Nepalese guide rescued from Everest after week alone; family halts funeral rites

Dawa Sherpa was descending Mount Everest on May 29 with a Polish climber when he vanished into the mountain's upper reaches. For nearly seven days, the 52-year-old Sherpa guide survived without food, water, or oxygen in the death zone—that airless band above 7,920 meters where the human body begins to fail. He crawled toward base camp through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, moving through terrain that had been stripped of its fixed ladders now that the climbing season had ended. When a cleanup crew from the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee found him near the icefall, still wearing his climbing jacket, he was alive.

The circumstances of his disappearance remain unclear. Dawa had been guiding a Polish alpinist down from Camp IV, the world's highest campsite, after they failed to summit. British climber Chris Thrall encountered Dawa during the descent and found the Polish client without oxygen and suffering from severe frostbite. Thrall helped the client down, believing the experienced Sherpa would manage the descent alone. "The weather was extremely unstable and harsh," Thrall said in a video tribute he posted, thinking Dawa had died on the mountain. "Tragic. Regrettable. But that's high altitude mountaineering." No one knows why the Polish climber reached base camp without his guide.

When the cleanup crew located Dawa, they brought him to safety, gave him food and water, and evacuated him by helicopter to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu. The Nepal Mount Evereste trekking company called his survival "nothing short of a miracle"—a man navigating one of the world's most lethal passages alone, without supplies, at an altitude where the air itself cannot sustain life. At the hospital, Dawa was conscious and recognized his family. His daughter, Mhendo Lhamo Sherpa, said he could speak. "We are happy," she told reporters.

The family's relief carried an edge of surrealism. When news came that Dawa had been found, they were already deep into a traditional funeral ritual that typically lasts several days. "When we heard about the rescue, we weren't sure if it was really my father," his daughter said. "We asked them to send photographs to confirm. Only then were we certain—and very happy." They halted the rites. Dawa was admitted to the hospital with frostbite and other cold-related injuries, but he was alive.

Dawa Sherpa belongs to the Sherpa community, an ethnic group whose ancestors were pastors and traders in the high Himalayas until Nepal opened its borders in the 1950s. Their natural resistance to altitude and intimate knowledge of the mountains made them invaluable guides. They came to dominate the climbing industry across the Himalayas. Ang Tshering Sherpa, a prominent figure in Nepal's mountaineering circles, told The Guardian that Dawa's survival reflected the resilience bred into Sherpa culture. "Sherpas, raised in the mountains, are hardy," he said. "If it had been someone else, perhaps they would not have survived."

Dawa's rescue unfolded against the backdrop of Everest's busiest season on record. More than a thousand climbers, along with their guides, attempted the mountain in May 2026. The season had started late—a massive ice block had choked the route for two weeks, trapping climbers at base camp—which compressed the climbing window and intensified the traffic on the mountain. The death zone, where Dawa spent his week alone, is a place where the margin between survival and catastrophe is measured in hours, where decisions made in seconds can echo for days. That he emerged from it alive, crawling through ice and thin air, speaks to something in him that the mountain could not break.