Sherpa guide missing for a week on Mount Everest rescued while crawling to base camp

KATHMANDU, Nepal -- A Sherpa guide was found alive on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and a helicopter was flying him to a hospital Thursday, rescuers said.

Dawa Sherpa was last seen around May 29 descending the mountain, but he did not make it to base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled.

Dawa was located by a cleaning crew Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall just above the base camp, said Pemba Sherpa of 8K Expeditions, which was coordinating the search.

He was quickly carried down to safety and given food and water. A rescue helicopter picked him up and was flying him to a hospital.

Though the Sherpa guide was missing since last week, there was delay in organizing a search team. An aerial search this week couldn't find him.

The team that spotted him was part of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, which lays the ladders and ropes on the route at the start of each climbing season and then removes the equipment and cleans up the site after the climbers have left.

Dawa, 52, works for a small Kathmandu-based company Himalayan Traverse, and he was guiding a Polish climber. He comes from the town of Okhaldhunga, south of Everest.

More than 1,000 climbers and their guides scaled Everest this May, which was the busiest climbing season ever on the world's highest mountain.

This year's climbing season began late because of a massive ice block on the route just above the base camp that took about two weeks to clear.

The 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) high peak was first climbed on May 29, 1953, by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay.