@cal.mcdonagh: What would you do if your climbing partner told you they were cold at 7100m? While descending one of the hardest sections of Mt. Everest, after he had just fallen 15m, I was tasked with this exact question. Gary is cold and has High Altitude Pulmonary Edema. Immediately, I start to help him. I know that he needs to get warm fast. I start rubbing him, making sure that he warms up, and getting close to him to block any wind from my direction. I immediately realize that he's in bad shape. He's breathing heavy, he's not as responsive as he normally is, and he doesn't look well. I take off my own jacket, something which you need to debate about this high, because getting yourself cold could lead to a bigger problem on the mountain and two people needing a rescue. As you can see, the wind starts to pick up. We're getting blasted with snow and ice in the face, so I'm helping him zip on my jacket, giving him an extra pair of gloves, while leaving myself exposed to colder weather. He improves, but he still has to get down the mountain. We start preparing. I communicate with the Sherpa what's wrong, and I start unclipping him and clipping him onto the next rope, preparing him to use his descender, and seeing how he is, how he's managing. He's unsteady on his feet. He falls over almost immediately as he gets up. But he still has energy, he's still trying. I'm realizing how serious this is now. The next thing I do is give him some water. You can hear his deep, throaty cough. While I'm telling him he's going to be fine, in my head, I know I have to watch out and be vigilant.  So how did he get this bad in the first place? What went wrong? This is him climbing earlier in the day at the very bottom of the Lhotse Face. There is the steepest section where you have a vertical ice climb in which you use your jumar to assist you going up. As you can see, Gary is in the middle here, and he's stuck. His safety clip at the top of his jumar has gone wrong. It's jammed, something which almost never happens. It's very unlikely to happen, but unfortunately for Gary, it has. He's using all of his energy at 6,900 meters trying to shove this jumar up the rope, and it's not going anywhere. He's stuck for almost 15 minutes, and eventually, he needs two Sherpas one above, one below to unjam the jumar and help him up this small section of rope. It's devastating for your energy at the start of the Lhotse Face to use up so much of it. What you see here is Gary descending, and slipping, losing his footing, falling almost 15 meters. This is 60 degrees steep, there's blue ice, very little snow on top. He catches himself where it levels off to about 45 degrees. And this is just before the start of the video. This is when we know he's in big trouble. He's not getting up easily. HAPE and being cold are two of the easiest and most common ways to die at extreme altitude. You need to make sure that you bring extra clothes, medication like tadalafil or sildenafil or dexamethasone, and you need to make sure to watch out for your friends, stay hydrated, and turn back before you exert yourself like Gary did. His biggest mistake was he didn't bring a down jacket. If he had, he probably could have made it down without having any assistance needed.

Cal

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Sunday 26 July 2026 21:26:45 GMT