원정 개요

Sam Wyatt - 20 Nov 2013

Steve, Dawa and I did an acclimatization trek and climb in the Khumbu between March 30 and April 12 where we climbed Lobuche prior to arriving in Tibet. Steve, Dawa and I arrived in Tibet side BC on April 17 and left on May 22, 2012. The rest of the Sherpa team, cooks, etc., arrived earlier and left later respectively from BC.

Our final assault went as follows: arrived at North Col on May 16th; arrived at C2 (7775m) May 17th, arrived at C3 (8300m) May 18th.

I arrived at summit at approximately 6 am May 19th; Steve and the Sherpas about 20 min later. I arrived back at C3 at about 11:30 am, Phurba shortly after me, Steve, Dawa and Thendorje at about 1:30 pm. We spent another night at C3 May 19th. We all returned to ABC on May 20th.

We only had on our team only Thendorje, Phurba Lama and Dawa Finjo Lama. Dawa is the son of Phurba. Dawa accompanied us back to Kathmandu after the climb.

Two other climbers were on our permit: Juan Polo (Spanish) and Bhagi [Bat-Erdene Sereeter] (Mongolian). They were each climbing on their own and each had one Sherpa climbing with them. I do not remember the Sherpas' names though Iswari (of Himalayan Guides) will likely know them. The two other climbers shared our cook and dining facilities on the mountain, but otherwise climbed independently from us.

Juan and Bhagi's Sherpas did make the summit.

I ran in to Bhagi on the way down from the summit at the Third Step; he had successfully summited and returned to camp that day. He developed some snowblindness from having his goggles off too long. The base of the Third Step is where I also saw the body of Frank [Ziebarth] (a [German] climber from Calgary) that I had met on my 2009 attempt. He had tried to climb without oxygen and perished.

According to his Sherpa, Juan died on the way down just below the Second Step. His Sherpa claims that Juan refused to move from there and that he eventually lost consciousness at which point the Sherpa left him. The last time I saw Juan was on the traverse just below the final gully to the summit ridge with his Sherpa on my way down. I was surprised to see him there because we passed him on the way up just after the First Step and he was VERY slow and did not look well. I told him at the time that he needed to remember that he still had to get down. I later heard from Steve and the Sherpas who spent more time at the summit that they two saw him still below the gully in exactly the same spot about 45 min later. I had fully expected that he would turn back early.