Three British Gurkha soldiers reached the summit of Mount Everest on Monday, two years after being caught in an avalanche on the mountain sparked by the earthquake that devastated swathes of Nepal.
The climbers are the first to summit the world’s highest peak from the south side this spring season, as strong winds, fresh snowfall and bitter cold hampered other attempts.
“At 14:08 the message came through that our lead team has summited Everest,” the climb organisers posted on Instagram.
Twenty-one Gurkhas are hoping this year to complete an expedition to the 8,848-metre (29,030-foot) peak which they began in 2015.
Sixteen soldiers from the Brigade of Gurkhas — a unit of Nepalis recruited into the British army — were at Camp One at 6,000 metres when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal in late April 2015, killing 9,000 people.
The quake caused an avalanche on Everest that claimed 18 lives at base camp, putting a stop to the climbing season. The soldiers themselves were unhurt.
On Monday the three Gurkhas reached the summit shortly after a team of Sherpa guides finished fixing ropes to the peak, Kamal Parajuli, an official with Nepal’s Tourism Department, told AFP.
Each year skilled rope-fixers prepare the path to the summit, allowing for hundreds of paying climbers to ascend the mountain.
This year’s climbing season has already been marred by two deaths.
Min Bahadur Sherchan — aged 85 and a former Gurkha himself — died this month while attempting to reclaim his title as the world’s oldest person to summit Everest.
Experienced Swiss climber Ueli Steck fell during an acclimatisation climb in late April.
Last year five people lost their lives on Everest, while 443 successfully summited from the Nepal side and another 197 from the north side in Tibet.
A team of six Indian climbers were the first to summit Everest from the northern Tibet side this year, reaching the peak on Saturday.
The successful first summits come unusually late in the season. Mountaineers are concerned that with 375 climbing permits issued this year, there could be potentially dangerous “traffic jams” as mountaineers target a brief window of good weather before the monsoon begins in June.
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