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It’s a lifetime experience & achievement for any mountaineer to climb Mt. Everest but instead of worrying about altitude sickness, bad weather& avalanche be cautious of thief lurking around to steal your life support. High altitude thefts have increased in last few years. The robbed are usually independent climbers or small teams. Every team stores oxygen cylinders near the summit ahead of their climb so they have sufficient supply but do not have to carry excess weight.
“Our four-member team had 27 cylinders stored at camp four, which is also called the summit camp, and took nine along when we started from the base camp,” Rudra Prasad Haldar, an employee of West Bengal police, told HT. “Upon reaching camp three, we learnt that only eight of our oxygen cylinders were left at camp four.” “It was unfortunate but true that a large number of oxygen cylinders were stolen,” said Halder, who reached the summit on May 21. Each climber generally requires eight cylinders — five for the climber and three for the accompanying Sherpa, an ethic group of Nepal considered elite mountaineers and often hired as guides in expeditions to the Everest.
The team of four that Haldar was part of took four additional cylinders considering that the pressure of the cylinders could be lower than normal as they were lying unused for two years. The team consisted of Satyarup Siddhanta, Malay Mukhopadhyay and Ramesh Roy — all from Bengal. “At camp three, learning about the theft of cylinders, we decided to wait and asked the travel agency to send in more cylinders at the earliest,” said Haldar
The teams that climbed the summit at the beginning of the season faced difficulties due to bad weather and had to stay longer on the mountain than planned. They ran out of oxygen and allegedly stole cylinders stored by other groups. Whoever took those cylinders out of sheer necessity in that ‘death zone’ should at least have had the courtesy and sense of duty to inform people at the base camp.
American Don Bowie, describing a nightmarish descent from a summit bid on Broad Peak. Again - the difficulty of the climb went beyond weather and fatigue: Instead, Don too was robbed on the mountain. It was not just his gear the fixed ropes on the most difficult sections were gone as well. Only Don’s calm and good luck saved his life. Safe back home, he points out; we better do something about this, before someone gets killed.
Australian mountaineer Adrian Ballinger shared a similar experience on his social networking page. “A lot of bull” is going on around us - stolen oxygen bottles, poached tents, and climbers taking it too close to the edge. We’re going to do our best to keep our ascent attempt clean, succeed or fail,” Ballinger wrote in a post from camp four on May 23.Ballinger unfortunately had to call off his ascent because of lack of oxygen, but his climbing partner, Cory Richards, made it to the top without supplementary oxygen In 2012, Sano Babu Sunuwar and Lakpa Tsheri Sherpa found their cylinders at camp four stolen. Against all odds, they made it to the top. Their descent, on the other hand, was easier because they had climbed the Everest with the intension of paragliding down.
However there is still hope for humanity & selfless deed till the people like Leslie John Binns is there in this universe, he is being hailed as a global hero for sacrificing his summit dreams barely 450 meters from the peak on May 22 to save the life of mountaineer Sunita Hazra, who was in terrible distress and wouldn’t have survived without help.
Read- Kindhearted British mountaineer forsakes, aspiration to save Indian woman on Mt Everest Trek
Source: hindustantimes
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