A 57-year-old climbing guide hired as a camp cook and pressed into service as a substitute summit guide was found crawling near the base of Mount Everest's Khumbu Icefall last Thursday, six days after he became separated from his clients during a brutal descent. Hillary Dawa Sherpa survived by chewing ice and eating chocolates. His family had already begun funeral rituals.
The rescue itself was accidental. A cleanup crew removing ropes and ladders after the climbing season spotted him inching down snowy slopes just above Base Camp. He could not walk. He was carried to safety, given food and water, and flown by helicopter to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu, where he remains under treatment for frostbite and exhaustion.
His survival is remarkable. The questions it raises about the commercial Everest industry, and the operators who profit from it, are less miraculous and more familiar. A police report has been filed. Nepal's tourism department is investigating. And two companies are pointing fingers at each other over who bore responsibility for launching a rescue that, by multiple accounts, came days too late.
The group began descending from Camp 4, which sits at 7,920 meters on the southern route, on May 29. British climber Chris Thrall and Polish climber Mariusz Chmielewski were the clients. Pasang Kaji Sherpa and Hillary Dawa Sherpa were the guides. Chmielewski was running low on oxygen, so Pasang Kaji took him down first.
Thrall descended behind them with Hillary Dawa. In a video posted to Instagram, Thrall recounted the moment he last saw his guide, telling BBC Newshour in a subsequent interview:
"I turned around and said, 'Hillary, are you okay brother?' He says, 'Yes, yes, I'm fine Chris, please go.'"
Thrall described the conditions as "a complete whiteout," with fixed ropes buried a foot under snow. He said he never saw any sign of Hillary Dawa again as he looked back up the mountain. Thrall shared his dwindling oxygen with Chmielewski. The group took roughly 38 hours to reach Base Camp, without Hillary Dawa.
Thrall acknowledged the weight of the decision he made that day. He told the BBC he faced a choice between going back for a veteran Sherpa who had summited many times and helping a fellow climber with no oxygen and frostbitten fingers.
"To try to get back up... would have taken pretty much all of my oxygen. I'm not trying to offload my responsibility. I'm just saying you've got to be real."
Hillary Dawa stopped just above Camp 3, at around 7,500 meters. Without supplemental oxygen, a fully acclimatized climber would typically survive only two to three days at that altitude. He lasted six.
Speaking from his hospital bed to BBC Nepali, he described what happened after he was left behind.
"I couldn't walk... I didn't eat anything for the first two days. Then I began chewing ice, but it pained my teeth."
At some point he fell into a crevasse. An avalanche deposited enough snow beneath him that he could stand. He found ropes. He kept moving downward. He told BBC Nepali simply: "I didn't think I would be alive."
The AP reported that a Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee cleanup crew found him Thursday morning crawling near the Khumbu Icefall. Search helicopters had already failed to locate him. His client had reached Base Camp safely. He had not.
Ang Tshering Sherpa, a figure in Nepal's mountaineering community, called the survival extraordinary. As the Breitbart wire report noted, Ang Tshering said: "Sherpas are built tough growing up in the mountains. If there was someone else in his place they might not have survived."
This is where the story shifts from survival tale to accountability failure. Two companies, Himalayan Traverse Adventure, which organized the expedition, and 8K Expeditions, which helped issue the climbing permits, have offered conflicting accounts of what happened after Hillary Dawa went missing.
Chmielewski claims Pasang Kaji Sherpa notified Himalayan Traverse Adventure on May 30 that Hillary Dawa was missing. HTA founder and president Dawa Sherpa confirmed the company realized that day that Hillary Dawa was uncontactable, and said HTA notified 8K Expeditions. But Dawa Sherpa argued that 8K Expeditions should have executed the rescue because it issued the permits.
8K Expeditions managing director Lakpa Sherpa told a different story. He said HTA first contacted his company on May 30, then went silent.
"We attempted multiple times to contact Himalayan Traverse Adventure for further information and co-ordination. However, they were unreachable... On 2 June, we established contact with Hillary's family and co-ordinated an aerial search operation."
That aerial search on June 2 came up empty. HTA did not respond to Lakpa Sherpa's claims that the company became unreachable.
Lakpa Sherpa maintained that 8K Expeditions was not responsible for logistics or operational services for the expedition. HTA's founder insisted the delay was about weather, not negligence.
"The weather was really bad, it was a whiteout, meaning we had deep snow continually for a few days. It wouldn't have been possible to send a helicopter [immediately]. I would have been sending the rescuers to die."
Three days elapsed between the first notification and the aerial search. The cleaning crew that actually found Hillary Dawa was not a rescue team at all. It was a garbage detail.
The circumstances of Hillary Dawa's assignment raise their own set of questions. Himalayan Traverse Adventure originally hired him as a cook to be stationed at Camp 2, not as a summit guide. HTA manager Angfurba Sherpa told the BBC the original guide "fell sick at Base Camp." Chmielewski offered a different version: HTA told the clients the original guide had "drinking problems and a health problem." The climbers, he said, were not told exactly what the issue was.
Ben Ayers, a longtime Everest reporter for Outside Magazine, noted the distinction matters. "Generally, local guides that take clients to the summit of 8,000m peaks are trained specifically for this purpose," Ayers said. "Hillary Dawa had experience working in this capacity in previous years, but he was late in his career."
Angfurba claimed the clients refused to pay extra for a more experienced replacement guide and that Hillary Dawa took the job because he "wanted to earn some extra money." Chmielewski called that characterization "absurd and outrageous," saying the climbers paid an additional "several thousand dollars" expecting a qualified climbing guide.
The New York Post reported that Hillary Dawa's family had already begun funeral rituals before learning he was alive. His daughter, Mendo Lhamu Sherpa, told AP she was unsure at first whether the rescued person was really her father.
Angfurba said Thrall and Chmielewski each paid about $37,500 for the expedition, a package that included an attempt up Everest and the 6,189-meter Island Peak. He said other companies charge six-figure sums for similar trips. His comment to the BBC about the clients was blunt: "They paid one of the cheapest prices and yet they expect VIP service."
He also said Hillary Dawa had a functioning walkie-talkie with extra batteries and that calling for help "would have taken 10 seconds." The implication was that the guide bore some responsibility for his own predicament.
Chmielewski saw it differently. He said Himalayan Traverse Adventure's handling of the situation exposed how the company treats its employees and its customers alike.
"Look, Hillary Dawa was left alone; he rescued himself. This shows the sad truth about how Himalayan Traverse regards its employees. Customers are treated similarly."
He added: "I have huge reservations about the agency that organised this expedition. I think they should lose their licence."
Pasang Dawa Sherpa, a longtime friend of Hillary Dawa, told BBC Nepali he believes the root cause was straightforward. "I believe this problem occurred because they took him as a cook but used him as a guide," he said. "Our main question is: why wasn't a search initiated right after he got trapped? We want to know why there was such negligence."
Unusual incidents in remote or extreme settings, whether a freak accident at a gas station or a man crawling alone through an icefall, often reveal gaps in the systems that were supposed to prevent them.
Nepal's commercial Everest industry generates significant revenue for the country and employs thousands of local workers. The southern route from Nepal features four camps above Base Camp, ascending to 8,849 meters. Sherpas carry loads, fix ropes, cook meals, and guide paying clients to the summit. The work is dangerous. The pay, relative to the risks, is modest. The clients pay tens of thousands of dollars. The guides are sometimes interchangeable parts.
Hillary Dawa's case puts a fine point on the arrangement. A man hired to cook was sent above 7,000 meters as a guide. When he went missing, the company that sent him and the company that issued the permits spent days debating whose job it was to find him. A cleanup crew did it instead.
Nepal's tourism department is now investigating. Hillary Dawa's family has filed a police report accusing Himalayan Traverse Adventure of negligence. HTA maintains its handling of the incident was "above board." Early this week, Hillary Dawa was transferred from intensive care to a general ward and was reportedly recovering well.
8K Expeditions described his ordeal as "nothing short of a miracle" and a "true self-rescue." That phrase, "self-rescue", may be the most revealing detail in the entire episode. When the companies responsible for a man's safety on the world's tallest mountain call his survival a self-rescue, they are telling you exactly how much help he got.
