Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Kia ora, I'm Sharon Brett Kelly.
Chapter 2: What is the incredible story of Hilary Dawa Sherpa?
Today on The Detail, the incredible story of Hilary Dawa Sherpa.
It's being called the miracle on Mount Everest. Six days without food, water or oxygen. He says he ate ice to survive.
For six days, the silence from the death zone was absolute.
Chapter 3: What happened during Hilary Dawa Sherpa's six days on Everest?
The world assumed the worst. His family had already started his funeral ritual. Then a cleaning crew spotted him as he was crawling down the mountain. He saved himself. There was no rescue. No one came to his help.
No one tried to search for him. That's why they're calling it Everest's dirty secret. The Sherpa who went missing and nobody lifted a finger.
Hilary Dawa Sherpa's survival has done something rarely seen in the modern Everest era. It has stopped the machine and people are looking in.
But just as shocking is the fact that those in the know are not surprised.
There's many, many stories like this involving climbers from the west, the east, as well as Nepalese. People go internet shopping for an Everest expedition. It would be like going internet shopping for your heart transplant and going, right, well, I'm going to get the cheapest one.
That's Guy Cotter, veteran mountaineer and head of adventure consultants in Wanaka. He and others are speaking out about what's going on on Everest, and not for the first time. It comes 30 years after a deadly day on the mountain when a big storm trapped dozens of climbers. Among the eight who died, New Zealanders Rob Hall and Andrew Harris.
Guy was involved in the rescue and says the disaster led to big changes on Everest. But they haven't stopped incidents like the one this month of Hilary Dawa Sherpas.
He was left behind on the mountain and then the icefall closed and he was deemed missing. But this is a very common term that's used by a lot of the Nepalese operators. People tend to go missing quite regularly. And it's really good to hear this case where Hilary Dawa was found again, where he survived and made his way down the mountain. Amazing.
So when you say that they're deemed missing, does that mean that they've died on the mountain?
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Chapter 4: Why is Hilary Dawa Sherpa's survival considered a miracle?
that climber off the mountain so they get left behind the Sherpa comes back to the high camp and says my client's missing and that's all to do with the structure of how that expedition is set up as opposed to like we work with teams so that we've always got the strength of the team there if there's an incident you can deal with that
Similarly, when you've got a very small expedition like these guys were on, underfunded probably, there weren't enough Sherpas to do the job of bringing everybody off the mountain. And that's why someone like Hilary Darwin got left behind.
Local expeditioners say they believe that no one has survived at that altitude alone in those conditions before.
It's hard to imagine how someone can get left behind in that situation. He was still high up on the mountain. He was at Camp 4, which I believe is 7,300 metres high.
Well, Camp 3 is 7-3, so I believe he was above Camp 3, coming down from Camp 4. And because there are fixed ropes on the mountain, it's not like everybody's always moving together, roped up, so people can move up and down independently. And he obviously got left behind. He might have sat down.
He was obviously exhausted, had spent too much time at altitude, too much load to carry, et cetera, et cetera. Got left behind and then I guess got, forgot and...
It's also quite incredible, he says, that he didn't eat for two days and then he chewed ice and found some chocolates in his pocket and that kept him going. Oh, and then he made his way down slowly but fell into a crevice and was trapped for two and a half days. And in fact, it was an avalanche that was actually kind of fortuitous, really, because it created steps for him to get out.
Hilary Dawa Sherpa was found by people from the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, people who were basically on garbage duty. And lo and behold, they come upon a living human being with no boots on.
You know, my take on it is that he's not a young Sherpa. I understood that he was actually working at Camp 2 as a cook. And then they...
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Chapter 5: How has the rise of cheap expeditions impacted safety on Everest?
Look, I really imagine that the company involved is going to be in a load of trouble. There's a new government over in Nepal. They're trying to do what they can to improve the reputation of Everest. And, you know, this sort of story doesn't bode well for the new government and how they should be perceived.
There's a lot of lessons to be learned there. You cannot just leave people for dead. In fact, there is now a turmoil in Nepal. There's an investigation ongoing just to find out why this person was left behind by his employer.
But it's just one story of many. If you're there on Everest, there's many, many stories like this involving climbers from the west, the east, as well as Nepalese that go on through the season that nobody hears about. But this one's great because he made it back down safely, and that's a wonderful result.
So you're saying that there are incidents like this happening all the time, but we just don't hear about them?
Exactly. All the time. And, you know, there are many incidences where there are fatalities on the mountain that are completely avoidable. But again, a lot of it comes back down to the scenario we've got where you've got so much competition from Nepalese operators that they're putting out these cheap expeditions, which all look good to the prospective customer. until something goes wrong.
And then you find out the quality of the operation that you're with. And for those of us who have been there for many, many years, none of this is new. This was happening 30 years ago with some of the cheap Western operators who were under-resourced with lack of qualified guides, lack of good equipment, not good communication equipment.
The failings of the expeditions were exposed on May 10, 1996.
It was to be the adventure of a lifetime.
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Chapter 6: What are the dangers of internet shopping for Everest expeditions?
Groups of amateur climbers had paid guides to take them up Mount Everest, all 8,848 metres of it. But as they descended from the summit, from out of nowhere, a fierce blizzard swept in. And for the next 36 hours, drained of all energy and frostbitten, The climbers had to fight for their lives. Eight perished and there was terrible suffering.
What has happened in the meantime is that we've had the emergence of the Nepalese operators who can offer cheap trips because they don't have to pay the same fees as we do. And so it looks very alluring to the prospective client who's shopping on the internet for an Everest trip. And they're sold on this thing. Oh, you don't need one of those expensive Western operators.
You just need to come with us and we're just as good, if not better. You're supporting the locals. And that all looks good. until you scratch below the surface and see that in a lot of cases there's a lot of exploitation of their own people going on.
There's just a lack of awareness of what guiding people on the mountain actually is, being able to look after people as well as looking after your own staff. We Western operators, we would be in jail if we operated according to the standards that a lot of the operators perform by over there in the pool.
When you say these local NEPA lease operators are cheap, what do you mean by that? How do their prices compare with what you charge?
there are still a large number of operators who they will have up to 60 clients on the expedition. You know, 100 star just going for the offer of a cheap trip. So we would run an expedition and we might have, you know, four to six clients and they'll be charged around $80,000 each, US dollars.
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Chapter 7: What changes are needed to improve safety for climbers on Everest?
That Nepalese operators, because of, you know, just the sheer numbers involved and the economy of scale that they... can provide, you know, they might offer the same trip for, you know, 40,000 or 50,000. 50,000 times 60 people is very different from, you know, four times 80. And economically, we looked at that model many years ago and just went, well, we're not going to do that because we're
That doesn't fit with our philosophy of what it should be like being in the mountains. It shouldn't be like being in a processing plant of people being dragged up to the summit. You get three minutes on top and then number 62 is going to come through and take your place. What is happening in Nepal on Everest has just become all about the business and very little about mountaineering.
But in the meantime, safety systems have improved in general. There used to be a very high fatality rate on Everest back in the 70s and 80s, percentage rates were somewhere around 20% of people who died. Now that percentage is 1.2%. It's the safest of the 8,000 metre peaks.
Guy says the 1996 disaster taught operators to work together on the mountain instead of competing.
There's been a lot of advances in process, and that has come about. Initially, it was we Western operators who were coordinating all the logistics on the mountain, and each year we would go back. We would have more collaboration between the different operators, even though we were competitors once we were on the mountain.
We would collaborate with fixing ropes and having backup safety systems and so on. That has also been adopted by a lot of the Nepalese operators. So the management of how the mountain works as far as getting from the bottom to the top has improved dramatically and hence why we have a safer mountain than what we once did.
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Chapter 8: Why do climbers often get left behind on Everest?
Okay, safer than it was, but a heck of a lot more people going up there.
And then as I lay there panting, for the first time I was really convinced we were going to get to the top. A half hour of quite hard work along sort of the backside of the ridge and finally looking up and seeing a little rounded snow dome above us and then up that and we were there.
Everest conquered. The New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, got his first mail and congratulatory telegrams from George Lowe, a fellow countryman and expedition colleague.
Between that day in 1953 and 1989, that's 36 years, there were 270 summits of the mountain. That same number reached the top in one day last month. This season, more than 1,000 people have summited a record.
And a big part of that was what we started doing. Rob Hall and Gary Ball started with Adventure Consultants, started guiding on Everest about the same time back in the early 90s. Now, prior to that, The only people who would end up going to Everest were people on national teams who were select from many countries.
They had to have special approvals from their alpine club and sometimes big sponsored groups. But for the everyday climber who had a body of climbing background that had built them up to being a A potential candidate for Everest never got the opportunity to step onto the mountain. It was very, very exclusive.
And so what we managed to do was to be able to offer the opportunity for appropriately experienced and skilled climbers to come and join us to climb Everest. We turned it into a democratic mountain as opposed to an exclusive one, and it was a positive change.
What you were doing back then, I mean, you were the first to commercialise it, weren't you?
No, in 1953 was the first time it was commercialized because those expeditions were sponsored. Money flowed around those expeditions. The local people were being paid. So that was commercial. A better terminology rather than commercialized in 92 when we were there was we were guiding.
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