Dan Mazur Receives Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal
This is the tenth time the medal has been awarded.
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At 8,700 meters, heading toward the summit of Everest on the morning of May 26, 2006, Dan Mazur and his teammates came across a man near death—a member of a different expedition that had evidently been left for dead the night before. The man, Lincoln Hall, was clearly suffering from high altitude cerebral edema and would die without a rescue. Mazur and his teammates abandoned their own summit dreams to help Hall down to safety.
While the Lincoln Hall rescue story is what Dan Mazur is best known for, he has spent many years more striving in various way to benefit the mountain regions he has climbed in. On Tuesday, December 11, Dan Mazur received the tenth-ever Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal “for remarkable service in the conservation fo culture and nature in mountains regions,” according to the Hillary Medal website . An accomplished mountaineer and guide with multiple 8,000-meter summits to his resume, Mazur runs the Mount Everest Foundation for Sustainable Develpment, through which he has overseen projects throughout Nepal such as helping to rebuild after earthquakes, renovating the Deboche Convent near Tengboche, training Sherpa climbers and guides, and building schools and clinics.
According to the press release, at present Mazur’s main focus is “the Mount Everest Biogas Project, which he cofounded with Garry Porter to mitigate the problem of human waste accumulating at elevation.”
Scott MacLennan, director of the Mountain Fund and a past Hillary medalist himself, noted that within the climbing and mountaineering communities, Mazur exemplifies Sir Edmund Hillary’s combination of “sportsmanship, conservation, and care for the host communities that mountaineers depend on.”
Another past Hillary medalist, the montologist Dr. Jack D. Ives, added, “Mountaineering should not be the province of the privileged few. … Daniel Mazur’s career perfectly synthesizes the challenges and opportunities of mountaineering and mountain service.”
Past recipients of the Hillary Medal include the archaeologist Johan Reinhard, Professor of Economics and conservationist Dr. Harshwanti Bisht, and Michael Schmitz and Helen Cawley, among others.
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