LEWISTON – Mountaineer Bill Yeo of Durham last week halted his climb of Mount Everest less than 2,000 feet from the summit after he began coughing up blood.

Yeo’s wife, Julie, said her husband decided to turn back out of fear that he was showing symptoms of a potentially life-threatening condition called high altitude pulmonary edema.

She told the Sun Journal newspaper in Lewiston that if her husband tried to press on toward the summit, his life would have been in danger and he might have jeopardized the climb for his partner, John Bagnulo of New Vineyard, and two other climbers they teamed up with during their ascent of the North Face.

Bagnulo, a nutrition professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, reached the 29,035-foot summit Thursday morning, Tibetan time, on his 36th birthday.

Bill Yeo, who is 40 and works at L.L. Bean, was comfortable with his decision to turn back, his wife said.

The problem surfaced at Camp 3, elevation 27,231 feet, just below a ridgeline leading to the summit.

“At some point Bill noticed that when he spit he was spitting some blood. None of them knew what to make of it, so they waited, and he still was spitting up some blood. To be safe, Bill decided to turn around at Camp three and head down,” she wrote in an e-mail to one of her husband’s sponsors, greatmoose.com.

“He felt great and knew he could have made the top, but he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone if he turned worse higher up.”

Bagnulo and Dave Watson of Burlington, Vt., apparently were the first Westerners to climb to the top of Everest this season. More than 40 other climbers have reached the summit since Thursday. Because of high snow on the South Face, no one has reached the summit from the more popular Nepalese side.

Yeo and Bagnulo were en route back to the United States via Katmandu. Yeo has taken photographs and video of the expedition, his wife said. She said he will probably do some speaking about the trip and perhaps combine the talks with a slide show.