Double amputee snaps artificial limb on Everest

A New Zealand climber trying to become the first double amputee to reach the top of Mount Everest has snapped one of his two artificial legs on the ascent, his wife said today.

Mark Inglis’ wife Anne said the 47-year-old broke one of his artificial legs in two after falling from a fixed ladder on the world’s tallest mountain.

In New Zealand, she said Inglis had told her by satellite phone that it was “a minor hiccup” and he had fixed the prosthesis and had a replacement brought up by fellow climbers and was continuing his attempt on the world’s highest peak.

Inglis had both legs severed just below the knees after suffering frostbite after being trapped by storms while climbing on New Zealand’s Mount Cook in 1982.

Mrs Inglis told New Zealand’s National Radio that he was about 10,250 feet up Everest, was still acclimatising and preparing to move up to Camp Two, at about 12,000 feet.

Mount Everest stands 29,035 feet high.

She said Inglis had been able to hop and to fix the carbon fibre leg well enough to reach climbing companions.

In an online diary entry dated April 29, Inglis was laconic in his description of the accident.

He wrote that while sliding down a rope “one of the fixed line anchors pulled out of the ice/snow, meaning a brief acceleration for me (some of it upside down, very interesting). I managed to arrest the slide only to find that the beautiful carbon leg on the right was now in two pieces!”

Inglis was a mountain guide when he and climbing companion Phil Doole were found barely alive and conscious two weeks after they were forced into an ice cave high on Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak, in 1982 by storm and blizzard conditions.

A wine maker and father of three, Inglis climbed 12,990 feet Mount Cho Oyu in Tibet in 2004. He said before leaving to climb Everest that the further he goes up a mountain the less disadvantage he has.

Inglis said he would be spurred on by the fact the expedition was expected to raise several hundred thousand pounds for a Cambodian centre that provides rehabilitation for landmine amputees, polio victims and other disabled people.