Kenyan climber Cheruiyot Kirui’s dream of summiting Mount Everest was cut short this week after he died just metres away from the peak of the world’s highest mountain.
Kirui, a banker with the local lender KCB, wanted to summit Everest, which stands at 8,848.86 meters above sea level, without supplementary oxygen.
He went missing with his guide, a Nepali climber identified as Nawang Sherpa, on Wednesday, at Bishop Rock, located at an altitude of 8,000 metres.
News that Kirui’s body was found was announced on Thursday morning by the Nepali mountaineering news website Everest Today. Sherpa’s fate remains unknown.
At higher altitudes, Everest is nearly incapable of sustaining human life and most mountaineers use supplementary oxygen past 7,000 metres.
Past around 8,000 metres, famously known as the ‘death zone’, the air is extremely thin, temperatures are below 0°C and the high winds are powerful enough to blow a person off the mountain.
Climbers face high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), where one’s brain is starved of oxygen.
This results in brain swelling, causing drowsiness, and trouble speaking and thinking. One might also experience blurred vision and episodes of delusion.
However, a scan through the banker’s social media accounts, where he gave followers updates about his mission, shows that Kirui had made arrangements for Sherpa to ferry an emergency bottle of oxygen to be used only under specific circumstances.
In a May 17 social media post, Kirui wrote that he was open to using supplemental oxygen if “I go lights out or if I go bananas.”
He also said he would use supplemental oxygen if he was time-barred, saying, “Too much time in the death zone is dangerous. If I’m not moving strongly or quickly enough then there’s no point.”
“Unfavorable weather: If the weather turns against our respected forecasters (as it happened on the 12th) and the exposure is dangerous,” reads the post.
It adds: “Body limit reached: If the body is fed up and can’t handle the grind and I realize I’m not Superman.”
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Kenyan disappears while climbing Mt Everest
