Safely home in Shropshire: Gareth Douglas relives his earthquake ordeal on Everest

Gareth Douglas was in the kitchen tent at Mount Everest base camp when the ground started to move.

"The table just started shaking, the flasks of tea and stuff started falling off the table," recalls the mountaineer, speaking from the comfort of his mother's front room in Bridgnorth.

"It was shaking really violently, and it was hard to even remain standing.

"There were these huge boulders crashing down, they were the size of minibuses."

Having experienced a large earthquake before, while working on a farm in Greece, he immediately knew what was happening. But this would be unlike anything he had seen before.

He would spend the next five days trapped at base camp, awaiting further news, before finally being evacuated to China where he would await his return home.

"My immediate thought was to run outside and watch these huge great boulders come crashing down and making an awful racket," he says.

"It would have lasted about 25 seconds, but it was a very long 25 seconds. During that time I managed to go back inside to get my camera and film it."

But while the quake was unlike anything he had seen before, the enormity of what had happened was yet to dawn on him.

"At first it seemed exciting," he says. "We had no idea how serious it was. There was even talk of us carrying on with the climb, it seems ridiculous now.

"But it was only later that we realised the full magnitude of what had happened.

"My first thought was to contact my family and let them know that there had been a big earthquake, but that I was all right.

"It was then that my dad told me how bad it was, that it had been on the news that Kathmandu was in a bad way."

Gareth, a 37-year-old former pupil of William Brookes School in Much Wenlock, speaks of his sadness at the moment that he discovered that the village of Langtang had been razed to the ground. He has yet to hear if anyone he knows has been affected by the latest earthquake yesterday, which centred on the Everest base camp and killed at least 37 and injured more than 1,000.

Gareth's memories of the first devastating earthquake will stay with him for the rest of his life.

He said: "We spent some time in Langtang during the acclimatisation process," he says."The village was completely flattened, only one house remained standing.

"It was terrible to think about that, these people gave us their hospitality, they were wonderful people."

The village, which had a population of around 450, was close to the epicentre of the quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter Scale.

"It is so remote it could only be accessed on foot, and it took us around three days to get there," he says.

"There is a dairy there, and there are small shops, but it is a place without any real mechanisation. You have bunk rooms, where people sleep, but there was always a communal room where people would sit around the fire and drink cups of tea."

It had been Gareth's lifetime dream to conquer the world's highest peak, to see the view that so few other people have witnessed.

"Every morning you wake up at base camp, you look out of your tent and see the north-face of Mount Everest before you," he says.

"You look at it and think 'how am I ever going to climb up that?', but then bit by bit you chip away at it."

Just 48 hours before the quake struck, Gareth had climbed North Col, the sharp-edged pass carved by glaciers in the ridge connecting Everest and Changtse in Tibet.

"You have to climb up there, and back down to base camp three times, as part of the acclimatisation process, because the final leg knocks you about so much."

The consequences of what would have happened had he made the journey a couple of days later have not been lost on him.

"Had I been on there when the earthquake struck, I would have been killed, no doubt about it," he says.

Gareth was part of a small group of eight climbers, led by two guides and six Sherpa climbers, supported by three kitchen staff. He says there were around 200 people in total who were stuck at the base camp, including a party of soldiers from the British Army.

His admiration for the Sherpa climbers, who even returned to the Advanced Base Camp 23,000ft above sea level to retrieve the party's equipment, is huge.

"They are amazing people, they're almost superhuman," he says.

"I think all the Sherpa who were with us, their families were all right, but a lot of them were left homeless. When we saw one of them crying in the kitchen tent we knew there was no way we would continue with the climb, it was a no-brainer, they had to go back to their families."

Even after the climb had been aborted, though, Gareth says they insisted on staying with them until transport arrived. He said that during the five days he was trapped at base camp there were several aftershocks, which were quite un-nerving.

Gareth says they had no idea how long they would be stranded."We had enough food to last for two months, so it was just a case of waiting for news," he says.

He had volunteered to help the British Army contingent, who had hoped to help with the relief effort in Kathmandu, but it quickly became clear that this would not be possible due to the damage to Nepal's road network.

After five days, a minibus was able to negotiate the dirt track to base camp, and two days later they reached the city of Lhasa in Tibet. There they stayed for a further two days, awaiting clearance from the Chinese authorities to return to Britain.

It has been a costly expedition for Gareth, who reckons he will be at least £25,000 out of pocket as a result of the adventure.

"It's not just the money, it's been six months of my life that has been on hold," says Gareth, who gave up his job as an area supervisor for the Miele appliance manufacturer.

Nevertheless, he is determined to return to Nepal, possibly next year, in an attempt to conquer the mountain one more time. And while he has suffered considerable financial cost, Gareth is in no doubt he is one of the lucky ones.

"I could have been killed in North Col, I could have died at Langtang," he says. "When you look at what other people have lost, it's heartbreaking."