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Everest climber returns to mountain to bury woman he was forced to abandon 9 years ago
In 2007, Ian Woodall, a British climber, returned to Everest to bury the bodies of three climbers he passed on his way to the summit.
One of the climbers, a woman named Francys Arsentiev, was still alive when Woodall reached her during his initial ascent.
Her first words to him were"don't leave me behind."
The grim reality, though, is that Woodall could not have done anything for her without jeopardizing his own life or the lives of his team members.
He was forced to leave her to perish alone.
Climbing Mount Everest has become much safer over the past decade thanks to advances in technology and climbing gear.
Satellite phones allow a climber to stay in contact with base camp to get constant updates on weather systems in the area. A better understanding of exactly what kind and how much gear to take has also caused the death toll to drop dramatically.
She was alone on a mountain shelf when they found her - a frozen, pathetic figure just 800ft below the summit of Everest.
When they eventually reached her she barely had the strength left to speak. But Francys Arsentiev's last words would stay with them for the rest of their lives: "Don't leave me," she begged. "Please don't leave me." In the treacherous terrain of the world's highest mountain, and in temperatures below minus 30C, they had little choice. They stayed with her for as long as they could before abandoning their summit attempt and heading back down for help. In their hearts, however, they knew they were leaving her to die. Scroll down for more .
By the time another climbing party got to her, Fran had already succumbed to the cold. No-one could help her now. It was too dangerous even to contemplate carrying her lifeless body down the North Face from its precarious position on the loose rock shards that formed the steep mountain shelf. And so, for the next nine years, the 40-year-old American would remain a macabre beacon of death at 28,000ft - clearly visible to the many adventurers who would subsequently take the same route to the top. Even today, the bright purple of her climbing jacket still stands out against the snow. The dark-haired young mother still lies in the same, grotesquely distorted position she was in when the other climbers found her, secured by a rope and largely preserved by the sub-zero temperatures. But now - finally - she is about to be afforded some dignity. The British-born climber who had to leave her in May 1998 has gone back to Everest to bury her. Ian Woodall is leading a new expedition to provide a poignant last chapter to a tragedy that continues to haunt the mountain into the next millennium. He will wrap her in an American flag, lay her to rest within sight of the summit she had earlier conquered, and cover her with a cairn of stones and boulders to shield her body from view.
Then he will speak at her graveside - and bring to a close the promise that he and his climbing partner Cathy O'Dowd made that day to do everything they could for her. Yesterday from a camp more than 17,000ft up the North side of Everest, the 50-year-old mountaineer told me by satellite telephone: "It's something I felt I wanted to do, not something I felt obliged to do. We went back for the summit a year later and we could see her perfectly clearly when we began to come down. "I was a little startled to see her still there... until it dawned on me that the mountain would never really consume her. It would always keep her there like that. "At the back of my mind, I hoped someone would eventually do something for her. But of course, the only reason anyone would be up that high is if they're on the way up to the summit or on the way down. "In either case, you really can't devote the hours and the workload required to bury a corpse. "It needed a dedicated mission by someone like me, who's been to the summit a couple of times already and isn't focussed simply on getting to the top. "This will probably be my last expedition, so I thought it would be appropriate to give something back. "It's not good that there are bodies lying on the mountain in full view of other climbers - not good for mountaineering, not good for the families of the people who've died here." Fran, from Telluride, Colorado, died after securing a place in the record books as the first American woman to conquer Everest without supplementary oxygen. She is believed to have collapsed or fallen just below the so-called First Step, some 800ft into her descent, as she climbed down with her Russian husband Serguei Arsentiev. He stayed at her side for a time but is assumed to have died on a fruitless mission to get help, or slid down into the Rongbuk glacier and perpetual obscurity. Mr Woodall and his team came across her as they were attempting to reach the summit. "It's fairly well documented where certain bodies are to be found on Everest - but according to the records, there wasn't supposed to be a body there. Then she moved. Once we knew she was alive, everything changed. We did everything we could for her but everyone knew she didn't really stand a chance. I don't think there's any question we could have done more or less than we did." Scroll down for more .
He and Cathy O'Dowd tried for more than an hour to keep Fran conscious and see if they could move her before deciding it was hopeless. When she slipped into silence they abandoned their climb and descended towards Base Camp, knowing, in reality, that they could not raise help in time to save her. Mr Woodall, a South African with an Army background and a string of climbing achievements behind him, faced a wave of criticism afterwards for effectively leaving Fran to die.
Yesterday he insisted it would have been impossible to save her, adding: "There are things in life that just don't work out in the way you would like them to work out. You can only do what you're able to do at the time. "You can't live in hindsight. Unfortunately, in the risk aversion society we live in today, you're not allowed to have accidents. There's always got to be someone to blame." Likewise Cathy, who later married Mr Woodall and wrote a book about her Everest experiences, said: "Anyone who becomes immobile on a mountain as remote and large as Everest is probably going to die. "I'd had friends who didn't come back, but I'd never watched anyone die. She was dead when the other teams came upon her the following morning." Cathy chose not to go on the burial expedition but said: "I think covering over the body is as much about the living as the dead. "There's an enormous lack of dignity in her circumstances. It's almost like a road sign on the mountain - when you get to Fran, turn left. That's not good for anybody." Fran, who had a young son, Paul, is one of three bodies Mr Woodall is hoping to bury. One is an Indian who was among three to perish in a 1996 storm; the other is David Sharp, who died last May after apparently running out of oxygen on his lone descent from the summit. If he can locate the 34-year-old climber, Mr Woodall plans to shield him only minimally with stones to allow the option of returning his body at some stage to his family in Guisborough, North Yorkshire, should they wish. Completing all three burials will be governed by the weather - and whether Mr Woodall and his two sherpas have the means and stamina to carry out the operation at such high altitude, and in such difficult terrain. He is chronicling his mission on the internet at taoofeverest.com and plans to write a book. "A lot can go wrong at 8,600 metres," he said. But it would be nice to finish one's expedition career by doing something for somebody else, rather than chasing a record or a summit. At least this way we can give everybody back some dignity."
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