Left for dead on Everest: how a Sherpa guide survived six days and crawled out alive

Every so often the mountains hand back someone they seemed certain to keep. In the final days of the spring 2026 season, Everest gave back Dawa "Hillary" Sherpa — a 52-year-old guide who vanished high on the mountain, was given up for lost, and six days later was found crawling out of the Khumbu Icefall, alive. It is the survival story that has transfixed the Everest world, and it deserves to be told properly.

Key facts

• Dawa "Hillary" Sherpa, 52, a veteran Everest guide

• Last seen 29 May, resting high on the mountain while descending

• Found 6 days later, on 4 June, crawling from the Khumbu Icefall

• Survived roughly 2.5 days trapped in a crevasse

Lost on the descent

Dawa was descending toward Base Camp, guiding a climber, when he disappeared above the upper camps on 29 May. For six days there was no radio contact and no sign of him. In the brutal arithmetic of high altitude, a guide missing that long is, realistically, presumed dead. His family and colleagues braced for the worst.

6days missing

~2.5days trapped in a crevasse

29 Maylast seen, descending

4 Junfound alive at the Icefall

How he survived

The details, as he and rescuers have described them, are extraordinary. Making his way down alone, Dawa tried to jump a crevasse, missed, and fell in — trapped, with almost no hope of climbing out. He kept himself alive for about two and a half days on a few chocolates, some coffee powder, and chewed ice for water. Then chance intervened: a section of the Icefall collapsed, and a block of ice wedged into the very fissure that held him, forming a rough staircase he could climb. From there he crawled, frostbitten and exhausted, down toward Base Camp — where, on 4 June, a garbage-collection crew from the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, out clearing end-of-season rubbish, spotted him and brought him in.

The people who carry the risk

Dawa's survival is a miracle worth celebrating — but it also points at a hard truth. It is Sherpa guides and high-altitude workers who shoulder the greatest danger on Everest, going up and down the deadly Icefall again and again so that clients can summit. This season alone claimed five lives, several of them Nepali workers. Stories like Dawa's make headlines; the everyday risk these men carry rarely does.

What this means for you

If Everest is your dream, honour the people who make it possible. Trek and climb with operators who insure their Sherpa staff properly, pay them fairly, and treat the mountain's dangers with respect — it is the single most important choice you make. We build our Everest trips around exactly that standard, and around the experience and acclimatisation that keep everyone safer.

Dawa "Hillary" Sherpa is recovering. That he is here to recover at all is, by any measure, a miracle of the high Himalaya.

Source: CNN; Outside; Fox Weather; PlanetMountain.

Cover photo: pierre matile via Pexels (Pexels License).