Records & People
How a Sherpa guide decides to send you back down the mountain
With altitude symptoms you sleep no higher tonight. The NHS rules, the signs that mean descend now, and what a guide watches that you cannot see in yourself.
High-Mountain & Expeditions
Dawa Sherpa
Dawa writes the high, hard end of the mountains — the 8,000ers, the death-zone maths, the records and the reckonings. He has stood on summits and turned back below them, and he treats both as the job. He does not romanticise altitude and he does not sensationalise the dead; he explains, plainly, why a mountain kills the way it does.
About Dawa
- High-altitude mountaineer
- Khumbu / Everest region
- Writes records & danger, sourced
- Respectful on fatalities
- Corrections: email our team.
Recent articles by Dawa
Safety & Advisories
US measles cases have passed last year’s total, and what to check before you fly abroad
3,471 cases by 17 September, against 2,289 in all of 2025. The CDC wants every traveller aged six months and up vaccinated two weeks before leaving.
Safety & Advisories
Manaslu climbers are racing a storm to the summit, and the forecast is against them
A record 493 permits, two deaths on Sunday, and heavy rain forecast from 24 September. Some teams are climbing, some are waiting, and one has gone home.
Safety & Advisories
How long jet lag actually lasts when you fly east, and what that means for day one
The body clock shifts about an hour a day going east, and Kathmandu is nearly ten hours ahead of New York. Here is how to plan the first days around it.
Records & People
How many Americans have died on Everest, and why nobody can give you a real number
No one publishes an official count by nationality. Here are the American deaths that can be documented since 1963, and what the record actually shows.
Records & People
Nobody stood on top of K2 this summer. Here is what stopped the whole mountain
Forty-one people summited K2 in 2025. In 2026, nobody did. Heavy July snow, a hot August and the fewest permits in two decades, and what it tells climbers.
World Destinations
Altitude sickness doesn't need a mountain, just a flight to Cusco
Altitude illness starts around 2,450 m, and Cusco, La Paz and Lhasa all sit above it. Flying straight in is harder on you than walking to Everest Base Camp.
Records & People
Cho Oyu and Shishapangma are closed again this autumn and every 14-peak climber is funnelled into Nepal
The China-Tibet Mountaineering Association has kept Cho Oyu and Shishapangma shut to foreign teams for autumn 2026, and Manaslu absorbs the whole overflow.
Safety & Advisories
Your Nepal Trekking Guide Just Spent the Week Learning to Keep You Alive Above 4,000m
Days before Nepal's autumn trekking season opens, two of the country's oldest mountain-safety institutions ran back-to-back wilderness first-aid courses for working guides, drilling CPR, patient evacuation and the earliest signs of altitude sickness.
Records & People
Nobody tells you Everest can only be climbed a few days a year, and the jet stream is why
For most of the year the jet stream sits on Everest’s summit. It lifts for a few weeks in May as the monsoon pushes it aside, and only then can anyone climb.
Records & People
Why some 8,000-metre peaks get climbed thousands of times and others almost never
Everest has over 12,000 ascents; Annapurna I and Kangchenjunga barely a few hundred each. The gap between the eight-thousanders is not about height.
Records & People
Everyone has seen the Everest traffic jam photo, this is what standing in that line actually does to you
In 2019 a record 381 permits funnelled onto Everest during just two good-weather days put hundreds of climbers in a single queue above 8,000 m. Eleven died. The crowd, not the mountain, was the danger.