ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani military helicopter teams rescued six mountain climbers on Tuesday after an avalanche trapped them on a treacherous stretch of the Hindu Kush on the border with Afghanistan, officials said.
The rescued climbers — four of them Italian, two of them Pakistani — were hit on Monday near the summit of the 5,800-meter Lions Melvin Jones Peak. Their Pakistani guide was killed immediately, officials said, and the survivors sustained minor injuries.
“They have been rescued and are under treatment at the Combined Military Hospital in Gilgit,” Naiknam Karim, the chief executive of Adventure Tours of Pakistan, said in a telephone interview from Gilgit, in northern Pakistan. “The Pakistani climbers can walk, while the Italian have minor injuries.”
Officials said it had taken two helicopters roughly four hours to bring the climbers down.
Mr. Karim, whose company provided ground services for the climbers, said that the team, known as the Pakistan-Italian Friendship Expedition, had set out from base camp on June 5. It was the second time they had attempted the climb, which is in the Ishkoman Valley.
“The Italians had attempted to climb the summit last year, too, but the attempt was unsuccessful,” Mr. Karim said.
The rugged, often unnamed peaks that run through northern Pakistan are less explored than the neighboring Himalayas that stretch into northern India and Nepal, where most of the world’s highest mountains are. Climbers say weather in the Hindu Kush is erratic.
“The peaks are dangerous and known for their avalanches,” said Mingma Sherpa, a Nepali climber who has summited mountains in the region.
Leading up to the avalanche, Tarcisio Bellò, one of the mountaineers, shared regular updates on social media about the group’s progress climbing Lions Melvin Jones Peak.
Mr. Bellò posted pictures of yak herds and several of the climbers scaling slabs of rock. The team had snowball fights and learned words in local Pakistani languages. The guide who died, Mohammad Imtiaz, spoke to the group about the dangers of altitude sickness, telling the story of a client who had recently died on a trek.
But as the group got closer to the summit, Mr. Bellò remarked on the constant snowfall — an estimated 20 inches one day. In his last update, posted a few days before the avalanche struck, he stressed the importance of waiting for the right conditions before making a final push to the top.
“If the window of good weather ends, everything becomes complicated,” he wrote. “Hopefully all goes well. Inshallah.”
Source : Nytimes
