Chris Thrall

With Aviva Insurance.

Hi, Clare.

How are you doing?

Quite simple, really.

We were coming down from the summit.

We had two Sherpas who we kind of used interchangeably.

No disrespect meant to them, but we had two Sherpas attached to the two climbers.

On this particular event, we were coming down from the infamous Camp 4.

One of the Sherpas sat on his backpack for a rest.

I was the nearest to him.

I turned around and said, are you okay, brother?

He said, yep, fine, Chris, you carry on.

Unbeknown to us, he was struggling with oxygen.

He didn't mention this.

It's completely normal to sit down on your backpack and take a rest.

We'd done it hundreds of times, Claire.

know one of us would go first then sit down for a break the other one would overtake so um nothing was was sort of untoward but when i came down over a feature called the yellow band which is um quite fair not a particularly steep abseil but some people choose to abseil over it i came across my fellow climber a polish chap who appeared to be struggling

When I asked him if he was okay, he said, I've run out of oxygen.

And I knew, um, from the day before from his, uh, attempted summit that he had fairly severe frostbite in his fingers.

So at that point, obviously all my attention turned to getting him down the mountain safely, which was supposed to be a two hour.