The mountain usually keeps its dead. Especially after a week in the freezing heights. But Dawa Sherpa had other plans. On Thursday morning, a cleanup crew spotted a shape dragging itself through the snow near the Khumbu Icefall, just above Everest’s base camp. It was Dawa. He was crawling.
The 52-year-old guide had vanished on May 29 while descending from the Yellow Band, a notorious stretch of rock and ice sitting at 7,200 meters. He was guiding a Polish climber for a small outfit called Himalayan Traverse. The client made it down. Dawa did not. By the time anyone realized he was gone, the seasonal circus was packing up. The climbing window was closing, and the ladders and ropes were already being ripped from the ice.
Bureaucracy and bad luck delayed the rescue. No one explained why. When helicopters finally buzzed the peaks, they saw nothing but white. Back in Kathmandu, his family did what any grieving Sherpa family does. They accepted the inevitable. By day two of his funeral rites, his wife, Damu, and teenage daughter, Mendo Lhamu, were preparing for a life without him. Then the phone rang.
Local news reported a ghost had walked off the mountain. The family, wary of false hope, demanded photos. It was him. Alive. Battered, but breathing. A rescue chopper whisked him to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu, turning a wake into a chaotic, tearful reunion.
How did he survive? Pure grit. Ang Tshering Sherpa, a veteran of the peaks, chalked it up to genetics and sheer toughness. Before Nepal opened its borders in the 1950s, Sherpas were yak herders and traders, hardened by the brutal high-altitude climate. ‘Anyone else would be dead,’ Ang Tshering said.
This season was a madhouse. More than 1,000 climbers choked the routes in May, the busiest season on record, despite a massive ice block delaying the start. It has been 71 years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first stood on the 8,849-meter summit. Today, the mountain is a commercial enterprise, but as Dawa’s near-death crawl proves, Everest still possesses the power to kill—and, very rarely, to let one slip away.
