Chhanda gayen biography books

Gayen, who scaled Everest last year, and three other clumbers from her state had successfully summited Kanchenjunga (8586 metres) last Sunday.

On Tuesday, she and the sherpas were climbing down from a lower (8,505m), Yalung Kang, peak of the world's third-highest mountain when an avalanche struck at 5,500 metres, officials said.

"The weather deteriorated while the climbers were at 7,300 metres. They were caught in incessant snowfall and got buried," inspector Krishna Dev Chaudhary of Sankhuwasabha district told Republica daily.

Police say the three climbers were trying to get back to a lower camp on the mountain due to bad weather when they got buried around 11 am on Tuesday.

Attempts to recover the bodies buried under snow have proved futile due to inclement weather. Officials say they will resume the search on Friday.

Temba Sherpa, 24, and Dawa Wanju Sherpa, 28, are the two Sherpa guides who have died with Gayen. Two other Sherpa guides and another Indian climber, who is yet to be identified, are reported to be safe.

Sixteen Sherpa guides were killed in an avalanche on Everest last month. The incident, the single biggest accident in the mountain's history, ended the spring climbing season on the world's tallest peak.

SUNITA HAZRA carefully settled into a plastic chair in her house in Barasat, a town 26 kilometres north-east of Kolkata. One of her arms was in a plaster cast, and a few fingertips were blackened with frostbite—they were due to be amputated in a week. A stray cat prowled at the door. Hazra asked her husband, Sudeb, where her medicines were. Then, she recounted the tragic and controversial climbing expedition to Everest that she had been part of a couple of months earlier, in May last year.

Hazra had embarked on the expedition along with three teammates—Subhash Pal, Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh—all of whom died during the climb. While Pal had run out of oxygen, Nath and Ghosh died from exposure. She herself escaped death by a whisker, after she was rescued by Leslie John Binns, a British climber, who abandoned his summit quest after he found Hazra in distress.

Hazra told me that at one point, while she was struggling to make her way down to safety, she came across Bir Bahadur, a Nepali mountain guide who had been hired to help Pal. She asked him how Pal was doing.

“Woh udhar baith gaya”—he sat down over there, Bahadur replied. Hazra immediately knew what had happened. “Did anyone try to pull him up?” she wondered as she narrated her account. “I was also about to die, and what if Pasang”—her Nepali guide—“just said, ‘Didi udhar baith gayi.’”

But she survived. After the expedition, Hazra claimed she had reached the mountain’s summit, but the Nepal government refused to give her a summit-success certificate, as she was unable to produce required evidence—videos, photos or testimony of a mountain guide.

West Bengal, whose popular imagination is immortally linked to its rivers, fields and forests, also has an eccentric, yet pervasive, addiction to mountaineering.

Neither the expedition nor the controversy that followed has diminished her love for the mountains. As a child, Hazra recalled reading stories of expeditions published in t

Indian mountaineer (1979–2014)

Chhanda Gayen (Bengali: ছন্দা গায়েন; 9 July 1979 – 20 May 2014) was an Indian climber, martial artist, explorer, and teacher of self-defense. She is best known for being the first, and fastest, Indian to climb two eight-thousanders, Mount Everest and Lhotse, in one go, which she did on 18 May 2013. She completed the traverse from the summit of Mount Everest to the summit of Lhotse in 22 hours.

Born in a Bengali Kayastha family on 9 July 1979, Gayen was awarded "Sera Avishkar" in Sera Bengali 2013 from ABP Ananda, at the age of 24.

2014 avalanche

On 20 May 2014, she went missing along with two sherpas in an avalanche while descending from the summit of Kanchenjunga in Nepal. All three of them were later declared to have died in the avalanche.

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