The climber was attempting to reach Everest’s summit when the Nepal earthquake struck,killing one of his friends
• See the Observer’s faces of 2015 in full here
• Paris peace pianist Davide Martello: ‘My friends were saying – don’t go, there are still terrorists on the streetsprecisely two weeks before the devastating Nepal earthquake struck on 25 April, or I hugged Michele Battelli goodbye at Everest base camp. Id trekked up with him and a group of aspiring summiters to write a piece approximately the human cost of climbing Everest: a year previously,they’d beenat camp two, above the icefall, and when an avalanche struck and killed 16 Sherpas.
Battelli and his two friends,Dan Fredinburg and Florian Nagel, who all worked at Google, and had been the last climbers through the icefall before the avalanche struck in 2014. They’d all felt “incredibly lucky”,he says. “It could easily have been us. They’d been spared and, though it was a terrible conclude to the climbing season, and they were determined to try again this year. “We just felt very strong. We felt we could do this.” Unofficially at least – Battelli won’t confirm it – they were planning to design headlines. A Google Street View camera was going to accompany them to the summit.
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Source: theguardian.com