A long overdue, heroic story of rescue high on Everest

For the first 29 years of Everest’s climbing history the death rate was 100%. That’s to say that the only two people to climb it, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, (if indeed they climbed it) didn’t come back alive.

Then Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed it in 1953 and came back down again. Suddenly the death rate was down to 50%, and it’s been going down ever since. Today the overall rate is closer to 4%, with close to 300 deaths in total and 7500 successful summits.

This year 563 peo...