Inglis set to lose his fingertips to frostbite

Mark Inglis will remember the final push for the Everest summit as the most challenging part of his triumphant ascent, but also as a fatal blow to his prospects as a concert pianist.

"The ends of a few of my fingers are an interesting colour, a bit black, and will probably drop off," Inglis told the Herald last night while en route to a medical clinic in Kathmandu, Nepal.

"But that's all right. I couldn't play the piano before, and I guess I won't be playing in the future."

On May 15, Inglis, 47, became the first double amputee to reach the 8850m Mt Everest summit in a journey that tested his endurance and skill through an ice and snow adventure in minus 40C temperatures.

He arrived in the Nepalese capital yesterday relieved, back in the arms of wife Anne and nursing his injuries.

"The journey did a bit of work on the [leg] stumps, a combination of knocking them around a bit and a bit of frostbite.

"We'll be on a plane first thing tomorrow back to New Zealand, and I'll probably spend a few days in hospital to get the stumps right. And then the frostbite to the fingers ... That's life."

So was it worth it?

"Hell yes! You know what Sir Ed said, and to 'knock the bastard off' is something I really understand now.

"It was bloody hard, harder than I expected, and for that it was well worthwhile.

"It's something I went out to do for my own benefit, disabled people's benefit, and primarily it's an achievement that I'll never have taken away from me."

Inglis said the true test was soldiering on through doubt and freezing temperatures during the final push for the summit.

"Eight hours going up and eight coming down, it was very, very hard, and it's just a measure of how well you think and how hard you go.

"And she's a touch chilly up there. I even got a bit of frostbite under my chin where there was a gap between my oxygen mask and my balaclava. It was such a cold day, minus 35 to minus 40 degrees."

Inglis said it made reaching the summit that much more rewarding, though he didn't hang around long once there.

"We touched the top and then it was a bit like, 'Shit it's cold, let's get out of here'.

"The top of the world looks pretty flat, everything else looks so low.

"It's a bit like standing on top of Mt Cook and you look around and you think, 'Those other mountains aren't all that big'. But to see the curvature of the Earth is pretty neat.

"When you're well above 8000m you just don't realise how alien a place it is.

"You cannot afford to spend any time there, especially in those temperatures, or you won't get home. And I wanted to come home."

Inglis defended the party's decision not to call off the ascent to help 34-year-old British climber David Sharp, who was sheltering under a rock but later died on the mountain.

"The trouble is, at 8500m it's extremely difficult to keep yourself alive, let alone keep anyone else alive," he told Close Up.

"On that morning, over 40 people went past this young Briton, I ... radioed and [expedition manager] Russ said, 'Mate, you can't do anything. He's been there X number of hours without oxygen, he's effectively dead'.

"So we carried on. Of those 40 people who went past, no one helped him except for people from our expedition."

Sharp's parents did not blame climbers for neglecting their son.

"Your responsibility is to save yourself - not to try and save anybody else," Sharp's mother, Linda, told the Evening Gazette newspaper in Britain.