Okay, so I’ve known for a while that a good number of the people who attempt to climb Mount Everest never return. But knowing that fact and actually hearing the stories of how these people perished or seeing images of their frozen bodies still stiff where they fell in the snow are two different things.
Honestly, when I began researching for this article I was not prepared for macabre horror of what awaits climbers on the face of that mountain.
Which is to say, if you’re going to read on and learn about a few of the people who went up but never came down, take a moment to mentally suit up. You’ll thank me later.
Here’s what shocked me the most: you could have an accident or become disoriented on your way to or from the summit and still be alive when people find you…but be “too far gone” to save. So basically, your partners and crew and sherpa or whoever make the decision to save themselves and leave you to freeze to death alone.
I know. It’s awful, but I guess…what’s the other option? Everyone dies?
Once you get into the “death zone,” you body is basically on life support until you reach the summit and then get back down to a safe(r) base camp. If you somehow become incapacitated in that zone? The chance that anyone is going to be able to help you when they’re using all of their strength and resources to not die themselves is pretty small.
And I get it. But that doesn’t make any of these stories less sad.
Green Boots is probably the most famous of these fallen bodies, seen by every climber who takes the Northwest Ridge route to the summit.
Though we don’t know for sure, it’s believed to be the body of Indian climber Tsewang Paljor. He, along with two of his teammates, were last seen by a group of Japanese climbers on their way to the summit in 1996, but even though the rest of their crew believed they saw the men’s headlamps descending later that evening, the three (including Paljor) who attempted to press on were never seen nor heard from again.
Francys Arsentiev was climbing with her husband Sergei, and, in 1998,…
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