Spanish climber Carlos Soria, 84, suffered a leg injury while attempting to summit Dhaulagiri Peak, forcing him to abandon his fourteenth attempt. for reaching one of the two eight thousand that remains to become the oldest person to tread the fourteen highest peaks on the planet.
Soria “has reported a leg problem at 7,400 meters while climbing to the summit,” Mingma Sherpa told Efe, director of Seven Summit Treks, the agency in charge of the expedition.
The group of climbers who ascended with him He helps him down to Camp II, where a helicopter is being mobilized to rescue him.
According to the team of the mountaineer from Avila, The accident occurred when in full ascent, a Sherpa fell on him causing an injury to his tibia, he indicated on social networks.
“Carlos slipped when he was at almost 8,000 meters and fell a few meters below,” Karma Gyalje Sherpa, a Seven Summit Treks operations manager.
“His condition is stable”, assured.
Soría will be evacuated from the mountain today if the rescuers manage to move him from the accident site to camp two before nightfall, otherwise, “it will be evacuated tomorrow morning,” Gyalje Sherpa said.
The mountaineer’s team had reported yesterday that Soria was already in camp III of Dhaulagiri (7,200 meters), at the foot of the last section before the summit, from where he would try the last push to crown the mountain today.
Soria arrived in Nepal last March to try to conquer Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain on the planet. with 8,167 meters of altitude, accompanied by the also Spanish climber, Sito Carcavilla.
The athlete who reached Annapurna at the age of 77 underwent surgery in 2018 for a total knee implantation due to severe osteoarthritis that caused him intense pain.
Although Dhaulagiri is not the most dangerous mountain he has climbed, this one has been especially elusive.
This season was Soria’s fourteenth attempt to tread the summit of Dhaulagiri, after his first attempt in 1998, a plan he was forced to abandon twice in 2021, and again in the spring of 2022 due to bad weather.
This is the first time that Soria has been rescued from a mountain, something that the climber highlighted last year in an interview with EFE as an achievement due to his prudence and experience.
Soria, who has climbed mountains since he was 14 years old, is until now the only mountaineer in the world who has managed to ascend ten eight-thousanders after reaching the age of sixty, and his final challenge is to reach the 14 eight-thousanders
Only Dhaulagiri and Mount Shisha Pangma, in Tibet, remain for Soria. to become the oldest mountaineer to reach the top of 14 eight thousand.