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Rounding Up This Week's Mount Everest Stories

For seasoned mountain climbers, May and October are the best months to attempt summitting the highest mountain in the world: Mount Everest. image from CBC

Lately I've been in the loop about various teams and nationalities attempting to scale the summit of Everest. For these people, summitting Mount Everest is a dream of a lifetime that requires not only months, but years of extensive training, demands skill and mountain knowledge beyond the ordinary and admittedly, involves a lot of money too.

So hearing about deaths of climbers - 4 to be exact - made me really sad. All of them died from exhaustion and altitude sickness while descending from the summit.

Everest may be very, very perilous and difficult to ascent but it's possible to come out of it alive. Too bad that due to unforeseen circumstances such as worsening weather conditions or traffic jam in the death zone none the less, lives have to be claimed.

Climbers know that they must turn around and abandon all plans of summitting at a particular time and if the weather is playing death-and-seek. The risks are even greater, for the climbers and the sherpas alike, if you're too stubborn to still summit after noon.

My prayers go out to the family and friends left behind by climbers Ha Wenyi (China), Eberhard Schaaf (Germany), Shriya Shah (Nepal-born Canadian) and Song Won-bin (South Korea).


In other news, 73-year-old Japanese Tamae Watanabe has successfully summitted Mount Everest for the second time, breaking her own record as the oldest woman to summit the mountain.

Wow. I wonder if I can still climb Gulugod Baboy when I'm 73 haha.

Congratulations! You are one kickass lady :)

as told by Marye at Friday, May 25, 2012 Labels: death on everest, everest climbing season, himalayan stories, mount everest, mountains, oldest woman to summit mount everest, sherpas, tamae watanabe


