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Sherpa in bid to conquer Everest for 18th time
Kathmandu—A Sherpa aiming to conquer Everest for the
18th time and septuagenarians battling for the title of oldest
climber to reach the summit are lining up their record bids as the
main climbing season opens.
Nepal this week lifted a climbing ban imposed to prevent pro-Tibet
protests on the roof of the world as the Chinese Olympic torch was
carried up the northern approach to the mountain from Tibet. The
main season for climbing the world’s highest peak is expected to
open towards the end of this month and hundreds of mountaineers,
support staff and paying clients from 32 expeditions are now
acclimatising for the final push.
“Now because of climate change, the season is shifting later and
later. This year we expect the good weather window might open around
the third week of May,” said Ang Tsering Sherpa, chairman of the
Nepal Mountaineering Association and an expedition organiser.
With a breathtaking 17 summits of the 8,848-metre (29,028-foot) peak
already under his belt, Apa Sherpa looks likely to get to the top
again, said chairman Ang Tsering. “I think Apa has a good chance. He
is physically very, very fit and as long as the weather permits, he
will break his own record,” he said.
Last year, retired Japanese school teacher Katsusuke Yanagisawa—71
years and two months old when he reached the summit—became the
oldest man to conquer the peak. This year two men are trying to beat
the record.
His countryman, 75-year-old adventurer Yuichiro Miura is currently
at base camp struggling with acclimatisation—a process of making
short trips up and down the lower reaches of the mountain to prepare
climbers for the “death zone” above 8,000 metres, where there is
just a third of the oxygen present at sea level.
“I was tired all day yesterday,” Miura wrote on his expedition
website Friday.
“But then I remembered it was the same situation as when I was 70
years old, but I feel even more tired now than when I was here when
I was 70,” said Miura, who won international fame in 1970 when he
became the first person to ski down the South Col of Mount Everest,
using a parachute as a brake.
Despite his previous Himalayan exploits—which also include clinching
the record for the world’s oldest person atop Everest in 2003—Miura
is up against stiff competition in 77-year-old Nepalese Min Bahadur
Sherchan.
Sherchan is a former British Gurkha—soldiers who have been part of
the British army for nearly 200 years—and was a government
mountaineering liaison officer with years of experience of high
peaks.
“When I last spoke with him he said he is feeling in very good
condition,” Ramjindaji Gurung, coordinator of Sherchan’s Senior
Citizen Mount Everest Expedition, told AFP.—AFP
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