Choking Point

Why some could not survive 'death zone'

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

On May 23, Parth Upadhyay, a 24-year-old mountaineer from Mumbai, conquered Mount Everest. Euphoric, he spent the next fifteen minutes on the top watching the sunrise, clicking selfies and soak ing in the breathtaking view. It was a feat he had been awaiting for the past five years and a smooth descent to the base camp was all that was left. But the ecstasy turned into horror, when barely ten minutes into the descent, he saw “climbers dying”. “It was shocking,” he said. “As I was coming down, I witnessed two of my fellow climbers succumb. While one of them lost balance and slipped from the same ridge that I had crossed a few minutes earlier, the other, David Cash (of the US) was already dead when we passed him by below the Hillary Step at 8,790m. They were like friends with whom I had shared a couple of beers back at the base camp before we headed out for the summit. It was very depressing.”

In the window between May 14 and May 27—the spring climbing season, when the weather is said to be favourable—11 climbers, including four Indians, lost their lives. There was also an unusually high number of climbers this year, evident from a picture of a deadly 'traffic-jam' that went viral on social media. It showed a long line of about 300 trekkers negotiating a narrow, precarious ridge as they marched in a single file on the final leg of the journey to the peak, reportedly waiting for hours at a stretch for their chance to climb.

Sharad Kulkarni, 58, says it was the “unending” wait between camp four and the final summit that led to the death of his wife, Anjali, 54. He says she was low on oxygen and the overcrowding got to her. He reached the summit but lost her 50m before it. On his way back to the base camp, Kulkarni also suffered a swelling in his brain that affected his eyesight.