A Nepali double amputee wants to make history by climbing Everest

Sangam Prasain |

Kathmandu (EFE) a series of legal and monetary obstacles.

“I will leave Kathmandu for the Everest region this Wednesday, the preparations have been completed,” Magar, 43, told EFE, confident of reaching the top despite the fact that with his prostheses he advances three times slower than a climber without disabilities.
“My plan to summit the 8,848.86-meter peak is tentatively set for the first or second week of May, depending on the weather,” explained a climber whose life has been marked by war.

Conflict and disability

Born into humble surroundings in Mirul, a village in the Rolpa district in north-eastern Nepal, the former soldier recalled walking barefoot for 45 minutes as a child to reach a school “where there were no pens or papers”.

Magar, forced into marriage at the age of 11, saw his education and adolescence interrupted by the conflict between the Maoists and the state, a civil war that left more than 17,000 dead before ending in 2006.

His life changed when several ex-British Army soldiers belonging to the elite Nepali Gurkha Corps, characterized by the 46-centimetre-long curved knives, or ‘khukri’, visited the village in 1998 and he decided to try his hand at the tough selection tests.

Magar was the only one among 200 people to pass all three phases of the process and joined the British force at just 19 years old.
But the mountaineer’s life turned upside down in 2010, when he was deployed with his unit in Afghanistan and was seriously injured in an explosive device. He lost both legs above the knee.

“Everything changed in an instant,” recalled Magar, who spent the next three years in a UK rehabilitation center learning to rebuild her life and cope with her disability.

The loss of both limbs left a deep mark on the former soldier. “I thought my life was over,” he said, “and I thought many times about killing myself. I started drinking too much, I became an alcoholic.”

Ultimately, Magar claimed that his concerns for the future of his wife and three children prevented him from taking his own life, though the former soldier only recovered after being offered a skydive.

“I realized that I could do everything that normal people do,” he said.

It was the beginning of a passion for sports that has led him to try skiing, canoeing and climbing, as well as wheelchair basketball. Magar became the first double above-knee amputee to summit Nepal’s 6,476-meter Mera Peak in 2017.

“Then,” he said, “I thought of Everest,” the peak first climbed by Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa in 1953. “I wanted to show the world that disability is not a barrier to achieving incredible things,” he explained.

The biggest obstacle to reaching the highest peak in the world was not his disability then, he recalled, but a 2017 law by which the Nepali government prohibited double amputees and the blind from climbing in the Himalayas.

“We consulted with the tourism minister, the British and American ambassadors and many senior officials. But no one was listening to us,” he said.

Magar resorted to justice along with other disabled people: after taking the case before the Supreme Court, the highest judicial body ordered in 2018 the suspension of the regulations.

Once the legal obstacles were overcome, the former soldier made an effort to raise the almost 150,000 dollars necessary for his expedition, with which to pay for custom-made suits, the Sherpa equipment and special prostheses for climbing mountains, among other expenses.

“An American mountaineer invented them in his garage, they are very useful,” he said, referring to the artificial feet with crampons that allow him to attack the ice on his way to the summit.

Magar claims he is now “fully prepared” for the ascension, having secured the funds but being forced to put his ambitious plan on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I hope to complete this mission successfully, but nothing is guaranteed,” acknowledged the mountaineer.