Two hours from a tent that was still in the "death zone."
Staying at that altitude for more than 24 hours means death.
how do you explain this?
May 28, 2006
'Dead' Climber's Survival Impugns Mount Everest Ethics
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, May 27 — It has been a lethal and quirky climbing season on Mount Everest, with at least 15 deaths recorded so far.
But no episode seemed quite so strange as the story of Lincoln Hall, a 50-year-old Australian climber, who was a 16th. But only for a while.
His tale, which emerged here on Saturday, offered an inspiring counterpoint to the grim end of a British solo climber, David Sharp, 34, who was left to die on May 15 as some 40 other climbers passed him on their own attempts to reach the 29,035-foot peak.
That case revived a passionate debate over the ethics of high altitude climbing, particularly in what is called the death zone, where conditions, temperatures and the lack of oxygen combine to mean that rescuers may forfeit their own lives in trying to save a sick or incapacitated climber.
Mr. Hall, one of Australia's best-known climbers, was on an expedition whose members paid a minimum of $16,000, according to its Web site. The group included a 15-year-old Australian climber, Chris Harris, who had hoped to become the youngest climber to reach the summit.
He was forced to turn back after having problems breathing, but Mr. Hall and others made it to the top on Thursday.
Accounts on Saturday, pieced together from expedition Web sites and newspaper articles, said that on the descent, Mr. Hall suddenly collapsed. He was pronounced dead by the sherpa guides accompanying him and abandoned at 28,500 feet. The cause was understood to be cerebral edema — a swelling of the brain.
The next day, according to accounts from Mr. Hall's fellow climbers, he was seen by Dan Mazur, an American veteran of many Himalayan expeditions. Mr. Mazur, they said, realized that Mr. Hall was still alive. Almost incomprehensibly, he survived the night.
"Lincoln was motionless, but submitted weak attributes of life," Alex Abramov, the Russian leader of the expedition, said on its Web site (http://www.7summits-club.com/).
The expedition dispatched a team of 13 sherpas to rescue him. Three sherpas with "tea, oxygen and medicines have reached Lincoln," the expedition Web site reported Friday.
"Lincoln has a rest, drinks tea. He in consciousness, however not completely understands what happens," Mr. Abramov wrote on the Web site.
It ascribed his initial weakness on the mountain to an "acute edema and hypoxia," meaning he was not getting enough oxygen.
By 10 p.m. local time Thursday, Mr. Hall and his rescuers were said to have descended to a camp at about 23,000 feet on the North Col of Everest. And by Saturday, "Lincoln Hall was able to walk on his own" to the Advanced Base Camp farther down the mountain.
The fact that he had been able to walk unassisted was taken as testimony to a remarkable recovery and raised the question of what might have happened to the Briton, David Sharp, if he had been helped.
"We will never know the whole story of who helped David and who did not," the EverestNews.com Web site said Saturday, as it published a photograph of the rock cave where Mr. Sharp died. "We will never know the whole story of his summit attempt and descent, where he ended up next to the previously dead climber in the rock cave on Everest. But we do know where he froze to death on Everest."
The climbing season had been an unusual one for records. A New Zealander, Mark Inglis, the first double amputee to reach the summit earlier this month, was one of the climbers who passed the dying Mr. Sharp on his way up the mountain.
Mr. Inglis told New Zealand television: "Trouble is at 8,500 meters, it's extremely difficult to keep yourself alive, let alone keeping anyone else alive. On that morning over 40 people went past this young Briton."
Mr. Inglis said he radioed for help but a fellow mountaineer told him: "Look, mate, you can't do anything. You know, he's been there X number of hours, been there without oxygen, you know, he's effectively dead."
The episode provoked a sharp dispute with Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, made the first verifiable conquest of Everest in 1953. Sir Edmund said that "people have completely lost sight of what is important."
"In our expedition, there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," he told a New Zealand newspaper, The Otago Daily Times.