Zaharias is one of Australia's leading high altitude climbers, his first expedition to the Himalayas was in the early '80s and he was a driving force of the Australian Army Alpine Club for many years [REF].
In 2001 on the Army Alpine Association expedition, one of the team members and two people accompanying him were killed in an avalanche while they were doing an acclimatisation trek in Nepal several hundred kilometres away from Everest [REF].