Missing for Six Days on Everest, With No Food, Water or Oxygen — How Dawa Sherpa Survived

For six days in early summer 2026, nobody knew if Hillary Dawa Sherpa was alive. The 52-year-old mountain guide had vanished above Everest Base Camp with no food, no water and no supplemental oxygen — and when he was finally found, he wasn't walking. He was sliding and crawling down the ice.

Dawa was guiding a Polish client down from high on Everest's south side when the two became separated at around 24,600 feet — roughly 1,600 feet below the altitude climbers call the Death Zone, where the air holds barely a third of the oxygen available at sea level. His client continued down alone and reached Base Camp safely. Dawa did not.

For the next six days, he was simply gone. No search party can move fast at that altitude, and the Khumbu Icefall — the shifting, cracking river of ice above Base Camp that every Everest climber must cross — is one of the most dangerous stretches on the mountain even in daylight, with a rope and a plan. Trekkers on a fully supported walk to Everest Base Camp already feel the altitude by 17,000 feet; Dawa survived nearly a week exposed far above that, with nothing.

He was finally spotted on Thursday, 4 June — not by a dedicated rescue party but by a garbage-collection crew working for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, the organisation that hauls discarded oxygen bottles and expedition waste off the mountain each season. They saw a figure moving strangely in the Icefall, more than 6,600 vertical feet below where he had disappeared. “He was found in a condition where he was slowly sliding down through the icefall. It is in itself an astonishing incident,” Pemba Sherpa of 8K Expeditions told reporters at the time.

A rescue helicopter lifted him to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu. He had severe frostbite on both hands and was exhausted, but conscious — lucid enough to recognise his daughter at his bedside. “He recognised me, is good and speaks,” she told reporters outside the hospital. “We are happy.”

What this means for trekkers

The Icefall has taken Sherpa lives before. On 18 April 2014, an avalanche off Everest's West Shoulder swept through it and killed 16 Nepali guides in a single morning — still the deadliest day in the mountain's history, and the disaster that forced the industry to finally confront how much risk its guides absorb on behalf of paying clients. Dawa's survival, twelve years later, is the rare version of that same story with a different ending.

Every year, thousands of foreign trekkers walk directly beneath the route where Dawa disappeared on their way to Everest Base Camp or the tougher Three Passes circuit. None of them enter the Icefall itself — that's reserved for summit expeditions — but his story is a reminder of how fast the margins change above 24,000 feet, and of exactly who is carrying the real risk up there.

Source: ABC News

Cover photo: mhtoori .com via Pexels (Pexels License).