Five-time Everest summiter and climate activist David Breashears died on 14 March at his home in Massachusetts in the United States, aged 68.
Breashears shot the IMAX film Everest about the 1996 tragedy when eight climbers were killed, and also co-produced the movie Everest in 2015 starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin about the 1996 deaths. While shooting another documentary in 2015, he had to be rescued by helicopter from Camp I when an avalanche triggered by the earthquake killed 19 people at Base Camp.
Breashears specialised in repeat photography of old images of the Alps and the Himalaya to visually document the impact of climate breakdown, and through his group GlacierWorks took part in the multimedia Climate+Change exhibition in Kathmandu in 2014.
The exhibition had Breashear’s before and after photography of Himalayan glaciers, comparing pictures taken in 1921 by George Mallory of the Rongbuk Glacier on the north side of Mt Everest to show how much it had shrunk by 2009.
Breashears was worried what the Himalaya would look like in 100 years, and told Nepali Times in an interview ten years ago: ‘Those of us who have climbed Everest for the past 33 years have seen the changes taking place under our own feet. Now our crampons scrape and scratch across hundreds of feet of exposed rock and the snow arête that Hillary climbed no longer exists. The route is entirely on rock.’