Bad weather on Mount Everest prevented retrieval of two bodies of climbers and the search for two who disappeared near the summit, expedition organizers said.
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Dutch climber Eric Arnold’s body was brought to Camp 2 at 21,000 feet, while Australian climber Maria Strydom’s body is at Camp 3 located at 23,620 feet.
Three people died over the weekend climbing Mount Everest and two others are missing.
It is not unusual for big numbers of climbers to reach the summit on a single day because only two or three windows of good weather in May enable climbing on the peak often hit with extremely harsh weather conditions.
Climbing Mount Everest has become increasingly risky in recent years.
While her family flew out to bring her body back, the expedition manager said bringing her body down was not a certainty because of the difficulty involved in doing so. Team member Arnold Coster was accompanying the body.
The climbers from the Indian state of West Bengal – Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh – have been out of contact since Saturday night, said Wangchu Sherpa, managing director at Trekking Camp Nepal.
Almost 400 climbers have reached the 29,035-foot summit since May 11 thanks to favorable weather.
More than 30 people have suffered from severe frostbite and altitude sickness in recent days while on Everest, officials said.
Dr Strydom, a 34-year-old finance lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, had been exhausted and weak when she died at an altitude of about 7,800 metres near Camp 4, according to tour company Seven Summit Treks.
More than a month into their climb up Everest, The Sydney Morning Herald reports Strydom died from altitude sickness after reaching the final campsite, which is about 1,300 feet from the mountain’s summit.
He survived the natural disaster and avalanche at base camp in 2015, which shut down the mountain for last year’s climbing season, The Washington Post reports.
“Everest is a mountain of extremes”, geologist and climber Jon Kedrowski told CNN. Carrying bodies down the mountain takes at least eight Sherpas since they become frozen and heavier than usual.
The tourism industry, which brings in more than $3 million from Everest climbing fees alone, is Nepal’s chief source of foreign income and contributed nearly 9 percent of its GDP in 2014, according to a report by the World Travel and Tourism Council.
Reuters could not independently confirm that it was the same woman, although both the sherpa guides worked for the same agency Seven Summit Treks and knew each other.
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But while hundreds have died trying to reach the top of Everest due to avalanches, altitude sickness, exposure and other dangers, the use of bottled oxygen and better equipment had helped reduce the number of deaths each year.
