LINCOLN Hall, the climber who cheated death on Mount Everest last week, looks set to cash in on his remarkable ordeal with negotiations under way for a media deal believed to be worth several hundred thousand dollars.

Hall survived a night at 8600m after fellow climbers left him for dead on the side of Everest. He continued to receive specialist medical attention in Kathmandu yesterday for frostbite and the residual impacts of altitude sickness.

A serious chest infection is making travel for Hall problematic, and he is expected to stay in Nepal’s capital with his wife, Barbara Scanlan, for up to a week.

However, with doctors expressing amazement at the speed of his recovery, Hall has already agreed to field offers from the Australian media for his story.

Hall’s long-time friend Simon Balderstone, who travelled to Nepal with Ms Scanlan earlier this week, confirmed that a number of media organisations had expressed interest in the climber’s tale.

Climbing colleagues of another Sydney mountaineer, Sue Fear — who died on Sunday after falling into a snow-covered crevasse while descending from the summit of Nepal’s Mount Manaslu — yesterday paid tribute to the 43-year-old.

Australian Geographic Society chairman Dick Smith said Fear “was extremely competent — probably the world’s most competent high- altitude female climber”.

“Sue knew of the risk and she died doing exactly what she loved doing. She was quite different to most of the climbers on Everest, who are simply paid clients of guides. She was a purist, who was never guided. She just climbed with fellow climbers for the sheer satisfaction of it.”

The Fred Hollows Foundation, for which Fear had acted as an official ambassador since 2003, issued a statement yesterday lamenting the loss of their “dear friend and supporter”.

Foundation chief executive Brian Doolan said Fear had been devoted to helping the fight against avoidable blindness around the world, using her public profile to support sight-saving operations in places such as Eritrea, Kenya, Vietnam and her beloved Nepal.

Fear’s employer, World Expeditions, announced that a plaque would be placed at the Mount Manaslu base camp in her memory. “Nepal was really beloved to her and she was in a place that she always wanted to be,” World Expeditions chief executive Sue Badyari said.

“Manaslu is a very, very spiritual area, it’s very Buddhist and I think Sue would be very, very happy … that she is there.”

According to her family and friends, Fear’s wish was that if she died while climbing the Himalayan mountains, then her body should remain buried there.

After it was decided on Tuesday that there was no hope that Fear was alive, her brothers Grahame and John Fear said there would be no attempt to recover her body.