Asia, Tibet, Cho Oyu, Various Ascents in the Post-Monsoon

Publication Year: 1996.

Cho Oyu, Various Ascents in the Post-Monsoon. Thirteen teams attempted Cho Oyu, and all were successful via the Standard Route from the west side in Tibet. Most of them were commercially organized. A total of 75 men and two women summitted from September 11 to October 13. On that date, the famous, indestructible Ang Rita Sherpa, who is about 48 years old, became the first person to make four ascents of Cho Oyu. He is best known as the only person to have summitted Everest nine times. He has been to the tops of Dhaulagiri four times and Kangchenjunga once. Amongst the other men were the first South African to this summit and two Sherpas who summitted twice this season. One of the women, Jan Arnold, was from from New Zealand. One Cho Oyu candidate never reached basecamp. A New Zealand mountain guide, Guy Cotter, was a member of the same team as Arnold, and they flew from Kathmandu to Lhasa before going to climb. At his Lhasa hotel one evening he handed in a fax message for his family back home, waited while it was transmitted, and took it away with him to his room. Later that night he was arrested, taken away by the police for several days of intensive interrogation, forced to confess that he had committed a crime, and deported on a plane back to Nepal. He had been videotaped by the police throughout his time in their custody. His offense: in his fax he had said that he had heard a bomb explode and seen army vehicles speeding down the street.

Elizabeth Hawley