85-year-old dies on Mount Everest during world record bid

An 85-year-old ex-Gurkha who was attempting to reclaim his title as the world’s oldest person to summit Mount Everest died at base camp on Saturday.

Min Bahadur Sherchan was on a bid to reclaim a title that he lost to Japanese mountaineer Yuichiro Miura in 2013. “He passed away at the base camp today at 5:14pm,” Gyanendra Shrestha, an official with the tourism ministry who is at the 5,380 metres (17,600 feet) camp, told AFP.

The former soldier became the world’s oldest climber to summit Everest in 2008 when
he was 76, but he lost the record five years later when Miura summited the 8,848-metre peak at the age of 80.

Speaking to AFP this year before returning to Everest, the slightly hard of hearing grandfather said he just wanted to prove to himself that he could still make it to the top of the world.