‘Don’t leave me… why are you doing this to me?’
Those were the final words uttered by 40-year-old Francys ‘Fran’ Arsentiev before she took her last breath on Mount Everest on May 23, 1998.
The mother-of-one had just made history as the first American woman to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain without using supplementary oxygen.
But her lifelong dream ended in tragedy when she got into difficulty and never made it back down.
On the descent, exhausted and severely oxygen-deprived, she became separated from her husband and climbing partner, Sergei Arsentiev, in the infamous ‘death zone’ – the area above 26,000
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