A Nepali climbing guide feared dead on Mount Everest has been found alive, crawling down toward Base Camp six days after he was last seen — by which point his wife and daughter had already begun funeral rituals for him. Dawa Sherpa, 52, also known as Hillary Dawa Sherpa in honour of the pioneering New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary, was discovered on Thursday morning by a cleaning crew sliding slowly through the Khumbu Icefall, a treacherous glacier just above Base Camp. He had frostbite on his hands but was otherwise in relatively good health. A rescue helicopter flew him to HAMS Hospital in Kathmandu, where he is awake and speaking. His daughter, Mhendo Lhamu Sherpa, said the family had been on the second day of a multi-day funeral ritual when news broke. "We first heard about it on the local news," his wife Damu Sherpa said. "When we first heard, we could not be sure if that person was indeed our father," his daughter added, "so to be certain we asked for photos to be sent."

Dawa Sherpa had last been seen on 29 May near the Yellow Band above Camp 3, at roughly 7,200 to 7,500 metres — well within the so-called "death zone," where atmospheric pressure is so low that oxygen levels cannot sustain human survival for long. He was guiding a Polish climber for Kathmandu-based company Himalayan Traverse when the group began its descent. British climber and former Royal Marine Chris Thrall, who was descending alongside them, recalled asking Dawa if he was all right after he stopped to rest. "He said: 'Yes, yes, fine Chris, please go, go!'" Thrall recounted. Further down, Thrall encountered the Polish client struggling without oxygen and frostbite, and guided him to safety, trusting that the veteran Sherpa — who had summited Everest many times — would follow. He never arrived. An aerial search earlier in the week had found nothing, and Thrall posted a video tribute on Wednesday believing Dawa had died.

The crew that found Dawa belongs to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, which each season installs the ladders and fixed ropes on Everest's standard routes, then removes them and clears debris once climbers have gone. Dawa and his Polish client were among the last people on the mountain as the climbing season drew to a close. Pemba Sherpa, executive director of 8K Expeditions, which coordinated the search, called it "a true self-rescue" and said Dawa likely sheltered in tents along the route to survive the bitter cold. "As far as I know, no one has survived alone at that altitude on Everest so far," he said.

The survival has been widely described as miraculous by Nepal's mountaineering community. "Sherpas are built tough growing up in the mountains," said Ang Tshering Sherpa, a leading figure in the community. "If there was someone else in his place, they might not have survived." The episode comes at the close of Everest's busiest recorded season: more than 1,000 climbers and guides reached the summit this May, a season that began late after a large ice block on the lower route took roughly two weeks to clear. Five people have died on the mountain this season. Mountaineering experts have long raised concerns about the volume of climbers on the peak, warning that overcrowding can create dangerous queues in the death zone, where every extra minute costs vital energy and oxygen. Mount Everest, which rises to 8,849 metres on the border of Nepal and Tibet, was first summited on 29 May 1953, by Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary.