers dead
‘Most likely they died from carbon monoxide poisoning by using stoves in the tent’
Nepali Sherpas have found four climbers dead in their tents on Mount Everest, officials said yesterday, with suspicion they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, taking the death toll on the world’s highest mountain to 10 in the past month.
The four climbers were found in two tents at Camp Four, at 8,000 metres, overnight, Mingma Sherpa of the Seven Summit Treks group, to which the Sherpas belonged, said in Kathmandu.
It was not clear how they died and their identities had not been established, Mingma said.
The Himalayan Times reported that two of the dead were foreigners and rescuers believed they had suffocated.
“It is most likely they died from carbon monoxide poisoning by using their stoves in the tent without proper ventilation,” US climber Alan Arnette, who blogs on Everest, said in a post.
Body brought down
The Sherpas who discovered the bodies were on their way to retrieve the body of Vladimir Strba of Slovakia who died near the 8,850-metre summit on the weekend.
Strba’s body has been brought down to Camp Two at 6,400 metres and was expected to be brought down to base camp later yesterday, Mingma said.
More than 5,000 climbers have scaled Mount Everest since it was first climbed by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and nearly 300 have died trying.
Many of the victims remain on the mountain, entombed in snow, as it its too difficult to bring their bodies down.
Exhaustion, exposure, frostbite, falls and altitude sickness are major causes of death on Everest. But the biggest killer in recent years has been avalanches.
Eighteen people were killed in 2015 when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake triggered avalanches that smashed into the base camp.
A year earlier, 16 Sherpas hauling gear to higher camps for climbers were killed when they were hit by avalanche while they were crossing the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, just above base camp. The Hillary Step — a rocky outcrop near the top of Mount Everest — is still intact, Nepalese climbers said yesterday, rejecting a widely reported claim by a British mountaineer that it had collapsed.
The condition of the rock face has been the source of intense speculation among the climbing community since six-time Everest summiteer Tim Mosedale declared it had crumbled.
“The Hillary Step is no more,” Mosedale wrote on Facebook the day after he made the top on May 17.
“Not sure what’s going to happen when the snow ridge doesn’t form because there’s some huge blocks randomly perched hither and thither which will be quite tricky to negotiate.”
But experienced Nepalese climbers said the rock feature — named after the first climber to summit the world’s highest peak, Sir Edmund Hillary — was unchanged.
“The Hillary Step is as it was before, but a large stone above it has fallen,” said Pemba Dorje Sherpa, who reached the peak last Saturday and has summited on 15 other occasions.
“It was easier to reach the summit because of that, but perhaps that confused people into thinking that the step is no more.”
Nine-time Everest summiteer Mingma Tsiri Sherpa, who runs a climbing company and is currently at base camp, said an alternative route being used by climbers could be leading to confusion.
“The fixed lines are more to the right of the step (than before). We’re now walking on the snow whereas before we had to walk on the rocky side. That is the reason for the confusion.”
Climbers can ascend Everest from the Nepal side and the Chinese side. One of the 10 deaths this has been on the Chinese side.
Nepal has issued permits to 371 foreign climbers this season, up from last year’s 281, each of which cost $11,000 (Dh40,401).
In addition, hundreds of Sherpas are climbing the mountain, or helping others to. Permit fees are a major source of income for cashstrapped Nepal which earned more than $4 million this year from Everest permits, officials said.