Harrowing Days in the Himalayas After Deadly Blizzard Surprises Hikers

Kathmandu, Nepal:  Freezing, exhausted and blinded by snow, Yakov Megreli, an Israeli medical student, had a few minutes to make a choice.

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.

Megreli, 24, cannot quite explain why he stayed behind in the wooden shack, but that is probably why he was alive Thursday, a survivor of the worst trekking disaster to hit Nepal's Himalayas in recent memory.

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, 40 to 50 young people, decided to go to the nearest town, Muktinath, he said in an interview from a hospital in Katmandu. "And we don't know what happened to them."

Around 350 hikers were making their way across the Thorong La pass Tuesday morning when a ferocious, lashing freak snowstorm - the tail end of a dying cyclone that had 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.

The bodies of seven trekkers, six of them visitors from other countries, were retrieved Thursday, according to the association, bringing the number of dead to 27. That number is expected to rise, because many bodies are presumed to be buried under several feet of snow. Trekkers who have been rescued have spoken of passing large numbers of frozen bodies as they hiked out, said Gopal Babu Shrestha, an official with Trekking Agencies.

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.

Nepal's army and police force began rescue operations after dawn on Thursday, and by nightfall reported more than 70 rescues. Dozens more hikers are safe but snowbound in remote lodges.

Meanwhile, dazed survivors were arriving in Katmandu's army hospital, wondering at the storm that had engulfed them.

"It was a terrible experience," Megreli said. "It seemed that everything was fine. The weather was fine. The trail was not so hard. Until the storm."

The Annapurna Circuit, as the three-week trekking path is called, is a popular route for backpackers, nicknamed the Apple Pie Trek for its famously well-stocked lodges. Guesthouses along the way provide hikers with thick blankets, yak-dung fires and simple foods like rice and soup, said David Ways, a travel writer who has made the journey twice.

October is peak season for the route because the weather is optimal. Temperatures are usually moderate, and there would have been little worry about snow. Anyway, in the days leading up to Tuesday, Dahal said, "there was not even a drop of cloud in the sky, it was all blue sky."

Members of the Israeli group had just crossed the pass and were beginning their descent toward Muktinath when the wind whipped up, lashing their faces with snow and making it difficult to see, 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.

Linor Kajan, a hiker who survived, said she became separated from her group and got stuck in a snowdrift, unable to see, until a Nepalese guide she knew spotted her and "dragged me, really dragged me to the tea shop."

Shrestha, the Trekking Agencies official, said the sudden, catastrophic storm was unlike anything he had seen in his 15-year career.

"It was not snowing when they started to walk down," he said. "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 had nearly reached Muktinath. Some stumbled into the town just before dawn Wednesday.

"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."

The blizzard abated Wednesday, and inside the tea stand, the small group of survivors with 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, Megreli said.

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. Megreli credited the handwritten note, passed by the man on horseback to an Israeli guide, who then contacted Israel's ambassador to Nepal. Ora described it as a miracle.

"All the time I thought, 'I am going to die,'" she said. "This is the moment when I said: 'It's over. I am going home. I am going to be OK.'"

Megreli was sitting near her. "Some of us are suffering from little medical conditions," he said. "We are happy that we are alive. We are OK. We are exhausted. We don't feel some sensations in the fingers. But everything is going to be OK." 

© 2014, The New York Times News Service

Why Himalayan glaciers are expanding instead of shrinking

Scientists' observations in the Karakoram region have revealed that the glaciers there were stable, and snowfall is increasing instead of decreasing.

The researchers found that while precipitation is increasing across the Himalayas, most of this moisture drops in the summer — except in Karakoram, where snow dominates the scene, Discovery News reported.

Study researcher Sarah Kapnick, a postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric and ocean sciences at Princeton University, gave reasoning for why you can have increased snowfall in a region and have increased glaciers or stable glaciers in a warming world.

She and her colleagues collected data on recent precipitation and temperatures from the Pakistan Meteorological Department and other sources, including satellite data. They combined this information with climate models to track changes in three regions of the Himalayas between 1861 and 2100: the Karakoram; the central Himalayas; and the southeast Himalayas which included part of the Tibetan Plateau.

The researchers found that a new model that simulates climate down to an area of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) was able to match the observed temperature and precipitation cycles seen in the Karakoram. A model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to simulate what will happen if the world continues to emit greenhouse gases at current rates was unable to capture these seasonal cycles, Kapnick said.

The reason, she said, was that the IPCC and other climate models are lower-resolution, capturing climate change over areas no finer than about 17,027 square miles (44,100 square km). The coarser resolution "smoothes out" variations in elevation that works fine for the central Himalayas and southeast Himalayas. However, the Karakoram region has more elevation variability than the other two regions.

Ultimately, the result is that the IPCC and other models overestimate the amount of warmth in this region, Kapnick said.