After Hiker, 17, Suffered 'Hallucinations' in Mt. Everest's 'Death Zone,' She Was Forced to Make a Heartbreaking Decision (Exclusive)

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As a little girl, Bianca Adler would sit cross-legged on the floor, flipping through her family’s picture books of Mount Everest — mesmerized by the snow-dusted peaks and climbers standing at the top of the world. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is beautiful,’ ” she recalls to PEOPLE.

Transcript

00:00I had it always in the back of my mind ever since I was really little, but I hadn't done

00:05enough climbing to sort of understand what that really means to climb Everest.

00:10The start of the Everest expedition is a trek to Everest Base Camp, which a lot of people

00:30do, so it's about 10 days of hiking.

00:34Once we reach Camp 3, we need to start using the bottled oxygen because there is such little

00:50oxygen up there.

00:51It feels horrible, really.

00:58You're in what's called the death zone above 8,000 metres, and that's just where no human

01:03can really survive for an extended period of time just because there is such little oxygen.

01:10There's only about 30% of the oxygen that there is down here.

01:18Climbing up this steep face, there's wind blowing snow everywhere.

01:24I couldn't see anything.

01:26It's pitch black because the sun had just set.

01:31I didn't want to risk my hands or my toes or my life for just a potential summit of Everest.

01:47My face looked very, very burnt.

01:54It looked very dark on my cheeks because of all of the snow blowing on my face and just

02:00sort of burning my skin a little bit.

02:02I did not expect them to sort of get as many views as they did and it just makes me so happy

02:19that more people and more girls are getting out in the outdoors and challenging themselves

02:24and doing something new and I think that, yeah, that really, really means a lot to me.

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