Everest ‘morgue’ not enough to deter Canadian climber

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This article was published 23/05/2012 (5077 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An Ottawa woman, who survived a deadly storm that made Mount Everest look like “a morgue” on Sunday morning, is wondering whether to take another run at the summit of the world’s tallest mountain.

Sandra Leduc was hours away from reaching Everest’s peak in the early morning of May 20 when her group was turned back by a storm that took the lives of four climbers, including another Canadian woman, Shriya Shah-Klorfine.

“My wife was someone who lived life to its fullest, with irrepressible energy and vitality,” Shah-Klorfine’s husband, Bruce Klorfine, said in a statement. “She died in the pursuit of her dreams… “

Shah-Klorfine, of Toronto, was killed when the mountainside was hit by strong winds, Dipendra Paude of Nepal’s tourism ministry said.

Leduc has been tweeting and blogging about her experiences on top of the world and said the Sherpa — Himalayan natives hired as guides — called it “the worst weather he had ever seen.”

Climbing down to the nearest camp, Leduc described seeing “lots of dead or dying bodies” and said she thought she “was in a morgue.”

Her brother, Kevin Leduc, tweeted Tuesday he had spoken to her and she was going to rest overnight at Everest Base Camp before heading back up the mountain. She intended to go up one camp at a time and had not decided whether to make another bid for the summit.

This isn’t the first time Leduc, a lawyer for the federal government, has faced adversity on her trek. While navigating through the Khumbu Icefall, a treacherous part of the Everest climb, Leduc wrote she saw a ladder covered in blood from an earlier accident that killed a guide.

Nepalese officials said conditions have been hazardous this year, with high winds and heavy snowfall delaying the construction of makeshift bridges over precipices.

After the departure of a Dutch woman last week, Leduc is the only female left on the climbing team, SummitTrek. But now, Leduc faces the question of going on in a season that has claimed multiple lives.

Leduc has led an adventurous life, which was tallied in a profile published this spring in a Department of Justice Canada newsletter. The daughter of a diplomat, Leduc entered McGill law school at age 17 and joined the Department of Justice in 2002. She spent two years in Afghanistan with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and is scheduled to serve as legal adviser with the Canadian International Development Agency in Pakistan when she returns from Nepal. She has lived in nine countries on four continents.

The Everest quest is part of her bid to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents.

 

— Postmedia News, with files from The Canadian Press