Officials and organisers of the expedition reported on Tuesday that renowned US ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson has vanished while climbing Nepal’s Manaslu peak.
The tragedy took place on the same day as an avalanche on the same summit claimed the life of a Nepali climber. After successfully ascending the eighth-highest mountain in the world on Monday with her partner Jim Morrison, Nelson was skiing down Manaslu.
‘She had an accident yesterday as she was descending shortly after her summit. We are trying to get clarity on what happened,’ Jiban Ghimire of Shangri-La Nepal Treks, which organised the expedition, told AFP.
Nelson’s sponsor, The North Face, acknowledged that the climber was gone.
An avalanche hit between Camps three and four on the 8,163-metre (26,781-foot) mountain, killing a Nepali climber and injuring a dozen others, the government’s tourism department said. It was the first confirmed casualty of the autumn climbing season in Nepal.
Rescue attempts were hampered on Monday because helicopters couldn’t fly due to bad weather. Tuesday’s weather had improved, according to Ghimire, and a helicopter was on its way to the scene of Nelson’s accident.
For the 404 paying climbers who have paid to attempt to reach the top of Manaslu this year, the constant rain and snow have been a problem.
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