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The rule in the Death Zone of Everest is: don't stop for dying strangers. This is the story of the man who broke it
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Watch More:
The Deadly Race To Conquer K2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWkzbKyLbL0&t=1762s
He Gave Up Everest To Save Liu Chunyang At 27,900 Feet. She Underpaid Him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCaVisVQaUs&t=13s
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-------------------------------------------
Watch More:
The Deadly Race To Conquer K2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWkzbKyLbL0&t=1762s
He Gave Up Everest To Save Liu Chunyang At 27,900 Feet. She Underpaid Him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCaVisVQaUs&t=13s
-------------------------------------------
More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge
For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com
Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/
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TravelTranscript
00:00The rule in the Death Zone is don't stop for dying strangers. This is the story of the man who
00:06broke it.
00:07May 18th, 2023. 27,300 feet. Mount Everest.
00:14Ravishandran Tharumalingam is dying. His oxygen tank is empty. His body violently shakes as he clings to ropes with frostbitten
00:22fingers for balance.
00:23He has no guide, no working radio in his hand. His only safety net is a thin summit suit and
00:30whatever internal body heat he has left to burn.
00:34All around him, climbers step past, pushing upward. This is the end. Until this Sherpa showed up.
00:42And what he did next is one of the most extraordinary rescues ever attempted on Mount Everest.
00:48Welcome to the Extreme Edge, where the stakes are high, but nobody's just a headline.
00:54Before this story is over, Gelge Sherpa is going to execute the most dangerous, physically impossible rescue in modern mountaineering
01:03history.
01:04And the man he saved is going to go on national television and pretend his rescuer never even existed.
01:11On May 18th, 2023, Gelge Sherpa was to guide a Chinese client to the highest point on Earth.
01:19The plan was for both he and his client to leave Camp 4 at 26,000 feet in the dead
01:24of night,
01:25climb the roughly 3,000 vertical feet to the summit in the dark, stand on top by sunrise, and be
01:32back down before the afternoon weather turn.
01:34This had to go right. Gelge and his client knew this was probably the best chance they had of summiting
01:41Everest that season.
01:43But in the freezing, pitch-black hours early morning, May 18th, Gelge's headlamp swept across the ice
01:51and caught something that made all their plans completely worthless.
01:55It was a man slumped against the fixed rope and shivering violently, as though his entire body was trying to
02:03generate the last bit of heat it had left.
02:06His downed suit was covered in frost, his oxygen tank was completely empty.
02:12In temperatures plunging to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit, Gelge knew that violent movement was his brain slipping in and out
02:20of consciousness,
02:21desperately trying to generate heat that simply wasn't there.
02:26But the most horrifying detail was his hands.
02:29As the man clung desperately to the frozen, climbing rope, Gelge could see that his hands were severely maimed.
02:36He was missing eight of his fingers.
02:39But still, those damaged, nearly destroyed hands were gripping the fixed rope with all the strength a dying man could
02:46muster.
02:47From where Gelge stood, the man appeared to be completely alone.
02:51There was no guide standing over him, checking his regulator.
02:55No teammates around, calling for help, trying to rub warmth into his limbs.
03:00He couldn't even see a radio crackling in his pocket.
03:03Just this strange figure, stranded in the most hostile environment on Earth, waiting for death.
03:09And the darkest part of this scene was that as he hung there, slowly suffocating in the thin air,
03:16Gelge could see other climbers just like him reach this dying man,
03:20unclip their safety carabineers from the exact same fixed rope he was clinging to,
03:26carefully step around his freezing body, clip back in on the other side, and continue their march to the top.
03:34Gelge wasn't shocked.
03:35You shouldn't be either.
03:36At 27,300 feet, there is so little atmospheric pressure that oxygen cannot effectively cross into your bloodstream.
03:45The body begins to eat its own muscle tissue for fuel.
03:49It's not a place you can afford to stop for anyone you are not responsible for.
03:54And something even worse was going on here.
03:57This has not been a great climbing season.
03:59Nepal, in 2023, issued a record 478 permits to foreign climbers, which meant massive, slow-moving traffic jams of climbers
04:10on the fixed ropes up Everest during summit pushes.
04:14Even worse, brutal weather meant summit attempts had been scattered throughout the month,
04:19and every team out there knew that once a summit opportunity showed itself, there was unlikely to be a second
04:24chance.
04:25By May 18th, the 2023 season was already on track to become the deadliest in Everest's entire history.
04:33Seventeen people would eventually lose their lives this season, and Ravi Chandran was about to be one of them.
04:40Because climbers operate by the only brutal math that makes sense in a death zone.
04:46If I try to carry this stranger down this mountain, the extra effort will drain my oxygen, stop my heart,
04:53and kill us both.
04:55Gelge should have done the same.
04:57Nobody would have blamed him.
04:58After all, the only reason he was on Everest this season was to guide his client up and down safely.
05:04Over the roaring minus-22 degree wind, Gelge told his client this summit push was over.
05:12They were not going to the top of the world today, and they were turning around to save this man.
05:18The client had every reason to be angry.
05:21He spent thousands of dollars and endured months of brutal training.
05:25He was just hours away from achieving that lifelong dream.
05:28And turning a paying customer around for a stranger from a completely different expedition team is a breach of contract.
05:36It means a ruined reputation, a massive financial dispute, and failing the one job you were hired to do.
05:43He could even sue Gelge over it.
05:46But, against all commercial logic, the client agreed.
05:51The summit could wait.
05:53Ravi Chandran couldn't.
05:54But, deciding to save someone at 27,300 feet was only the beginning.
06:01Now, Gelge had to actually get him down.
06:04There was no rescue sled waiting for them, and no helicopter could simply fly up and pick them up.
06:10And the man Gelge was trying to save couldn't walk.
06:13He had to somehow take this 180-pound dying adult down the 1,900-foot drop of slick blue ice
06:21between him and the relative safety of Camp 4.
06:25If he tried to drag him down jagged mountain terrain, he would tear his downed suit to shreds,
06:31which definitely would mean the end of this man.
06:35But, before he even figured out what to do with Ravi Chandran,
06:39Gelge had to do something that defied every survival instinct in the human body.
06:44First, he had to take off his own team's precious emergency oxygen and strap it to the dying stranger.
06:52Every climber up there carries enough oxygen for their own trip up and back down.
06:57Nothing extra, because every spare bottle is more weight to haul.
07:02Gelge's tank held his and his client's only supply for the whole day.
07:07And he just gave it out.
07:08It was the right emergency protocol, but it meant one man was breathing oxygen Gelge needed.
07:15That fixed one problem.
07:17It didn't fix the bigger one of moving a full-grown, unconscious man down 1,900 feet of snow and
07:24rock,
07:24when just lifting your own body here is already almost more than your lungs can handle.
07:31Luckily, Gelge had one piece of gear that could actually help.
07:35It was something he'd carried up strapped to the outside of his own pack for a completely different reason.
07:41A thin, foam sleeping mat, the kind climbers use just to keep the cold ground from sucking the heat out
07:48of them at night.
07:49He unrolled it flat in the snow.
07:51Then he dragged the man onto it by the shoulders of his suit,
07:55folded the sides up and over him like wrapping a package,
07:59arms pinned to his sides,
08:01legs pinned together.
08:02And as Gelge pulled loops of climbing rope tight across Ravi Chandran's chest, waist, and ankles,
08:09he made sure to leave his face uncovered so he could keep breathing.
08:14It took Gelge several minutes standing still to tie him properly,
08:19but once he was done, he clipped himself back onto the fixed rope.
08:23All around them at that point was a field of open snow,
08:27and for a few hundred feet, this simple, improvised plan was actually working.
08:33Gelge leaned back against the slope, letting Ravi Chandran slide ahead of him,
08:38and using his crampons-like brakes with every step to keep him from getting away from him.
08:43It was slow, but it was working.
08:46Then, the smooth snow ended, and the slope changed completely into jagged, exposed rock.
08:54Dragging the mat over bare rock would have torn it apart
08:57and slammed Ravi Chandran against stone hard enough to break bones.
09:02There was no way around it.
09:04Gelge's client couldn't help him carry the weight,
09:07because at this extreme altitude,
09:09a paying client's only job is just to survive their own climb down.
09:13So, Gelge, all by himself,
09:16bent down and lifted Ravi Chandran on his own back.
09:20Now that a stranger's full body weight was riding directly on top of his,
09:25Gelge had to be extra careful here.
09:28He tested every foothold with his boot before trusting it with both of their weight,
09:34breathing so hard now that each breath barely seemed to give anything back.
09:38It was still the pitch black, freezing hours of the early morning.
09:44He had gone maybe 200 feet since he lifted Ravi Chandran onto his back,
09:50a painfully slow crawl that had already taken nearly an hour.
09:54He still had about 1,700 more feet to go before he'd even reach Camp 4.
10:00He should have given up.
10:02No one would have known, and even if they did, no one would blame him.
10:07But Gelge just dug in,
10:10and kept carrying this dying stranger down one of the most dangerous stretches of mountain on Earth.
10:16Every single step took total focus,
10:20because all that extra weight strapped on him meant double the work.
10:24If Gelge lost his footing,
10:26the dead weight on his back would drag him right off the edge of the mountain.
10:31Then, he had to trust that the ice wouldn't crack before he could take the next step.
10:37Every so often, he'd stop just long enough to check the small gap in the mat,
10:42where Ravi Chandran's face was still uncovered,
10:45just to know if he was still breathing.
10:47And he had to do all this effort without his oxygen tank.
10:52So, it's no surprise Gelge's body slowly started to shut down.
10:57First, his eyesight,
10:59because the edges of what he could see started turning blurry and gray.
11:03Then, his own legs began shaking on flat sections,
11:08not from cold,
11:09but his muscles were running out of fuel.
11:12More than once, he had to stop,
11:14plant his hands on his knees,
11:16struggling to breathe,
11:17before he could drag himself and the man on his back again.
11:21Then, this is the moment where most rescue missions on Everest fail.
11:26I mean, would you keep moving if you were him?
11:29Your own body's already shutting down on a rescue you've barely begun.
11:33There's still over a thousand feet to go,
11:36but you don't even know if you will survive the next hundred.
11:40Pushing any further at this height, with this weight,
11:43could mean dying right next to the guy you're trying to save.
11:46He should quit.
11:48But somehow, almost unbelievably,
11:51he kept moving.
11:53One careful, exhausting step at a time.
11:56In some places on the way down,
11:59the mountain flattened out into open, snow-covered ground instead of ice.
12:03You'd think that would be easier.
12:05It wasn't.
12:07The snow in these sections was soft enough
12:09that carrying the man on his back
12:11meant Gelge sank in up to his knees with every step.
12:15And when that happened,
12:16he would unstrap the wrapped man from his back,
12:20lower him into the snow,
12:21and drag him by the ropes instead,
12:24across the ground like a sled,
12:25at an altitude where some passenger airplanes fly.
12:29Hours passed this way as the clock dragged past 3 a.m.,
12:33then 4 a.m.
12:36Gelge's entire world narrowed down to the small circle of light from his headlamp,
12:40the sound of his own breathing,
12:43the wind,
12:43and the knowledge that if he stopped,
12:46the entire effort would have been for nothing.
12:49By the time the sun finally came up,
12:51Gelge had carried and dragged this stranger nearly 1,300 feet lower,
12:56down the mountain to a flat,
12:58windswept stretch of ground at around 26,000 feet,
13:01called the South Coal.
13:03The air was a little thicker there,
13:05but they were still deep in the death zone.
13:08He still had thousands of feet left to go to bring this man to safety,
13:12but Gelge's body was completely spent.
13:16It had taken him roughly six straight hours in the freezing dark
13:20just to move less than 2,000 feet,
13:23Ravi Chandran on his shoulders.
13:25It didn't matter what Gelge's mind wanted,
13:28his body was done.
13:30And that would have been the end of this brave but pointless rescue,
13:34but somewhere ahead in the dark,
13:36a second light appeared.
13:39Now, Gelge didn't quite trust his eyes at this point,
13:42because with his body running on fumes after six hours of climbing,
13:46he knew his starving brain could be hallucinating due to the lack of oxygen.
13:51The distant light could have meant nothing at all.
13:55But Gelge kept dragging Ravi Chandran toward it anyway,
13:58because he desperately needed help.
14:02And that light turned out to be just that.
14:05It belonged to another guide named Engima Tashi.
14:09Engima took one look at Gelge and understood immediately.
14:13Without being asked,
14:15he stepped in and lifted the raft man onto his own back,
14:18finally giving Gelge's exhausted body a chance to recover.
14:23Now, working as a team,
14:25taking turns carrying the weight,
14:27the two men kept moving lower.
14:29They needed to reach Camp 3 at roughly 23,500 feet,
14:33because that's about as high as a rescue helicopter can safely fly in the thin air.
14:39And while the Sherpas were fighting gravity on the ice,
14:43help was coming up to meet them.
14:45Because according to Tashi Lakhpa Sherpa,
14:48the founder of 14 Peaks Expedition,
14:50and head of Ravi Chandran's expedition down at Everest Base Camp,
14:54the moment Gelge realized how bad Ravi Chandran's condition was,
14:59he had radioed down too and told him the client was dying.
15:04And Tashi, to his credit,
15:06immediately started coordinating a rescue.
15:08He sent one of his Sherpas up towards Ravi Chandran with an oxygen tank.
15:13He also started organizing a medical helicopter to meet them
15:16as soon as they got low enough.
15:19But none of that could help them yet.
15:21The helicopter couldn't reach them at 27,000 feet,
15:25and the Sherpa carrying the oxygen
15:27still had to fight his way up the same brutal mountain they were trying to descend.
15:31So for the next several hours,
15:33the rescue came down to two men,
15:36one dying climber,
15:37and thousands of feet of ice between them and safety.
15:41It took several more hours of hard, exhausting teamwork
15:45down the steep Lhotse face.
15:47But late that afternoon,
15:50Gelge and Engima finally reached Camp 3.
15:53They had done it.
15:54Right there at Camp 3,
15:56a highly skilled rescue pilot
15:58flew a stripped-down helicopter
16:00up into that dangerously thin air.
16:03Because there was nowhere flat enough for him to land on the steep, icy face,
16:07the pilot hovered the chopper steady above the slope
16:10and dropped a long-line cable.
16:13The Sherpas hooked the climber onto it,
16:16the cable pulled taut,
16:18lifted Ravi Chandran off the ice,
16:21and onto a helicopter that raced down the valley
16:23to an intensive care unit in Kathmandu.
16:27Gelge sat down in the snow.
16:29He was completely spent.
16:31I can only imagine just how fatigued he must have been.
16:34He'd given up his summit,
16:36his oxygen,
16:37and nearly his own life for a complete stranger,
16:39but it worked.
16:41He was alive.
16:42And this is where the story should end.
16:44Except,
16:45what happens next
16:46will make your blood boil.
16:49Because weeks later,
16:50the dying stranger had recovered enough
16:52to travel back home.
16:54And when he landed in Malaysia,
16:56he wasn't just a nameless,
16:58freezing body anymore.
16:59His name was Ravi Chandran Therumalingam.
17:02And to understand the absolute audacity
17:05of what he did next,
17:06you have to understand exactly who this guy was.
17:10He wasn't some naive tourist
17:12who bought a ticket
17:13and got in over his head.
17:14Known back home as Ravi Everest,
17:17he was a 58-year-old
17:18former professional footballer
17:20turned high-altitude obsessive.
17:22His mountaineering resume is legendary.
17:25He was the first man in Malaysia
17:27to summit Everest alone.
17:29He had climbed K2
17:30and other 26,000-foot mountains.
17:33He'd even survived being buried alive
17:35by an avalanche on Manaslu in 2012.
17:38And remember those missing fingers?
17:40Well,
17:41he didn't lose them in a freak accident at home
17:43or even on Everest right before Gelge found him.
17:47He lost eight of his fingers to severe frostbite
17:51on an earlier Everest expedition.
17:53He knew exactly what this mountain was capable of
17:56and he kept coming back anyway.
17:58In fact,
17:59the only reason Ravi Chandran was dying on the balcony that morning
18:03is that he had a highly sponsored,
18:05heavily publicized campaign to summit Everest
18:08and then immediately summit the neighboring peak of Lhotse
18:12all within 24 hours.
18:14It's an excruciating,
18:16elite-level endurance test
18:18that breaks climbers half his age
18:20who actually have all 10 of their fingers.
18:23And the craziest part is that on May 17th,
18:26the day before Gelge found him,
18:29Ravi Chandran had actually reached the summit of Everest,
18:32waved the Malaysian flag for the cameras,
18:34and set a national record with his fourth successful summit.
18:38Unfortunately,
18:39when he was descending,
18:41trying to keep his massive Lhotse double summit dream alive,
18:45he burned through his oxygen too fast.
18:47His body,
18:49pushed past the absolute limit of human endurance,
18:52completely gave out.
18:54That's why he collapsed on the fixed ropes near the balcony,
18:58stranded and suffocating,
19:00until Gelge threw away his own client's summit
19:03to drag him out of the grave.
19:05So now it's June 2023.
19:08Ravi Chandran is back in Malaysia,
19:10and because of his massive resume
19:12and his incredible survival story,
19:14he's treated like a returning hero.
19:16As soon as he was discharged from the hospital,
19:19the media tour began.
19:21He went on national television.
19:23He sat in warm, brightly lit studios,
19:26giving interviews about his harrowing brush with death.
19:29He posted highly publicized updates
19:31to his thousands of followers on Instagram.
19:34And in those initial, carefully curated posts,
19:38Ravi Chandran started handing out the credit for his survival.
19:42He thanked his corporate sponsors
19:44and his partner organizations,
19:46He thanked his expedition company,
19:4814 Peaks.
19:49He even made sure to thank
19:50the medical evacuation insurance company
19:52that paid for the helicopter.
19:54He wrote, and I quote,
19:56I am alive today
19:57because I had the best and dedicated partners.
20:01He did not say a single word about Gelge Sherpa.
20:04The name of the man who found him in the dark stripped off his own oxygen
20:10and strapped Ravi Chandran's dead weight to his spine
20:13for six excruciating hours.
20:16But in the modern era,
20:18you can't just edit out the people who literally spent sweat and tears for you.
20:23Because while Ravi Chandran was doing television interviews,
20:26a video was quietly making its way around the climbing community.
20:30It was a short, shaky clip taken high on the mountain.
20:34It showed a Sherpa struggling down a steep, snowy ridge,
20:38carrying a man wrapped like a mummy in a foam sleeping mat.
20:42The video went massively viral.
20:45The man in the video was actually Engima Tashi,
20:48the second guide who joined Gelge on the rescue.
20:51But then, on May 20th,
20:54Gelge posted a quiet update on his own Instagram.
20:57He didn't post a triumphant summit photo.
21:00He just posted a short video on the mountain.
21:03Then, he wrote,
21:04You may all be wondering, where is the summit photo?
21:08Unfortunately, no summit yet.
21:10At the balcony during our summit push, around 8,300 meters,
21:14I saw someone in danger.
21:16A man who needed rescuing, and no one else was helping.
21:19I made the decision to cancel our client's summit push,
21:23so that I could bring him down to safety before he died up there alone.
21:27I carried him myself all the way to Camp 4,
21:31where a rescue team organized by 7th Summit Treks helped from then on.
21:36I will be back on the mountain soon after regaining energy from a huge task,
21:41but I'm happy to say he's alive and recovering in hospital.
21:46Slowly, everyone started putting the pieces together.
21:48They realized that Gelge had initiated the entire thing,
21:52doing the highest, deadliest part of the carry, completely alone in the dark.
21:57So naturally, people went over to Ravi Chandran's Instagram page,
22:02expecting to see a massive tribute to Gelge.
22:04A post, a heartfelt message, an acknowledgement, anything.
22:08Instead, they discovered something sickening.
22:12Ravi Chandran hadn't just ignored the man who saved his life,
22:15he had actually blocked Gelge on Instagram.
22:18And now, the story that had been so simple on the mountain,
22:22suddenly wasn't simple at all.
22:24Because Gelge's version was that he found Ravi Chandran alone and dying,
22:29and that he had to abandon his client's summit attempt to save him.
22:32But Tashi Lakhpa Sherpa, the head of the 14 Peaks expedition Ravi had signed on to,
22:38told a different story.
22:40According to Tashi, the company had already realized Ravi Chandran was in trouble
22:45and was already organizing a rescue.
22:48They tried to make it sound like Gelge hadn't acted alone,
22:51but had simply stepped in to assist,
22:54an operation the company was already controlling.
22:56And when the climbing world realized that was what was happening,
23:00the internet did not go easy on him.
23:04Within hours, the backlash hit from every direction,
23:07with all of them saying some version of the same thing.
23:10How do you get carried off a mountain by a man who nearly died doing it,
23:14and not even say his name?
23:16To make matters even messier,
23:19Ravi Chandran said that he had almost no memory of what happened on the mountain.
23:23He had been so badly affected by the altitude
23:25that much of the descent was a blur.
23:28But under that wave of crushing public pressure,
23:32Ravi Chandran eventually caved.
23:34A few days later,
23:36he unblocked Gelge's account
23:37and posted a longer message this time,
23:40one that finally listed names.
23:43Gelge's was in it with several other Sherpas
23:46who'd taken part in different stages
23:48of getting him off the mountain.
23:49On the surface, it looked like an apology,
23:52but people who read it closely caught something else.
23:56Even in this corrected version,
23:58Ravi Chandran folded Gelge's name into a list of Sherpas
24:02he'd described as working for his own expedition company,
24:05the same company that had nothing to do with organizing this rescue
24:09until Gelge had already carried him most of the way down alone.
24:13It wasn't really an acknowledgement of what Gelge specifically did.
24:17It read more like crediting the whole staff for a job
24:20any one of them happened to be doing that day.
24:23Now, Gelge Sherpa had every reason to burn this man's career to the ground.
24:29But what he did next is what makes this story even more incredible.
24:33To understand how insulting this PR spin was,
24:36you have to know that Gelge was, in his own right, mountaineering royalty.
24:41This was a man who spent years working on one of the most dangerous jobs on Everest,
24:46an icefall doctor,
24:48one of the small crew of Sherpas who rebuild the route of ladders and ropes
24:51through Everest's Khumbu Icefall at the start of every season.
24:55By 2023, his climbing experience was well beyond Everest.
25:00He had been recruited onto NIMS Persia's legendary Project Possible team,
25:05the squad that blitzed all 14 of the world's 26,000-foot mountain peaks
25:10in six months and six days.
25:12He was the youngest member of the all-Napali squad
25:15that shocked the world with the impossible first-ever winter ascent of K2.
25:21He co-founded his own expedition company, AGA Adventures,
25:25and by his own count,
25:26he had successfully executed more than 55 high-altitude rescues in the death zone.
25:32Gelge had the resume and the respect of the entire climbing world.
25:37One interview could have turned the entire story into a public war,
25:41but he didn't do any of that.
25:43He simply went to Ravi Chandran's edited post and left a single, quiet comment,
25:48Thank you. Hope you are recovering well.
25:52And just moved on.
25:54He didn't need the validation.
25:55When a Reuters journalist finally sat down with Gelge,
25:59they asked him the obvious question.
26:01Why did he do it?
26:02Why give up his client's money, risk his own life,
26:06all for a stranger who couldn't even be bothered to thank him the right way?
26:10Gelge gave a simple answer.
26:12To him, saving one person's life mattered more than spending a whole day praying at the monastery.
26:19The courage Gelge showed that morning proves that the true giants of the Himalayas
26:24aren't the ones paying for the summits.
26:26They're the ones breaking the trail.
26:29And this wasn't the first time Gelge had to do something the rest of the world called impossible.
26:34Two years earlier, he was trapped on a mountain far deadlier than Everest in the dead of winter,
26:40chasing something that had broken every expedition that had ever attempted it before.
26:45On that mountain, there was no rescue waiting for him either.
26:49This next video is all about how he survived.
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