Mount Everest Deaths: American Among 4 Killed In Weekend Climbs

An Alabama doctor was among four men who died climbing Mount Everest during the weekend, according to media reports. Roland Yearwood, 50, from Georgiana, Alabama, was making his second attempt to climb the Earth's highest peak after he barely escaped an earthquake-triggered avalanche in 2015 that killed 19 people on Everest and an estimated 9,000 people in Nepal, according to USA Today.

The circumstances around Yearwood's death on Sunday were still unclear, but The Washington Post reports the weather was so bad that many climbers had to turn around halfway up the summit because of high winds.

According to a profile on the Georgiana Medical Center's website, Yearwood had been trying to climb the highest peaks on each of the world's seven continents. (For more information on this story and more national news, subscribe to the Across America Patch.)

A record number of climbers is trying to scale the world’s highest peak, with 375 foreigners issued permits, the most since 1953, according to The Washington Post. The large number of potential climbers has increased safety worries and concerns of environmental degradation.

The weekend climb to the summit also left dozens of climbers frostbitten and suffering from altitude sickness, with many evacuated to Kathmandu, a local tour operator Temba Tsheri Sherpa told the Anadolu Agency. The deaths in the past month of two prominent climbers – Ueli Steck, a 43-year-old Swiss alpinist and Min Bahadur Sherchan, who at 85 was seeking to be the oldest climber to reach the top of Mount Everest – has already lead to a negative climbing season.

A typical spring season sees around six deaths on Everest, according to mountaineering officials. Last year, six climbers had died between April and May. In 2014, an avalanche on Khumbu Glacier killed 16 climbing guides, which forced the season to be canceled.

Photo Credit: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images