Someone survives Everest

The Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall, who survived a night near the summit of Mount Everest, is this morning at Base Camp. And the man who was given up for dead has now been given a better than even chance of surviving. Quite miraculously he may not even have been as badly affected by frostbite as earlier feared.

Meanwhile another climber has given more details about what happened near the summit on that night.

On Friday it seemed the revered climber was dead after achieving a life-long ambition to summit the world's highest mountain.

It followed the lonely death of climber David Sharp, abandoned and left for dead, passed on the mountain by about 40 climbers.

Lincoln Hall's friend and mountaineering companion Jamie McGuiness says contrary to earlier reports, Hall was not dead when sherpas left him on the mountain.
"Up on the summit of Everest you're on the absolute limit of human endurance and of where people can survive, even using bottled oxygen.Nobody's really sure what exactly happened to Lincoln. I'm not even sure that he knows. But somehow, on the way down, he suffered high altitude cerebral oedema, and that made him lose his mind a little bit, and made for some serious trouble."

The day that he summited he came down, two sherpas helped him extensively, but Lincoln, normally a very nice, placid guy, was obstructive, and basically wouldn't come down the mountain under delusions. And so, at 7pm at night on difficult terrain, the decision was made, the only decision that could be made, was to abandon him.

The sherpas had been real heroes, but they were suffering snow blindness. They were really... they were in need of rescue themselves. And the main rescue team wasn't able to reach him at that time.

So he was left there, one person dead rather than three people dead, and thank goodness the next morning he was still alive.

Simon Baulderstone, family friend, climbed with Lincoln Hall on the first Australian ascent on Everest in 1984.

" Well, he's still not a well boy. He's got, you know, cerebral oedema, and the only real cure and the only real way to ease the cerebral oedema is to get down as low as possible, as quickly as possible.He's got frostbite on his fingers which I'm... any frostbite's serious, but I'm told it's not very severe. And he's got a chest infection, which is more annoying than serious but, again, will be eased I think by him getting lower."