Roland Yearwood, a 50-year-old doctor from Georgiana, Alabama, had survived the 2015 earthquake.
The Mount Everest has become the graveyard for at least three more climbers, including one American, and an Indian has been reported missing since Sunday.
Roland Yearwood, a 50-year-old doctor from Georgiana, Alabama, was among those who died on Sunday. He reportedly died near the mountain’s summit. Details were not immediately known, said Murari Sharma, a spokesperson for the Everest Parivar Expedition agency, based in Kathmandu.
Yearwood had taken on the world’s highest mountain before, surviving a massive earthquake during his 2015 attempt to scale Everest. He was on the mountain when the avalanche killed 18 climbers. Fortunately, he was brought down safely on that occasion. But luck didn’t favor him this time and he failed to make it.
Yearwood was part of a team led by American climber Daniel Mazur for the expedition firm SummitClimb, according to its Nepal-based partner, Murari K. Sharma.
Yearwood, 50, was a doctor by profession at the Georgiana Medical Center in Alabama. He was trained as a doctor in London and New York and eventually settled in southern Alabama, where he had been a primary care physician for 20 years, according to his biography on the rural health center’s website. He was married to another physician, Amrita, and had two college-age daughters.
“He is always calm,” Amrita Yearwood told a local news site after his first Everest survival. “He does a lot of sports. He is adventurous. He doesn’t get freaked out.”
The other two climbers that died are Slovak Vladimir Strba and Australian Francesco Enrico Marchetti. Search operations continued for Indian climber Ravi Kumar, who was separated from his guide on Saturday.
The death of Strba, 50, on Everest on Sunday, was confirmed by the Nepalese Tourism Ministry official Gyanendra Shrestha. His body was brought to the South Col camp.
Marchetti, a 54-year-old Australian from Queensland, died on the Tibet side of the mountain, after suffering altitude sickness, according to a report in the Himalayan Times.
Search teams continue to look for Kumar, the Indian climber missing since Saturday. He fell sick on his way down from the summit on Saturday and did not make it to the nearest camp. His accompanying Nepalese guide did reach camp, said Thupden Sherpa of Arun Treks and Expedition.
The guide was sick but had managed to drag himself to the camp at South Col, located at 8,000 meters (26,247 feet), Sherpa said, adding that Kumar had frostbite and was receiving oxygen. The guide left Kumar with a supply of supplemental oxygen and went down the mountain to call for rescue. Though the guide made it to the high-altitude Camp 4, teams have not been able to locate Kumar.
“Kumar and his guide reached the 8,850-meter-high (29,035-foot-high) summit about 1:30 p.m. Saturday, which is considered late, and not many climbers were around when they were returning,” Sherpa said.
Three sherpa rescuers were flown by helicopter to Camp 2, from where they were climbing up the mountain to help search for the missing climber.
The number of climbers who have died on Everest during the current spring climbing season, which began in March and runs through this month, has now reached five, with one missing.
The Nepalese Tourism Department issued a record of 375 permits this year to foreigners to scale the world’s highest peak, which is the most since 1953. The increased number of climbers this year is likely because many people were unable to climb in 2014 and 2015, when deadly avalanches disrupted the climbing seasons. The high volume of traffic has fueled concerns about safety issues on the mountain, which continues to suffer environmental degradation.
Guide Tendi Sherpa said that 60 people made it to the top on Sunday.
Sunday was also a busy day for helicopter evacuations, mostly for altitude-related sicknesses, frostbite and snow blindness. He added several teams were planning on climbing all night and expects to reach the summit Monday morning.
“The weather has been pretty bad, especially with high winds, but there were some little keyholes which climbers have been lucky to take advantage of,” a longtime guide, Tendi Sherpa, said in a Facebook direct message from the base camp. “Several teams got lucky but there are also many climbers who had to turn around half way to the summit due to high winds,” he said.
Climbing Everest is an inherently dangerous activity with risks of sicknesses related to high altitude such as cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain that can be fatal. Every spring climbing season in recent years has claimed lives, with more than 280 dying over the years.