The 84-year-old climber Carlos Soria abandons his attempt to summit Dhaulagiri after a sherpa fell on him
It can't be…. still. Carlos Soria was addressing his fourteenth attempt to crown Dhaulagiri, one of the two summits that he is missing to be the oldest mountaineer to reach the top of the 14 eight-thousanders. This time he has not been able to get it due to an accident he has suffered with one of his sherpas.
Soria “has reported a leg problem at 7,400 meters while climbing to the summit,” Mingma Sherpa, director of Seven Summit Treks, the agency in charge of the expedition, told Efe.. A helicopter is being mobilized to rescue him, he said.. And the problem is that one of his Sherpas accidentally fell on his leg, “causing an injury to his tibia.”
The mountaineer's team had reported that Soria was already at the Dhaulagiri III camp (7,200 meters), at the foot of the last section before the summit, from where he would try the last push to crown the mountain.
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Soria arrived in Nepal last March to try to conquer Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain on the planet with 8,167 meters of altitude, accompanied by the Spanish climber, Sito Carcavilla.
However, the prolonged snowfalls delayed their ascent for several weeks, waiting for a window of good weather that did not appear until the last few days.
The athlete who reached Annapurna at the age of 77 underwent surgery in 2018 for a total knee implantation due to severe osteoarthritis that caused him intense pain.
While Dhaulagiri isn't the most dangerous mountain the veteran climber has climbed, this one has been especially elusive for him.
This season was Soria's fourteenth attempt to reach the Dhaulagiri summit, after his first attempt in 1998, a plan that he was forced to abandon twice in 2021, and again in the spring of 2022 due to bad weather. .
This is the first time that Soria has been rescued from a mountain, something that the climber highlighted last year in an interview with EFE as an achievement due to his prudence and experience.
Only Dhaulagiri and Mount Shisha Pangma, in Tibet, remain for Soria to become the oldest mountaineer to reach the top of the 14 eight-thousanders.