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Stranded Hikers Await Rescue After Deadly Blizzard in Nepal Harrowing Days in the Himalayas After Deadly Blizzard Surprises Hikers
(about 7 hours later)
KATMANDU, Nepal — As rescue workers struggled on Thursday to reach hikers who were overwhelmed by a sudden blizzard on the Annapurna Circuit, one of Nepal’s most popular trekking routes, dozens of guides and hikers were awaiting rescue in isolated mountain lodges. KATMANDU, Nepal — Freezing, exhausted and blinded by snow, Yakov Megreli, an Israeli medical student, had a few minutes to make a choice.
Nepal’s Army and police force began rescue operations at 6 a.m. in relatively good weather, said Baburam Bhandari, the chief district officer in Mustang, the area where the storm occurred. Officials gave no update of the death toll, which stood at 20 on Wednesday but seemed likely to climb rapidly in the coming days. He could spend the night shivering in a flimsy wooden tea stall with a few others, as snowdrifts crept up the walls outside and began to fall in through cracks. Or he could press forward into the blizzard with a large group of trekkers headed toward town and led by the tea shop’s owner, who promised to help them to safety if they each paid him 1,000 rupees, about $10.
Fourteen survivors — 12 Israelis and two hikers from Hong Kong — were airlifted to Katmandu by helicopter on Wednesday evening and were admitted to the army hospital there, many with broken limbs and suffering from severe frostbite, Mr. Bhandari said. Mr. Megreli, 24, cannot quite explain why he stayed behind in the wooden shack, but that is probably why he was alive on Thursday, a survivor of the worst trekking disaster to hit Nepal’s Himalayas in recent memory.
Crews also rescued 14 hikers from Manang, a nearby district. Ten people — four Canadians, three Indians and three Nepalese — are still missing there, said Devendra Lamichhane, a local official. He and around a dozen other hikers — mostly young Israelis and Germans — spent the night lying on top of one another, trying to fight off hypothermia by sharing body heat and talking about anything they could think of to keep from falling asleep. But they were a small group. The rest of their group, some 40 to 50 young people, “decided to go to Mukhtinath,” he said, in an interview from a hospital in Katmandu. “And we don’t know what happened to them.”
When the fierce storm bore down over the Thorong La pass early this week, many guides and hikers took shelter in the teahouses that provide food and lodging along the route. Narayan Bhandari, a Nepalese trekking guide, said that about 36 people were safe inside a lodge known as the High Camp, where they had sporadic phone service. Around 350 hikers were making their way across the Thorong La pass on Tuesday morning when a ferocious, lashing freak snowstorm — part of the aftermath of a cyclone that ravaged India’s eastern coast — closed in on them, burying their legs in snow and making their progress down the steep path to safety agonizingly slow. Of those, 244 reached their destination, according to Ramesh Dhamala, chairman of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal.
Those who tried to proceed across the pass and down a steep, exposed path to the next major town would have faced the brunt of the storm, said Mr. Bhandari, who spoke by telephone to a fellow guide who had been in the area. He said groups who tried to cross the Thorong La pass on Monday or Tuesday, when the storm hit unexpectedly, were in extreme danger. The bodies of seven trekkers, six of them visitors from other countries, were retrieved on Thursday, according to the association, bringing the number of dead to 27. Many more bodies had yet to be retrieved, presumably buried in snow along the path, which is so steep that helicopters cannot land nearby.
“Some people did pass if they started early in the morning — if they were very young and very fit,” he said. “If they were very old people, perhaps they had problems.” Harry Dahal, a director of Swissa, a tour agency that caters to Israeli trekkers, said around 100 of his clients were planning to cross the pass on the day of the storm, and 40 were still missing.
He said colleagues had reported seeing many dead bodies. Nepal’s army and police began rescue operations after dawn on Thursday. More than 60 people were delivered to safety, and dozens more were believed to have taken shelter at a lodge near the pass, said Gopal Babu Shrestha, an official with Trekking Agencies.
“Nobody expects this kind of storm at this time of year, in October,” he said. Meanwhile, dazed survivors were arriving in Katmandu’s army hospital, wondering at the storm which had engulfed them.
The descent from the pass to the nearby base of Muktinath is “very, very steep,” through an open, exposed area, and often takes several hours to complete, said David Ways, a trekker and travel writer who has hiked the route twice. “It was a terrible experience,” Mr. Megreli said. “It seemed that everything was fine. The weather was fine. The trail was not so hard. Until the storm.”
“It’s the wind and the cold that kills up there. It’s perishing,” he said in a telephone interview from the Philippines. The Annapurna Circuit, as the trekking path is called, is a popular trekking route. Those crossing the pass often stay overnight in lodges that offer thick blankets, yak-dung fires and simple foods like rice and soup, said David Ways, a travel writer who has made the journey twice.
“What struck here is a freak blizzard,'’ he said. “They’re in an exposed area — there is no shelter whatsoever. That wind, that snow — it’s not a good scenario.” In October, there would have been little worry about stormy weather, and, anyway, for the days that led up to Tuesday, Mr. Dahal said, “there was not even a drop of cloud in the sky, it was all blue sky.”
In snowy conditions, Mr. Ways said, trekking groups making their way across the pass would ordinarily either stop and wait for improvement or turn around. Members of the Israeli group had just crossed the pass and were beginning their descent toward Mukhtinath when the wind whipped up, lashing their faces with particles of snow and making it difficult to see, Mr. Dahal said. The path is both steep and exposed, offering virtually nothing that could serve as shelter. As the snow accumulated, some hikers found that it was taking them as long as five minutes to make a single meticulous step, he said, and some hikers lost their shoes in the snow.
“It looks like what had happened is that they were stuck up there for two or three days and there was a break in the weather and they tried to go ahead,” he said. “It was not snowing when they started to walk down, " said Mr. Shrestha, the Trekking Agencies official. “Less than one to two hours later, they could not move. They cannot go back, they cannot go ahead.” After spending Wednesday at the site of the rescue operation, he said, many of those who died were “nearly down” to the town of Mukhtinath. Of the large group that Mr. Migreli belonged to, he said, those who stayed overnight in the tea stall survived, and were later rescued by a Nepalese Army helicopter.
Basant B. Hamal, the secretary general of the Himalayan Rescue Association Nepal, said that the organization sent two people by helicopter, one to Jomsom in Mustang District and one to Tilicho Lake in Manang District, on Thursday morning to help with the army-led rescue operations. Of those who pressed forward, some stumbled into the town just before dawn on Wednesday, but many died.
Fearing the worst, friends and relatives of missing climbers reached out to each other via Facebook and Twitter. A Facebook page titled “Annapurna Nepal Avalanche and Blizzard Info Share” became a virtual bulletin board. “Everyone was freezing, everyone was trying to put their feet in the right place, slowly, slowly,” he said. “Everything looks white, and you can’t find the real path.”
“Our hearts and minds are on Annapurna, Nepal,” read the caption on a photo of snow-capped Annapurna, the world’s 10th-highest peak. The blizzard abated Wednesday, and inside the tea stand, the small group of survivors with Mr. Megreli weighed their choices and finally decided to venture out into the waist-high snow.
They did so without any certainty that they would be strong enough to reach the town. “We couldn’t see the way, we didn’t know the way, and all the night it was snowing,” said Maya Ora, 21, another Israeli hiker.
They wrote one note that they hoped would reach diplomats from their home countries, and handed it to a Nepalese guide on horseback. And they left a second handwritten note addressed to whatever stranger would next enter the building, listing all their names and asking that someone look for them, Mr. Megreli said.
Ms. Ora, 21, said they hiked for eight hours before they were able to get cellphone reception. At that point, they saw a Nepalese rescue helicopter.
“All the time I thought, ‘I am going to die,'” said Ms. Ora. “This is the moment when I said, ‘It’s over. I am going home. I am going to be O.K.'” Mr. Megreli was sitting near her. “Some of us have ice burns in the fingers or feet,” he said. “We are happy that we are alive. We are O.K. We are exhausted. We don’t feel some sensations in the fingers. But everything is going to be O.K.”