The string of disaster reports from Nepal just won’t stop. A massive avalanche struck the base camp at the foot of the 7,126-meter-high Himlung Himal today in the morning local time. The tents set up there were buried under about five meters of snow. At the time of the accident, two Nepalese mountain guides and 14 kitchen staff members from two commercial teams were staying at the camp.
The first four rescuers to reach the base camp by helicopter were only able to recover the bodies of the two mountain guides. Given the massive amounts of snow, there is little hope for the others who are missing.
Warnings ignored
“We could have saved lives today, but due to bad weather, we reached the accident site only in the evening,” wrote Mingma Gylaje Sherpa, the leader of the rescue team, on Instagram. Among the missing are also a cook and a kitchen assistant from his own team at Imagine Nepal.
“The rest of my team is safe,” said Mingma Gyalje. “We tried our best to convince them to leave Base Camp since Friday and move to the lower valley, but they did not take our warnings seriously and ignored them. We still hope to find our friends alive.” The search will resume on Monday, said the head of Imagine Nepal.
Impact of a cyclone
According to information from the Nepalese website The Tourism Times, the other dead and missing are members of the team from the operator Himalayan Holidays. They were preparing an expedition of female climbers from the United Arab Emirates that was scheduled to begin in early October.
Himlung Himal is located in western Nepal on the border with Tibet, about 25 kilometers as the crow flies northwest of the eight-thousander Manaslu. The mountain is considered a technically relatively easy seven-thousander.
A cyclone over the Bay of Bengal had brought heavy rain throughout Nepal and heavy snowfall at higher elevations. In light of the poor weather forecasts and the expected extremely high avalanche risk, most teams on Manaslu – as reported – had called off their expeditions. Previously, two climbers had lost their lives in an avalanche at Camp 3.
The Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA) had called on expedition operators to suspend their planned expeditions until the weather improved.
Update, 29 September: After two more bodies were recovered from beneath nearly five meters of snow and ice, the eight-member search team led by Mingma Gyalje Sherpa suspended operations and left the mountain. “We will continue monitoring the snow conditions and will retrieve the bodies as soon as the snow melts a bit more,” Mingma Gyalje wrote on Instagram yesterday. This means that twelve avalanche victims remain missing.
