By Gopal Sharma
KATHMANDU, May 22 (Reuters) – A Briton improved his own Everest record on Friday and notched his 20th ascent to the world’s highest peak, as two Indian climbers died on the mountain, taking the season’s toll to five, hiking officials said.
Kenton Cool, 52, climbed the 8,849-metre (29,032-foot) peak before dawn and was descending to lower camps. He was expected to reach the base camp over the weekend, his expedition organisers said.
An Indian climber died at Camp II and another at the Hillary Step, Nivesh Karki of their expedition organising company Pioneer Adventure said. Both had climbed the summit on Thursday but died during descent, he said on Friday.
Hillary Step is located below the summit in the “death zone”, so called because of the dangerously low level of natural oxygen.
Details of their deaths were not available.
“One body is at very high altitude and we are trying to bring the second body from camp II,” Karki told Reuters.
Cool, the British climber, is “quietly rewriting the record books,” said four-time Everest climber and expedition organiser Lukas Furtenbach of the Austria-based Furtenbach Adventures company.
“More Everest summits than any non-Sherpa ever… and still making it look like just another walk in the hills. Absolute legend,” Furtenbach told Reuters from the base camp. Cool climbed with one of Furtenbach’s teams.
Cool, who first climbed Everest in 2004 and has since repeated the feat every year except some years when authorities closed the mountain due to various reasons, said scaling the height of Everest was not routine.
“It never gets any easier or any less frightening. It’s the tallest mountain in the world and with it comes an incredible sense of majesty,” Cool said in a statement.
“I rely on every bit of experience I have to move safely in this environment. Standing on the summit for the twentieth time is incredibly special.”
The record for the highest number of summits at Everest is held by a Nepali Sherpa, Kami Rita, at 32.
Everest has been climbed by more than 8,000 people, many of them multiple times, since it was first scaled by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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