First female amputee scales Everest

An Indian former volleyball champion who lost a leg after being pushed from a moving train by robbers has become the first female amputee to climb Mount Everest.

Arunima Sinha, 26, was among more than 100 climbers who have reached the 8,848-metre (29,029ft) summit in recent days during a rush to take advantage of a short period of good conditions that allow the ascent of the world's highest peak.

Among those mountaineers are the first Saudi woman to climb the mountain, the first Pakistani woman, a Qatari prince and a famous Nepali film star.

The 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, by a British expedition in 1953, will be celebrated on Wednesday 29 May. It will be marked amid continuing concern that the mountain is too crowded and commercialised.

More than 700 climbers and guides are expected to have attempted to reach the summit by the end of this season, which will come when high monsoon winds make the ascent impossible, within weeks.

Scores more are to try over the coming days before bad weather predicted for the weekend. Among them are an 80-year-old Japanese extreme skier, Yuichiro Miura, and his rival for the title of oldest man to climb the mountain, an 81-year-old Nepali.

Miura is reported already to be at the South Col, a windswept shoulder high on the mountain from which mountaineers attempt to reach the summit, while his rival, Min Bahadur Sherchan, is at the base camp preparing for his own bid next week.

On his expedition's website, Miura said he hoped "to challenge [his] own ultimate limit" and to "honour the great Mother Nature".

Miura, who officials say has his own team of eight guides, first reached the summit on 26 May 2008, at the age of 75 years and 227 days, according to Guinness World Records. But he missed the record because Sherchan had scaled the summit the day before, at the age of 76 years and 340 days.

Critics say climbing Everest has become a race for records or trophies that has little to do with mountaineering.

All those who reached the summit in recent days did so using supplementary oxygen. There are now ropes fixed almost the entire distance from base camp, at 5,364 metres up the steep slopes of the mountain, to the summit. Guided climbers clip into the ropes at the bottom and follow a well-worn trail through camps that have already been set up for them by Sherpas, who have long supplied the expertise for expeditions on the peak.

Sherpas also maintain a route through the infamous Khumbu icefall, a massive and very dangerous unstable area of crevasses and ice cliffs that was one of the principal obstacles to early attempts to climb the mountain from the Nepalese side.

Many say that the mountain remains risky, however.

An experienced Russian climber was killed earlier this year while attempting a new route on the south-west face, and a 58-year-old Chinese citizen died of altitude sickness on Monday, according to officials. Five other mountaineers have been killed and three Sherpas.

The lack of high-altitude experience among many climbers on Everest worries some.

Raha Mobarak, the first Saudi female to reach the summit, only started climbing two years ago.

Sinha, the Indian amputee, trained for the climb with an ascent of the relatively straightforward 6,150-metre Island Peak, close to Everest, last year.

According to the Indian Express newspaper, Sinha was found lying critically injured near railway tracks between railway stations in the lawless, poverty-stricken Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She later told the police she had been pushed out of train when she tried to resist an attempt to steal her necklace.

Mark Inglis, a New Zealander, became the first double amputee to climb the mountain, in May 2006.

This season has been overshadowed by a high-altitude scuffle between three foreign climbers and a group of Sherpas last month.

Sherpa mountaineers in Kathmandu dismissed the argument as "commonplace". "I've seen that kind of thing many times. People lose a few brain cells at altitude," said Tashi Tenzing, who has reached the summit three times himself.