Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall has died in a Sydney hospital from mesothelioma.

The 56-year-old was given up for dead in 2006 when he developed altitude sickness on the way down from the summit of Mount Everest.

He was found alive the following day and survived against slim odds to tell his tale.

Mr Hall, who lived in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, was a founding director of the Australian Himalayan Foundation and a pioneering climber at home and abroad.

He was a member of the first Australian expedition to Mount Everest in 1984, a feat which he recounted in his book White Limbo.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 3 minutes 27 seconds 3 m 27 s Mountaineer Lincoln Hall dies at 56 ( Timothy McDonald ) Download 1.6 MB

Mr Hall's lawyers have released a statement saying the mountaineer contracted mesothelioma after helping his father build cubby houses from asbestos cement sheets in the 1960s.

The law firm, Maurice Blackburn, recently concluded a claim for compensation.

Mr Hall's friend and Himalayan Foundation chairman Simon Balderstone says he is devastated by the loss.

"There were very few tougher, better climbers in the world, and very few better people," he said.

"Frankly, I'm grief stricken. He was a dear friend and a simply wonderful human being and a wonderful humanitarian.

"I guess I finally have to admit he wasn't invincible."

In 1987 Mr Hall was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to mountaineering.

He is survived by his wife and two children.

Lincoln Hall stands at Advanced Base Camp on Mount Everest on May 28, 2006. ( AAP: Project-Himalaya.com/Jamie McGuinness )

In a 2007 interview with Andrew Denton, Mr Hall said he had always been attracted to the danger of mountain climbing.

"The experience is incredibly intense because it is so dangerous," he said.

"There are the objective dangers, which are dangers you can't control like avalanches, rock falls, storms, hidden crevasses.

"And then there's the dangers within yourself; mental fortitude, physical fortitude, your judgment, what your climbing partners happen to be doing, how much time you've got left in the day ... juggling all those parameters.

"You become hyposensitised and it's a level of living.

"It's an easy way of meditating in a way, I mean meditating - your mind drifts off, there you have no choice because if you take your mind off the game you can die."

But aside from his love of climbing, family was also important for Mr Hall.

"It used to be that climbing was what I had to be doing but it's ultimately, I mean there's no real purpose in it," he said.

"I guess we're all here because we have families, whether we wanted to be here or not, we are.

"And so I met Barbara, who's my wife, and we have my two sons and and that's really what makes the world go round."

Three other people died on the day Mr Hall tried to reach the summit of Everest in 2006.

He recalled afterwards how he had found two more bodies near the top that had obviously been there for a long time.

"They'd been scalped by the wind, with the blasting snow, blasting ice. That was the really upsetting thing, one for me, partly because I think that close to the summit even with oxygen I was close to all sorts of limits, emotional, not just physical," he told Denton.

Hall said he found climbing mountains like a form of meditation ( AAP: Nine Network )

It was shortly after starting his decent that Mr Hall was struck down with altitude sickness.

His climbing companions waited with him for two hours on the mountain but he was not breathing and had no pulse. The decision was made to leave his body there.

As news went down the mountain that Mr Hall was dead, he woke up.

"The sherpas had let me lie there for two hours thinking I was dead, and so they took my pack, which had useful things like thermos of water and more clothing and head torch and all sorts of practical things," he said.

Mr Hall said he then became aware he was going to die.

"Right on the heels of that thought of I'm going to die, was the fact I can't die because I'm going back to my family. That was the premise of this whole expedition, was that I come back, I always come back," he said.

"I wasn't going to let it happen, I just had to stay alive, and somehow stay awake till the morning when at least there would be some sun, which would carry some sort of warmth."