Sherpa who retrieved body from Mount Everest death zone recalls dangerous mission, as peak’s reopening to climbers draws near

Mount Everest has claimed 300 lives, and 150 bodies remain on its slopes because of the expense and danger of retrieving them; a 2017 recovery cost US$200,000

Ahead of the opening of the climbing season this autumn, authorities and climbing guides are unsure if or when more bodies will be brought down its slopes

Reading Time:3 minutes

Green Boots is the name given to the unidentified body of this climber, one of 300 who lost their lives on the mountain. Photo: Wikipedia

Published: 9:30pm, 2 Aug 2020Updated: 9:30pm, 2 Aug 2020

Dawa Finjhok Sherpa and his teammates hashed out a retrieval plan as they stood surrounding a dead body in the Himalayas one early morning in May 2017. It had been around a year since Indian climber Goutam Ghosh, a 50-year-old police officer from Kolkata, died near the summit of Mount Everest. His face had turned pitch black, his body as hard as the rock next to it.

Dawa and four other Sherpas from the Seven Summit Treks agency would spend the next 28 hours working in the “death zone” without food or sleep, and then a few more days going downhill, before finally handing over Ghosh’s body to his family in Kathmandu.

Ghosh’s body was at an altitude of around 27,500 feet (8,400 metres). Climbers call that the “death zone”, an area where people can easily die due to lack of oxygen, frostbite and cold. The altitude was one of the many odds Dawa’s team had to overcome.

“He was around six feet tall (1.83 metres) and over 120kg due to snow. It took us almost an hour just to move the body,” says Dawa.

Dawa Finjhok Sherpa was part of a mission to retrieve three bodies from Mount Everest. Photo: courtesy of Dawa Finjhok

Five Sherpas hauled the corpse in a stretcher as they trekked downhill along a narrow, treacherous path with the help of snow axes and ropes. The use of a stretcher did prevent the frozen body from falling apart, as they had hoped, but it also slowed them down. To make matters worse, people were still summiting, and they had to intermittently give way to avoid traffic jams.