April 27, 2013. A team of Sherpas was fixing ropes between Camps 2 and 3 on Mount Everest for clients who planned to use them the following day. In a meeting at Camp 2 the previous evening, the clients and Sherpas agreed that nobody would climb near the fixing team. “Fixing ropes is a sensitive and huge task,” Tashi Sherpa, one of the fixers, later told journalist Deepak Adhikari. “So we strictly alerted everyone not to go high up.”
At 6,700 metres, they noticed three people climbing toward them. They turned out to be Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck, Italian climber Simone Moro, and British climber and photographer Jonathan Griffith. The three famous climbers had an ambitious objective, the elusive Everest-Lhotse traverse, and they were on the Lhotse Face for an acclimatization round up to their tent at Camp 3. The Sherpas in Camp 2 had asked Steck not to climb that day, but he reassured them that they would not touch the lines and would be extra careful not to knock any ice onto the fixing team. The three sped up the face much faster than the Sherpas, since they were merely climbing, not working with the ropes. The optics weren’t good for the fixers. “I think the leader felt like he was losing face,” Steck later told writer Tim Neville. “They had been fixing ropes for four or five hours, and then we climb up on the side of them without using their ropes in one and a half hours.”
