Kangchenjunga: One Climber Dead, Another Stranded in Camp 4
Margareta Morin of France died on Kangchenjunga yesterday. At 63, this was her first 8,000'er. Meanwhile, British climber Adrian Hayes is seriously sick in Camp 4, and bad weather has thwarted attempts to rescue him.
Once again, expedition operators reported the summits on May 10 but didn't mention any problems. Adrian Hayes was listed in the summit report, alongside Uta Ibrahimi, who completed her 14x8,000m list and is safely back in Base Camp.
Morin never made it to the summit. Yogendra Tamang from the outfitter Peak 15 Adventure told The Himalayan Times that Morin fell ill during her summit push and passed away at 7,800m. IFMGA guide Tendi Sherpa guided Morin.
Adrian Hayes fell sick with serious acute mountain sickness symptoms on the upper sections of Kangchenjunga while descending from the summit. Climbers brought him to Camp 4.
"Once the weather allows, we will evacuate him from the lower camps," Chhang Dawa Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks told The Himalayan Times.
Hayes, 64, is a well-known explorer and speaker in the UK. He has summited Everest and made trips to the North and South Poles in a record one year and 217 days, between 2006 and 2007. In 2014, he summited K2. He has also made a north-to-south traverse of Greenland's Icecap and crossed the Arabian desert on foot and camel, following in the footsteps of British explorer Sir William Thesiger. Before Kangchenjunga, he attempted Pumori.
A group of climbers launched a Kangchenjunga summit push on May 8, taking advantage of a weather window, even though ropes were not fixed to the summit. The day before, the team responsible for laying the ropes, led by EliteExped's Nirmal Purja, had to turn around in rapidly worsening weather. They were roughly 150-200 vertical meters below the summit.
EliteExped posted about the decision on their social media.
Purja, one of Elite Exped's directors and the company founder, said: "The team set around 11,000m of rope from Base Camp toward the summit, but unfortunately, we were forced to turn back just short of the summit because of the extreme conditions. Safety is 100% the priority. The conditions were extremely challenging, it was a full-on whiteout and extremely cold. We made the right choice to prioritize safety, and 100% of the team is safe and no one suffered injuries."
Asked by ExplorersWeb, Purja confirmed that his team intended to return to the higher sections of Kangchenjunga and finish the rope-fixing work "after potentially three days, weather depending."
"If other teams go up on a summit push in the meantime, they do this in full knowledge that ropes are fixed almost all the way to the summit, but not to the final summit point," Purja wrote. "This is a risk they have to calculate, and it is their decision."
But according to an SMS sent by Uta Ibrahimi over Inreach, the climbers who launched their summit push last weekend only found out the ropes were not ready as they reached Camp 3. The SMS is reproduced below, without edits:
Still same drama with fixing! Once we know fixing summit, and after on SM we understand that the fixing is not completed! We r on summit push.
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