Climbing on Mount Everest was suspended for a day, as hundreds of mountaineers and Sherpas paid emotional tribute to 16 of their fellow guides who died in an avalanche one year ago.
The avalanche tore through a group of Sherpas who were hauling gear up the mountain on the morning of April 18, 2014, sending shock waves through the climbing community.
The disaster triggered an unprecedented shutdown of the 8,848-metre mountain, fuelling demands for better compensation as well as higher death and injury benefit payouts to the Sherpas’ families.
Monks in Kathmandu chanted prayers and played traditional music in a monastery surrounded by family members of one of the avalanche victims, Ang Kaji Sherpa, a single father with five children.
“There is a vacuum in our family, no one to guide or scold us. We are on our own,” his 20-year-old daughter, Chhechi Sherpa, said.
