Status: 09/27/2022 4:16 p.m
Veteran US skier Hilaree Nelson has gone missing on one of the world’s highest mountains in the Himalayas. She is said to have fallen into a crevasse on Monday. The search is hampered by bad weather.
American skier Hilaree Nelson is missing. She had been to Mount Manaslu in the Himalayas. After reaching the summit on Monday, she fell into a crevasse, an employee of the trekking company Shangri-la Nepal Trek, which organized the expedition, told the dpa news agency. In the incident, the 49-year-old skier was traveling with her partner.
Little progress on rescue
Rescue work using two helicopters is ongoing but hampered by poor weather conditions and making little progress, a spokesman for Nepal’s tourism ministry said.
There was also an avalanche just below the crevasse on Monday. The Ministry of Tourism initially announced that the American’s accident was also related to the avalanche. However, this is not the case, as more recent information has shown, said a ministry spokesman for the dpa news agency.
At least one Nepalese Sherpa mountain guide was killed in the avalanche and 14 other Sherpas were injured, some seriously. They had brought luggage from a mountaineering group to a high-altitude camp when they were hit by the avalanche.
Extremely difficult due to “incessant rain”.
Last week, Nelson reported on her latest Himalayan expedition on Instagram and explained that the ascent to the 8,163-meter-high mountain was extremely difficult because of “constant rain”. “I didn’t feel as safe on Manaslu as I have on other adventures in the thin air of the Himalayas,” she wrote there. “These last few weeks have tested my resilience in a whole new way.”
Nelson has been a successful ski mountaineer for two decades. In 2012, she became the first woman to scale the summits of Mount Everest and neighboring Lhotse in just 24 hours. Six years later, she became the first person to descend Lhotse on skis.