Damu Sherpa believed that her husband, Dawa Sherpa, a guide helping climbers summit Mount Everest, was dead.
Mr. Sherpa, 57, had been missing on the world’s tallest peak since May 29, when he was descending with the last group to climb the mountain for the season. On Wednesday, her husband’s employer told her that he was dead, and that she and her daughter could start mourning rituals.
Then on Thursday morning, six days after he went missing, Damu Sherpa received a call: Her husband had been found alive, crawling on a glacier near base camp, by workers on foot who were collecting trash from the mountain. Rescuers were called to bring him down and airlifted him to a hospital in Kathmandu. He had suffered frostbite on his fingers but was conscious, one rescuer said.
The miracle of his days-long survival in one of Earth’s harshest climates was met with astonishment and relief, but also with anger.
As Everest ends one of its busiest climbing seasons yet, the dramatic episode has set off a cascade of finger-pointing among his family, local groups and the expedition companies that operate there. Questions have swirled around how Mr. Sherpa became stranded, who was responsible for rescuing him and whether his employers could have started looking for him sooner.
A Delayed Rescue
Dawa Sherpa’s family said on Friday that he was in stable condition. But they have blamed his employer, a tour company called Himalayan Traverse Adventure, for not launching a search for Mr. Sherpa more quickly. His family filed a police report accusing the company of negligence.
Complicating Mr. Sherpa’s situation is the informal relationship between Himalayan Traverse and a larger tour company, 8K Expeditions, which secured the permit and insurance policy for Mr. Sherpa to work on Everest.
When a sherpa goes missing on Everest, the companies who hire them are typically responsible for launching search efforts, which are carried out by private firms. Neither company began a search after Mr. Sherpa went missing.
After five days, 8K launched a helicopter mission that was unsuccessful. The refuse collectors on foot found him the next day.
“My happiness is beyond words to see my father back,” Mendo Lhamu Sherpa, Mr. Sherpa’s daughter, said in an interview. But she argued that her father had been “exploited and completely abandoned” by his employers.
A representative for Himalayan Traverse disputed that account, saying that the company did not begin a rescue operation because the weather conditions were too challenging. “Sending someone to search under such conditions would have put that person’s life at risk,” said the representative, Angfurba Sherpa.
Pemba Sherpa, executive director at 8K Expeditions, said in an interview that the responsibility to mount a search lay with Himalayan Traverse, and that his company was not involved in his climb beyond securing the permit.
Angfurba Sherpa of Himalayan Traverse said that it was natural to conclude that a person who had been out of contact for several days was dead. He said that Dawa Sherpa had a satellite phone and a walkie-talkie. It was unclear if he had tried to use them to call for help.
Descent Gone Wrong
Dawa Sherpa had been working on Everest since late March, when he left his home in Kathmandu to work on the mountain for the climbing season.
His daughter, said in an interview that her father had been hired as a cook. He told her that Himalayan Traverse had assured him that he would not go higher than Camp 2, at an elevation of about 21,000 feet.
Instead, she said, her father had gone to Camp 4, the final camp before the summit, to work as a high-altitude guide.
Angfurba Sherpa, the company representative, said that Dawa Sherpa had been hired as a porter for Camp 2, but that he had asked to be sent to higher altitudes where he could earn more money.
Among the last people to see him before he went missing was Chris Thrall, a British climber who reached the summit on May 29 with another guide. In a video posted on YouTube and in a text message exchange on Friday, Mr. Thrall said that he had been descending alongside Mr. Sherpa, who at one point sat down to rest.
Mr. Sherpa urged Mr. Thrall to continue without him — which is not uncommon on the mountain, Mr. Thrall said. “It had been a long summit push,” he said, adding that a journey that should have taken them five days had taken 11. “That’s how challenging the conditions were.”
But hours after they parted, when Mr. Thrall stopped to rest at a camp with another climber, he became worried that Mr. Sherpa had not caught up with them.
They reported him missing when they reached a camp farther down the mountain, some 19 hours later.
Tshering Sherpa, the chief executive of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nongovernmental body that operates a range of programs on Mount Everest, said that the aerial search on Wednesday came only after his group had put pressure on Himalayan Traverse and 8K.
The helicopter crew sent up by 8K Expeditions failed to locate him. But Mr. Sherpa may have seen them. In a video taken after his rescue and shared online, he says that he “waved my hands” at the helicopter “but was left unnoticed.”
The next morning, at about 7:30 a.m., members of the pollution control group found him while collecting trash on the Khumbu Icefall, a large, treacherous glacier.
Precisely how Mr. Sherpa managed to survive remains unclear.
“I didn’t think I’d survive,” Mr. Sherpa said in brief interview with BBC News Nepali on Friday from a hospital. “I was left behind because I ran out of oxygen.”
To survive, he said, he ate ice everyday and some chocolates he had in his pockets. ((His wife declined an interview with The Times, saying that doctors had asked him not to speak extensively.)
Mr. Sherpa told rescuers earlier that he had become disoriented after he ran out of oxygen, according to Buddhi Bahadur Sarki, one of the rescuers. Somehow, he trekked down from where he had parted ways with Mr. Thrall and past two lower camps. Mr. Sherpa told rescuers that he had been trapped in a crevasse for two days before finding a way out.
Rescuers took him on a stretcher to Gorak Shep, a stop before base camp, and gave him noodle soup, two chocolates and a bottle of Sprite, Mr. Sarki said.
He was then airlifted to a private hospital in Kathmandu.
Each year, between 700 and 1,000 climbers, guides and porters try to reach the summit of Mount Everest, providing a major source of revenue for the Nepali government. The 2026 season broke records, including the most climbers to ascend to the summit in one day.
