How a Snake Halted Tim Howell’s Lhotse Wingsuit Record Attempt

British adventurer Tim Howell was planning to set a record for the world’s highest wingsuit flight, launching himself off a ridge near the summit of the Himalayan peak Lhotse, when a venomous snake bit him on the finger. Now he’s putting his record attempt on hold.

“We have now put so much time and effort into this that I can’t walk away from it,” Howell told Outside. “At the same time, I’m only going to jump when everything is right; there can be no second-guessing.”

It was Howell’s third planned attempt—in as many years—to jump from roughly 27,230 feet on Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak. The ice-clad 27,940-foot Himalayan summit is known by some as the “Other Everest.” If successful, his jump will be the highest wingsuit flight in the world. That would put his record nearly 2,000 feet higher than the previous, set by the late Russian flyer Valery Rozov in 2016 on another Himalayan giant, Cho Oyu, at 26,864 feet.

Howell told Outside that a week before he planned to leave for Lhotse, he was on a short walk in Grenoble, France, when he sat down near a bush.

“As I pushed some of the branches out of the way to sit on a rock, I felt a tiny sting in my finger,” Howell recalled.

At first, he assumed the sensation was just the prick of a thorn. But ten minutes later, his lips, throat, and fingers swelled. Howell tried to make it back to his car, but collapsed on the ground before he could, and went into anaphylactic shock. Luckily, he was out with two friends when they called for a helicopter evacuation.

Howell spent five days in the ICU, where he learned that the prick he’d felt in the bush was the bite of a venomous snake called an asp viper. Asp viper bites aren’t usually fatal, but Howell was allergic to their venom and would have likely died had he not reached a hospital.

During his treatment, the flesh on Howell’s finger turned necrotic, and the doctors removed some of it.

“It was just flesh, no ligaments or anything,” Howell said. “It’s healed up quite nicely.”

He’s now undergoing physical therapy to regain full use of the finger.

Howell is a veteran BASE jumper and wingsuit pilot with more than 1,200 jumps worldwide. He attempted to set a world wingsuit record by jumping from Lhotse twice, in 2024 and 2025.

“The first attempt was really to find the exit point, as we had to make a new route to the location suitable to jump from,” he said. Howell and his support team turned around just below this exit point, but succeeded in establishing a route to reach it.

On their second attempt, the group spent four days waiting at a camp near 26,000 feet, below the exit point, for a perfect weather window. But when jump day finally arrived, a sudden storm trapped them for three hours, forcing a retreat. Howell told Outside he will return to Lhotse in 2027.

In the meantime, another British adventurer, Joshua Bregmen, is planning to set what he calls an unbreakable altitude record by parachuting off the summit of Everest, according to his project’s Instagram page.

“Because there is no higher point on planet Earth from which to leap, this world record can never be broken,” the social media page states.

It remains to be seen if Bregmen will succeed, but Howell’s own record attempt isn’t in jeopardy.

“He won’t be flying a wingsuit, so his record attempt isn’t competing with mine,” Howell said.