For nine years, the crumpled body of Francys Arsentiev, an American climber, lay preserved in ice on the northeast ridge of Everest. She was last seen alive by Ian Woodall, a British climber who abandoned his own attempt to reach the summit to get help when he found her slumped against a rock, barely breathing. She was dead by the time her rescuers reached her.

In elite climbing circles, the dead stay on the mountain. No attempt was made to move Arsentiev, who got into trouble just hours after becoming the first American woman to climb Everest without oxygen. Her distinctive corpse, clad in purple Gore-Tex, was passed by successive climbing teams focusing on their own ascents, and in time she became a ghoulish landmark.

“People would talk of being ‘an hour below Frankie’. Or say, ‘Take a right when you get to Frankie,’ ” says Woodall, a former army officer.

It sounds a callous way to refer to the mother of a son who was only 10 when she died, but in the world of mountaineering, there is no room for sentimentality. Anyone embarking on an Everest expedition knows that they are risking their life. If they die, their colleagues will leave them behind. The body of George Mallory has been there since 1924. Andrew Irvine’s body has never been found. Hauling a dead companion down the mountain is not an option.

Nevetheless, Arsentiev’s waxy white face — “beautiful, like a Chinese porcelain doll” — continued to haunt Woodall when he returned to his home in Andorra. Her last words: “I’m an American. Don’t leave me,” echoed in his head, until he could ignore them no longer.

In 2007, Woodall decided to return to Everest to give her a decent burial, or at least as decent a burial as possible 28,000ft up a mountain. At the age of 50, with three Sherpas and just two bottles of oxygen and one tent, he set off for the lonely spot where he had left Arsentiev to die in 1998.

But why was it up to Woodall to make the £25,000 trip? Surely one of the many climbers who saw her could have buried her, instead of leaving her like some macabre frozen marker?

“That’s a good question,” he says. “I kept hoping that I would hear that someone else had done it, particularly when there was a big American expedition heading up, but it didn’t happen. Her body lay very near the summit. Nobody could be bothered sacrificing their summit attempt to bury a body, and on the way down, it’s often too dangerous to stop.”

Woodall climbed up the north face with some trepidation. He had an injured ankle and not much oxygen. To succeed in reaching Arsentiev, he would need all his strength. Before he left, he told only Cathy O’Dowd, who became his wife after the 1998 expedition, about his goal. He deliberately didn’t tell Arsentiev’s son, Paul, now an American university student, what he was doing in case he failed.

When he got close to where Arsentiev lay, just 1,000ft from the summit, the ground was thick with snow. The risk of avalanche was high and Arsentiev’s body was hidden. Woodall and the Sherpas dug several holes in the general vicinity before they found her.

He wrapped Arsentiev in an American flag, tucked a teddy bear under her arm and delivered a private message from Paul, who had been contacted by O’Dowd the day before, when it looked certain that Woodall was going to make it.

The plan to bury Arsentiev beneath the loose stones and rocks of the upper slopes had to be dropped because of the snow. Instead, Woodall and the Sherpas took the decision to dislodge Arsentiev from her icy tomb and lower her body down the mountain on ropes into the crevice where her second husband, Sergei Arsentiev, the Russian climber nicknamed the Snow Leopard, suffered a fatal fall during the same ill-fated descent in 1998.

“Whatever Frankie was in life was long gone,” says Woodall. “But if you’re looking for a spiritual aspect to it, we thought we’d place her beside her husband. Or where we think her husband is. His body has never been found.”

It was a perfunctory ceremony conducted in haste because of the cold and a shortage of oxygen. “It was physically hard but mentally satisfying. What happened to Frankie was not my fault. Cathy and I, we did what we could. I did not have any obligation to bury her and I might not have been the best person for the job, but I was the only one who wanted to.”

The deaths in a single expedition of both Arsentiev and her husband, who was not Paul’s father, and the fact that Woodall lost another friend, Bruce Herrod, in an earlier attempt on Everest highlights the danger that still surrounds the world’s highest peak.

“The most important thing is that you need to know why you are doing it, says Woodall. “You also need to know what is involved and still want to do it. And that needs to be explained to your next of kin, so that if anything happens to you, they know that you were doing something you loved.”

He says that Arsentiev’s son, now 20, is a well-adjusted young man. “He has fully accepted that his mother died doing what she wanted to do.”

On his return from Everest, Woodall felt that an unfinished story now had its final chapter. He decided to turn his experiences into a one-hour corporate address. The story proved popular with executives, and Woodall has now expanded it into a two-hour show to be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe with less corporate and more popular appeal.

“Mountaineers would want to know about the technicalities and this show doesn’t tell you how to climb Everest,” he says. “It is a story, a story of why people like Bruce and Frankie should not be forgotten, because they are examples of people who tried to do something important.”

The Tao of Everest with Ian Woodall will be on at the James Clerk Maxwell Centre, Edinburgh Academy, August 7-31, at 7pm Call 0131 226 0000 for tickets

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