Climber conquers Everest before fatal blindness

Peter Kinloch's body may never be recovered from the frigid heights of Mt Everest. Photo / Supplied

British climber Peter Kinloch was on the roof of the world, in bright sunlight, taking photographs of the Himalayas below, "elated, cheery and bubbly".

But Mt Everest is now his grave, for only minutes later, he suddenly went blind and eventually had to be abandoned to die from the cold.

As the team descended, Kinloch's guides noticed that he seemed to lose co-ordination. He would slip and stumble, then resume walking.

After an hour, he made a surprising request to the team leader, David O'Brien, to be shown how to get down the ladders. At first he said he was having difficulty seeing, then he admitted that he could not see anything.

It took four hours for O'Brien and a sherpa to help the stricken climber down to Mushroom Rock, barely 300m below the summit. Two more sherpas arrived, and for the next eight hours they all struggled to bring Kinloch, 28, down the mountain.

But they were now dangerously close to needing rescue themselves, and had to abandon him and struggled back into camp suffering from hypothermia and minor frostbite.

Kinloch's body may never be recovered. He is the 30th climber to die on the mountain in the past five years. He died last Thursday but the news was made public only yesterday, on the EverestNews website.

"On the summit Peter was elated cheery and bubbly. Earlier, during the expedition, while dining with the team, he had said that climbing Everest would be the realisation of a dream he had had for 25 years. While standing atop Everest, Peter took summit photos with the team. Conditions were sunny, but extremely cold, windy, with blowing snow and some cloud."

The IT specialist, who worked for Merseyside Police, had an ambition to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Everest was the fifth.

Retinal haemorrhages - bleeding from the cells at the back of the eye - are a relatively common complaint of mountain climbers. High altitude causes the blood to thicken, increasing blood pressure, which can lead to the seepage of blood from cells into surrounding tissues.

Some researchers have found that more than a quarter of climbers on an Everest expedition are affected by retinal haemorrhages. Normally, they are minor, with no noticeable effect on vision, and resolve themselves within weeks of a return to low altitudes.

- INDEPENDENT