The Girl Who Climbed Everest: The inspirational story of Alyssa Azar, Australia's Youngest Adventurer by Sue Williams

Author:Sue Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Adventure, Biography, Australian, Mountaineering
ISBN: 9781743484708
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2016-09-18T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Everest’s Hero: Dan Mazur

To be successful on a climb of Everest, you need to know how to suffer. You need to be willing to suffer, embrace the suffering, and make the suffering work for you. Otherwise, you shouldn’t even get out of that plane at Lukla.

So says Dan Mazur, one of the world’s most successful Himalayan mountaineers and the man best known for abandoning his own attempt on the summit to save the life of Australian Lincoln Hall.

‘A lot of high-altitude climbers talk about Everest as a sufferfest,’ he explains. ‘Because you really suffer up there. There’s the cold, the snow, the wind, the ropes that aren’t fixed, the accidents, the tragedies, the deaths, even that time a bunch of foreigners got into a fight with the Sherpas. There are so many different things that can go wrong, and you really have to be prepared to suffer, to know how to suffer and to keep going despite everything.’

American-born Mazur has been visiting Nepal for twenty-five years, and for over eighteen has been organising and leading trekking and mountaineering expeditions. He had his first experience of altitude at Alyssa’s age – seventeen – when he climbed peaks in Montana’s Glacier National Park, on the Canadian border. From that time, he was hooked.

‘I love the beauty of climbing, the scenery up there, the thrill, the excitement of it and sharing it with other people,’ he says. ‘Then there’s the part where you get to deal with the local people, and meet them and learn about their culture.’

Many people know of Mazur from May 2006 when he was leading an expedition of three climbers up Everest. They were only a couple of hours from the summit when, at 8600 metres, they came across Lincoln Hall, who’d finally reached the top twelve years after his first attempt as part of the 1984 expedition with Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer. He was on the way down the previous day and had fallen sick and been left for dead. His team was convinced he’d already died and had wanted to cover him with stones in the makeshift burial that’s customary on Everest, but it wasn’t possible where he lay, on a spine of rock covered by a 2 metre-wide snowbank.

But as Mazur and Jangbu Sherpa came up the crest of a ridge, they were startled to see Hall very much alive, sitting cross-legged on the top. The pair looked at him, dumbstruck. Hall was the first to speak. ‘I imagine you are surprised to see me here,’ he said levelly. Mazur asked him if he knew how he’d got there. ‘No,’ replied Hall. ‘Do you know how I got here?’ ‘No, I don’t,’ replied Mazur. ‘Do you know your name?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My name is Lincoln Hall.’

Thus began one of the most daring rescues in the history of mountain climbing. The four gave him oxygen, liquids and food, and tried to keep him warm in temperatures 20 to 30° C below zero. They remained

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.