Sherpa guide lost on Mount Everest found alive crawling back to base camp – National

A Mount Everest Sherpa guide was found crawling back to camp a week after he went missing and was safely reunited with his family, who were unsure if he would ever return.

Dawa Sherpa, 52, was last seen on May 29 in an area called Yellow Band above Camp 3 at 7,200 meters (23,622 feet). The base camp is 5,300 meters (17,388 feet), but he failed to reach it even though his client arrived, reported the Associated Press.

1:26
Blizzard includes 200 tourists on Mount Everest

The two were among the last ones on the mountain as the climbing season was coming to an end and their route was completed.

Dawa was spotted by a cleanup team Thursday morning, crawling on snow-covered slopes near the Khumbu Icefall, just above the camp, Pemba Sherpa of 8K Expeditions, which is coordinating the search, told AP.

The staff took him to safety and gave him food and water. Dawa was flown by helicopter to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, where his wife and daughter, who had already begun funeral rites, were waiting for him.

Get the latest country news

Get the best Canadian news delivered to your inbox as it happens so you never miss a trending story.

“We first heard that he was still alive in the local news and someone we know called with the news that … he was being taken down,” said his wife, Damu Sherpa.

Although Dawa has been missing since last week, the search and rescue team has been delayed in being sent. When helicopters were finally sent to find him, Dawa was nowhere to be seen. His family had given up hope and were on the second day of the funeral ritual which lasted for several days when the news of his rescue reached them.

“When we first heard about it (the rescue), we were not sure if that person was really our father,” said his daughter Mendo Lhamu. “So, to be sure, we asked for pictures to be sent and only then were we sure and very happy.”

The team that saw Dawa was part of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, which is responsible for setting up ladders and ropes at the beginning of each climbing season and removing the equipment and cleaning it after it closes.

Dawa is from the town of Okhaldhunga, south of Everest, and is employed by a small company in Kathmandu called Himalayan Traverse. He was guiding a climb in Poland when he went missing.

His survival has been hailed by the Sherpa community as extraordinary.

“This is not a miracle to live so many days in the mountains facing such a difficult situation,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, a community leader, told AP.

“Sherpas are built tough growing up in the mountains,” said Ang Tshering. “If there was someone else in his place, they wouldn’t have survived.”

Members of the Sherpa community were mostly yak farmers and traders who lived deep in the Himalayas until Nepal opened its borders in the 1950s; their endurance and familiarity with the mountains quickly made them sought after by guides and porters.

The storied history of Sherpas in the region, which dates back to tens of thousands of years, has also made them famous climbers with a special resistance to hypoxia, according to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, which finally allowed them to dominate the Himalayan climbing business.

More than 1,000 climbers and their guides scaled Everest in May, marking the busiest climbing season ever for the world’s highest mountain. It got off to a late start due to heavy snow on the trail just above the camp which took almost two weeks to clear.

In October, more than 300 climbers became trapped on the world’s highest mountain amid tropical storms that trapped them at an altitude of 4,900 meters (16,000 feet).

In April, some Everest directors were accused of participating in a USD$20 million insurance scam involving fake rescues and fake hospitalizations to claim insurance money.

— via files from The Associated Press

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.