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A fourth person has died on Mount Everest, and further details about the deaths are slowly emerging. Subhash Paul of India was being assisted overnight Sunday by Sherpa guides during a descent when he died of altitude sickness, the AP reports. Dutch climber Eric Arnold passed away Friday of the same malady, while Australia's Maria Strydom succumbed to it on Saturday. A 25-year-old Sherpa was the first to die this climbing season: Phurba Sherpa fell to his death Thursday while trying to prep a route for climbers just 150 feet from the top, CNN reports.

An Australian woman who set out to climb Mount Everest to prove that “vegans can do anything” died Saturday after developing altitude sickness. Maria Strydom, 34, had reached the final camp from the summit before she and her husband, Robert Gropel, both began suffering from high-altitude pulmonary edema, which caused fluid to build up in Strydom’s brain, the Washington Post reports.

Dr Strydom, who also goes by Marisa, was on a seven-week expedition with her husband Robert Gropel - who has also been injured during the trek. The 34-year-old's family say the couple's GPS tracker stopped working on Friday. A single transmission from the tracker on Saturday gave them hope but a Google search on Saturday night delivered the devastating news that Dr Strydom had died, her sister Aletta Newman told AAP. ... Conflicting media reports attributing her death to altitude sickness, snow blindness and a stroke only added to the distress of the Strydom family, who have yet to hear...

A major earthquake has struck eastern Nepal, near Mount Everest, two weeks after more than 8,000 died in a devastating quake. The latest earthquake hit near the town of Namche Bazaar, near Mount Everest. The US Geological Survey said it had a magnitude of 7.3. An earthquake on 25 April, centred in western Nepal, had a magnitude of 7.8. The latest tremor was felt in northern India and Bangladesh. In the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, which was badly damaged last month, people rushed out of buildings as the quake struck at 12:35 local time (07:50 GMT).

Mount Everest record holder Apa Sherpa ran for his life when a huge earthquake hit Nepal, and now fears for the future after the disaster cut short the climbing season for the second year in a row. “Everyone here is scared and depressed, we have lost everything,” the climber told AFP by telephone from Thame, deep in the Everest region, one of the villages that is home to the Sherpa ethnic group. The tight-knit community of around 50 families has produced some of the world’s greatest mountaineers, including Sherpa, who is something of a celebrity having reached the top of...

An avalanche triggered by a deadly earthquake in Nepal on Saturday buried a part of the base camp for climbers bound for Mount Everest, killing at least eight people, Nepal's tourism ministry said. "The toll could go up, it may include foreigners as well as sherpas," tourism official Gyanendra Shrestha said.

Saturday’s earthquake has triggered avalanches in Mount Everest according to a Tweet posted by Alex Gavan, a mountaineer. He claims, “running for life from my tent” and further says there were “many, many” people up the mountain at the time. Alex Gavan, who describes himself as a mountaineer, said a “huge avalanche” had hit from Pumori, a mountain lying close to Mount Everest on the Nepal-Tibet border.

Construction project is believed to be under consideration and is part of proposed extension to link China with Nepal by railChina is considering extending a railway line linking the country to Nepal via a tunnel under Mount Everest, according to Chinese state media. The proposal is the latest in a series of ambitious rail schemes Beijing is reportedly examining. It comes amid scepticism about whether some of the projects will ever get off the ground and at a time of a growing Chinese presence in Nepal, which has caused some concern in rival regional power India. The Qinghai-Tibet railway already...

You can now "trek" Mount Everest from the comfort of your sofa, as Google Maps launches new Street Views of the Khumbu valleys in Nepal. While you might not be able to get to the summit, you can explore many of the trails and towns in the region. The area is home to the Sherpa community with many acting as guides and porters on Mount Everest. "I guided the Google Maps team through my home region to collect Street View imagery," says Apa Sherpa in a blog.

Environmentalists have switched their assault on the world economy to a new frontier, previously unaffected by their agenda – peaks, Mount Everest to be more specific, located between China and Nepal in the Himalayas. The 29,029 feet mountain is in danger. What is the crisis? According to the National Geographic team, the mountain is “overcrowded with inexperienced climbers and polluted with waste.” The nature of the pollution includes human corpses, human excrement, garbage leaking from glaciers, abandoned equipment, and overcrowding. How crowded could it be? Mark Jenkins described at 26,000 feet the dangerous inconvenience of more than 100 climbers moving...

Rupee was hour away from dying when Joanne Lefson saved him; trek to 17,598 feet took 10 days and helps raise awareness of dog adoptions. Rupee, a stray dog that was rescued from a dumpsite in Ladakh, Northern India, and was said to be less than an hour away from death, has become what is believed to be the first dog to reach Mount Everest base camp, located at an elevation of 17,598 feet. The dog was just 8 months old—starving, dehydrated, and extremely weak—when Joanne Lefson adopted the pup, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. She nursed him back...

Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, researchers said today (May 14) at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico. Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet (180 meters), Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest's summit is 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level. Thakuri and his colleagues tracked changes to glaciers, temperatures and...

BEIJING – The youngest climber to reach the peak of Mount Everest hugged his tearful companions and told them he loved them. Then 13-year-old Jordan Romero took the satellite phone and called his mom. "He says, 'Mom, I'm calling you from the top of the world,'" a giddy Leigh Anne Drake told The Associated Press from California, where she had been watching her son's progress minute by minute on a GPS tracker online.

A leading mountaineering official on Tuesday urged Nepal to reduce climbing fees for Mount Everest and other mountains during the peak climbing season, to lure climbers back from Tibet where mountaineering is cheaper. Tourists are returning to Nepal, one of the world's poorest countries with largely aid-and tourism-dependent economy, after the Himalayan republic emerged from a long civil war in 2006. Climbing is one of the most popular tourist pastimes but Ang Tshering Sherpa, chief of the Union of Asian Alpine Associations, an umbrella body of 26 alpine groups, said overcharging was driving climbers across the border to Tibet. "The...

Good news for mountaineers preparing to climb Mt Everest is that they may soon be able to make calls using their mobile phones, from Mt Everest. Yes, the Nepal's state-run telecommunication firm – Nepal Telecom (NT) is gearing up to set up mobile network in the proximity to the highest mountain peak of the world. Nepal Telecom (NT) is set to install a permanent cell-tower near Mt. Everest. The Nepal Telecom’s mobile network will help the climbers to make calls using their GSM or CDMA throughout their mountain climbing adventure on the Mt Everest. According to Nepal Telecom, a satellite...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9, 2008 (Reuters) — A brain swelling condition related to low oxygen levels in the air may have caused many of the deaths of people climbing Mount Everest, researchers said on Tuesday. A brain swelling condition related to low oxygen levels in the air may have caused many of the deaths of people climbing Mount Everest, researchers said on Tuesday. An international team led by Paul Firth of Massachusetts General Hospital studied the 212 reported deaths from 1921 to 2006 on Mount Everest, the highest on Earth. Hazards awaiting those who dare to climb the 29,000-foot (8,850 meter)...

Sir Edmund Hillary, the lanky New Zealand mountaineer and explorer who with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday in Wellington. He was 88.

(DINGBOCHE) -- Birds, mice and Chinese herbalists have long understood the health benefits of sea-buckthorn berries, but now farmers in Solu Khumbu are looking to make money from these tart-tasting fruit. At Dingboche, in the shadow of Ama Dablam, the Khumbu Alpine Conservation Council has been teaching villagers to make a healthy juice from the wild berries, which they can sell to thirsty tourists heading for Everest Base Camp or transport to Kathmandu's cafes and bars for the cocktail crowd. The council has given priority to those villagers, particularly women, who do not own tourist lodges or camp-sites and need...

Dying Brit climber 'too big' to rescue off Everest By MICHAEL FIELD The New Zealand mountaineer who ordered climbers to leave a dying Briton near the summit of Mt Everest says it was impossible to carry the big man off the peak. Double amputee Mark Inglis was one of four New Zealanders in a group of 40 who walked past dying David Sharp during their descent of Everest on May 15. Most of them were part of a Discovery Channel film crew, which included Queenstown cameraman Mark Whetu. The crew filmed the dying British mountaineer in his last conscious moments...

Just days after a British climber was left to die near Mount Everest's summit, an American guide abandoned his second bid to stand on top of the world so he could rescue a mountaineer mistakenly given up for dead. Not only did Daniel Mazur not scale the world's highest peak from the northern side, he also failed to get his two paying clients to the top. "It was very disappointing for me to miss my chance at the summit, but even more that I could not get my job done," Mazur, of Olympia, Wash., told The Associated Press upon returning...