May 21 (UPI) — A 50-year-old American physician, who survived a 2015 earthquake in Nepal, died attempting to climb Mount Everest on Sunday morning, authorities said.
That earthquake apparently also led to the demise of the famous Hillary Step, a 39-foot rocky outcrop on the mountain’s southeast ridge that mountaineers’ regarded as the last great challenge before the peak. British mountaineer Tim Mosedale wrote on Facebook after reaching the summit last week: “It’s official — The Hillary Step is no more.” It was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first to scale it in 1953.
Roland Yearwood, a primary care physician at Georgiana Medical Center in Alabama, was part of a team led by American climber Daniel Mazur for the expedition firm SummitClimb.
He was married to another physician, Amrita, and has two college-aged daughters.
Yearwood was in the “death zone” above 26,247 feet, where most of the climbers perish, according to authorities.
“We are trying to confirm the reason,” said Dinesh Bhattarai, director general of Nepal’s department of tourism.
Authorities are still trying to determine whether Yearwood was trying to reach the summit or was on the way down when he died.
On Saturday, Mazur posted on the team’s blog that one member and a Sherpa guide had reached the top of the Everest, with “more on the way.”
In 2015, he was on McKinley when an earthquake triggered an avalanche that killed 18 climbers. He was brought down safely.
In May 2016, pictures posted by the American Himalayan Foundation show that the Hillary Step had apparently changed shape.
“It was reported last year, and indeed I climbed it last year, but we weren’t sure for certain that ‘The Step’ had gone because the area was blasted with snow,” Mosedale wrote on Facebook after reaching the summit for the sixth time. “This year, however, I can report that the chunk of rock named ‘The Hillary Step’ is definitely not there anymore.”
Mountaineers are divided on the future difficulty with some claiming the snow-covered slope will be much easier to climb than the notorious rock-face, but warn that it could create a bottleneck, according to Planet Mountain.
“Not sure what’s going to happen when the snow ridge doesn’t form because there’s some huge blocks randomly perched hither and thither which will be quite tricky to negotiate,” Mosedale wrote on Facebook.
One other climber died and another was reported missing Sunday.
Ravi Kumar, a climber from India, has gone out of contact from the balcony area after he was descending to lower camps after standing atop the world’s highest peak Saturday, according to the expedition organizer.
Francesco Enrico Marchetti, a 53-year-old Australian climber, was killed when he was descending to the lower camps from the North Col route on Everest on Sunday morning, according to the Tibet Mountaineering Association.
