被困珠峰 世界顶峰上演生死时速(图) 扬子晚报

2:49 pm EST May 23, 2007
(MountEverest.net) "I have been climbing for 25 years, and I've seen people risking their lives to save other's. Those who say there was nothing they could do are lying," wrote Banjo Bannon last week on the anniversary of David Sharp's death. Yesterday, Everest brought another example that rescues on altitude are not only possible, but common. "Within the first twenty minutes of our rest time we started getting radio calls that there was a woman on the triangular face of Everest (27,000 ft) that was having a very difficult time. A call went out to IMG guide Dave Hahn to watch for her on his way down. By the time Dave got to her she was in very bad shape and was nearly unconscious." Next comes a detailed report of climbers, exhausted from their own recent summit, rescuing a climber from another team.

The rescue was done from the triangular face under balcony on Everest South side, at 8100-8400meter, about the same altitude where Sharp was found. This isn't Hahn's first such experience. Poignantly, in 2001 he helped to rescue 2 Himex climbers from close to the summit of Everest: 300 meters higher than the place where David Sharp died.

We kept lowering and lowering...

Yesterday's rescue on Everest south side was hard: "For the extremely steep and rugged descent down from the South Col, Usha was packaged up in a sleeping bag strapped to a sled. Since carrying her down this terrain would be impossible we would have to drag her and lower her with ropes... We worked our way across the steep Lhotse Face and down through a rocky area called the Yellow Band. Once we got through this area it got a little easier because we were straight above camp III so we did more lowering than guiding the sled, but we were also getting very tired. Before we got to camp III the sun had set and it was starting to get cold. We kept lowering and lowering and finally just above camp III a group of doctors from the Extreme Everest Expedition came up and helped us the rest of the way into camp..."

Found almost unconscious, Usha was brought down from 8300 meters to C3 at 7300 meters. That's 1000 meters, or about 10 times the distance (100 meters) separating David Sharp from the place where he was last interviewed by Discovery cameras and the safety of high camp.

"David Sharp HAD to Die," explains Adventurist editor J. Alan Hendricks in his editorial posted a few weeks back. "To save lives." Banjo, Alan and yesterday's rescue are just the latest in the large number of climbers, writers and examples stressing that it's not feasibility, but human ethics that need to be scrutinized in the wake of David Sharp.