By IANS,
Sanawar (Himachal Pradesh) : Six boys of Lawrence School, Sanawar, located in the picturesque Kasauli Hills here Tuesday scaled the Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain peak, school officials said.
Those who scaled the peak were Guribadat Singh, Prithvi Singh, Ajay Sohal, Shubham, Fateh Singh and Raghav Juneja. They were in the age group of 15 to 17, the officials said.
Updates posted on the Facebook page of the young team also said that six members had summitted the world’s highest peak. This is the first school team to set a record, the post said.
Youngest climber Raghav reached the summit around 7 a.m. Two hours later, Fateh scaled the summit successfully. Guribadat followed around 12.30 p.m.
However, Hakikat Singh had to be held back after climbing 27,600 feet as there was some problem with his oxygen cylinder.
School officials said before scaling the Everest, the boys underwent basic and advanced courses at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling.
During the training, besides climbing two major peaks in the Kanchenjunga area, the students were given high-altitude training in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir where temperatures normally hover 25 degrees Celsius below the freezing point.
They also undertook a cycling expedition in the Thar desert, where they pedalled more than 1,000 km in nine days.
This was followed by high-altitude training at over 6,000 metres in temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius in Ladakh.
The team was part of a ‘Teens Tame Everest’ campaign, supported by leading outdoor adventure gear brand Woodland. The expedition was flagged off from April 5 from India.
The team, comprising all teenagers, has undergone a five-month extensive training (September 2012 to January 2013) in all formats of stamina build-up, fitness as well as adventure sports to equip them to cope up with the hard tenure at Mt. Everest, expedition leader Colonel Neeraj Rana had said earlier.