"I thought I was going to die," Dawa Sherpa told the BBC from his hospital bed in Kathmandu, where he is being treated for dehydration, frostbite and a broken leg.
The family had begun mourning rituals when the news that he had been found came on Thursday - six days after he was last seen alive.
The Sherpa told the BBC how he ran out of oxygen after becoming separated from his group high on the mountain. Stranded in sub-zero temperatures near Everest's "death zone" - where oxygen levels are critically low - he found it increasingly difficult to walk.
Found by a cleaning team
"The first two days I didn't eat anything. Then I started chewing ice," he says, adding that he later found some pieces of chocolate in a pocket.
With little energy left in his body, Dawa Sherpa began to descend the mountain - only to fall into a crevasse. He was trapped for two and a half days, but was rescued when an avalanche caused snow to fall into the crevasse.
"I took a step on the snow, stood up and looked up... It felt like I could get out of there," he says.
After nearly a week, he finally saw people near Mount Everest Base Camp. On Thursday morning, a crawling Dawa Sherpa - exhausted and frostbitten, but alive - was discovered by a Nepalese team collecting debris left behind by the season's mountaineers.
Raises concerns
Search leader Pemba Sherpa calls it a miracle.
"As far as I know, no one has ever survived alone at that height on Everest," he told the BBC earlier this week.
"It's a miracle that he managed to survive for six days."
More than 1,000 climbers have reached the summit of Mount Everest so far this year and at least five people have died on the mountain. Dawa Sherpa's fate has raised renewed concerns and questions about the safety of Nepalese guides on the mountain, which has seen explosive commercialization in recent years.
Mount Everest, known in Nepali as Sagarmatha and in Tibetan as Qomolangma, is a mountain in the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet (China). The massif is named after George Everest, who led the mapping of the Himalayas in the mid-19th century.
The highest peak reaches 8,849 meters above sea level and is the highest mountain in the world. In 2020, the exact height was determined to be 8,848.86 meters after careful measurements by China and Nepal.
Mount Everest was first climbed in 1953 by Tenzing Norgay from Nepal and Edmund Hillary from New Zealand.
Source: National Encyclopedia
