South Asia - AFP |
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Four years after losing part of leg, he stands on top of world
KATHMANDU (AFP) - Four
years after he lost part of a leg in a traffic accident, Nawang Sherpa was
standing on the top of the world.
The 30-year-old Nepalese man, who has a
prosthetic left leg from the knee down, has conquered Mount Everest (news
- web
sites). But he said that scaling the highest peak, a feat that has
daunted so many experienced climbers before him, was "not so
difficult." When he reached the the 8,848-meter
(29,028-foot) summit on May 16, Sherpa said he thought back to July 2000 when
he was knocked down by a public bus. "I just remembered the moment of
the accident, and the agony that I experienced after it," Sherpa said. "After
reaching the summit, I was dumbfounded for some time as I forgot I was standing
on the top of Earth," he told AFP. "With my successful Everest
ascent, I realised that people with disabilities should also be given the
opportunity to show their skills rather than just be the objects of
sympathy." Sherpa, who brought bottled oxygen, made
it to the top of Everest in 11 hours and 15 minutes by climbing up the South
Col route. "I did not find it so difficult when I climbed to the summit
of Mount Everest from our final camp set up at an elevation of 7,900 meters
(25,920 feet)," Sherpa said. It was faster -- but more demanding --
on the way down. "It took me six hours to descend to the South Col from
the summit and I found climbing down with an artificial leg was
difficult," he said. After Sherpa's ascent, a Nepal
Mountaineering Association official erroneously said that the 30-year-old had
two artificial legs. Sherpa, as befits his name, is an
experienced climber. The Sherpas, a mountain people, have long been the
forgotten guides who assist Himalayan climbs -- the most famous being Tenzing
Norgay, who with Edmund Hillary first conquered Everest on May 29, 1953. The
first physically challenged person to conquer Mount Everest was Tom
Whittaker, an American whose foot had been amputated, in May 1998. It was that same year that Nawang
Sherpa, two years before he would be hit by a bus, made an unsuccessful
attempt to climb Mount Annapurna with Tom McMillan, an executive from San
Francisco. McMillan, learning later that his young guide had been hurt,
helped raise funds for his prosthetic leg. In 2003, amid golden jubilee
celebrations for Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa's historic ascent, McMilan
and Nawang Sherpa decided to forge their own partnership to conquer Mount
Everest. McMillan recalled a moment of fright going up Mount Everest when
their expedition, which also included three other climbers, was supported
only by a nylon rope.
"The rope was about six milimeters
thick and I was very scared of the possibility of the rope snapping and
throwing all of us down," McMillan said. But the team made it up and McMillan
credited Nawang Sherpa with being a "courageous climber" -- who
conquered Everest as fast as anyone who was not physically challenged. |