An Australian woman and a Dutch national have also died since Friday due to altitude sickness in the notorious “death zone” where the air is so thin that only the fittest can survive without supplementary oxygen.
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A convenience store worker from CT scaled Mount Everest on Friday for a seventh time, breaking her own record as the most successful female climber of the world’s highest peak, expedition organizers said.
This is the first climbing season for two years on Everest.
Mountaineering is “open to everyone”, said Kenton Cool, who has reached Everest’s summit a dozen times, including this season.
Nava Kumar Phukon, an Indian climber who summitted on Friday, told AFP the weather had been harsh through the weekend with strong winds severely hampering visibility.
The last week looks especially bleak, with four climbers dead and two missing.
Despite the risks and recent disasters, Everest’s allure remains undimmed, with Nepal issuing 289 permits to foreigners for this year’s spring climbing season. Authorities previously said they were looking for two missing Indian climbers.
The team headed toward Camp III – where a helicopter would be able to land, and Strydom could be evacuated.
Avalanches have taken an especially awful toll on climbers, killing 35 in just the past two years.
On April 18, 2014, seracs on the western spur of Mount Everest failed, causing an avalanche which killed 16 Nepalese guides and a number of climbers, including four Canadians in the Khumbu icefall.
Veteran mountaineer Jim Davidson knows what an Everest close call feels like.
Maria Strydom during a climb in Alaska last July.
Dr Strydom’s mother Maritha commented on the Facebook statement with: “We never had. any contact from anyone from your company, now, nearly 48 hours after my daughter’s death”.
Maria Strydom, a 34-year-old Monash Business School finance lecturer, made it roughly 400 meters shy of the summit when she began suffering from altitude sickness and died while attempting to descend.
“It is not clear what happened”. More than 250 people have died climbing the mountain since 1953 and many of those were due to altitude-related illnesses.
According to Associated Press reports, two other people died on Everest, including 36-year-old Eric Arnold, who was part of the couple’s climbing team, and 25-year-old Phurba Sherpa, according to CNN.
The mother of an Australian woman who died on Mount Everest says there is a “glimmer of hope” her daughter’s body can be retrieved.
Around 30 climbers have suffered frostbite or become seriously ill on the mountain in recent days.
The fourth climber from the team, Sunita Hazra, was rescued and is undergoing treatment at base camp.
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Of the 7,001 Everest summits going into this season, according to the Himalayan Database, only 193-or 2.7 percent-did not involve supplemental oxygen.
