25-year-old South African serviceman, Private Jaco van Gass, lost his left arm to a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan three years ago. Now he’s testing a prosthetic ice-axe – an invention of his own design – in preparation for an attempt at Mount Everest in May, alongside five other injured servicemen.

Said van Gass in an interview:

I came up with the idea to attach an ice axe to one of my prosthetics, so I kind of challenged the guys at Headley Court (a military rehab center in the U.K.) to see how we could get this done. … The ice axe is there for back-up. Once we do stuff like the Lhotse ice face and the Hillary Step, it might come into aid. It’s there for the places where I could slip and I’m not attached to a fixed rope.

The group climbed Mount Manaslu, the world’s eighth tallest peak, last year as part of their training for Everest, and hope to have scaled the world’s tallest by the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

[Source: Telegraph]