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| Hilaree Nelson a ski-mountaineer. Source : Online |
A well-known American ski climber was found dead on Wednesday, two days after going missing while skiing off Nepal's eighth-highest peak. Nepalese rescuers had been searching for her.
With her companion, Jim Morrison, Hilaree Nelson, 49, was descending from the 26,781-foot summit of Mount Manaslu when she fell.
She was found dead about 6,200 feet from the summit, according to Capt. Surendra Poudel of Simrik Air, who recovered the body during the helicopter search that had been hampered by bad weather.
He declared, "The body has been severely damaged." The body, which was partially buried in the snow, was recovered after an hour and a half.
Bigyan Koirala, a representative of the Department of Tourism, the government body responsible for issuing climbing licences, claimed that on Wednesday morning, Morrison and two high-altitude sherpa guides were dropped off by helicopter to look for the body.
According to Poudel, "the body was about 50 metres down to our landing point." At the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, a post-mortem was performed.
According to the information provided by Morrison, Nelson fell from the peak's southernmost point after slipping on a mountain's precarious knife-edge near the summit. Because more than 60 mountaineers have died on its slopes, Manaslu has earned the nickname "killer mountain" among the locals.
Nelson is referred to as the "most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation" by one of her sponsors, North Face, and has participated in about 40 expeditions over the past 20 years.
Nelson, a resident of Telluride, Colorado, spent his weekends at Stevens Pass in the Washington Cascades while he was growing up in Seattle. North Face claims that after visiting Chamonix, a French town at the base of Europe's highest mountain, Mont Blanc, after college, she became obsessed with skiing and mountaineering.
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| A helicopter carrying the body Nelson lands at a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Wednesday |
She made history in 2012 when she was the first woman to summit Mount Everest and nearby Mount Lhotse in a single day. She and Morrison returned to the region in 2018 and made history by being the first to ski down from the summit of Lhotse, the fourth-tallest mountain in the world, which stands at 27,940 feet. She described their exploits in detail on her website.
In a 2019 video about the accomplishment, she said, "It's hard to summit a 28,000-foot mountain, let alone get your skis up there, have the right conditions, and be able to make the ascent."
Young female climbers are credited with being inspired by Nelson. A mother of two boys who were born two years apart, she wrote in 2019 about the challenges she faced juggling motherhood and her mountaineering career. Pregnancy was "treated like an injury" for elite climbers, according to Nelson, who went on one expedition while six months pregnant and took pay cuts.
Nelson wrote about the difficulties of her most recent expedition on Instagram just a few days before it fell.
"On Manaslu, I didn't feel as secure as I had on earlier forays into the thin air of the high Himalaya. These recent weeks have put my fortitude to new tests," she wrote. I am terribly homesick because of the ongoing monsoon and its relentless rain and humidity.
When it became too dangerous to move between two camps, Nelson and her companion gave up trying to reach the summit. Morrison wrote on Instagram, "We went up high and tried hard, but the mountain said no. "With our tails between our legs, we left camp 3 and descended."
Avalanches and rapidly changing weather are frequent challenges for climbers in the region. The Associated Press reported that a Nepalese guide was killed and several climbers were injured on Monday by an avalanche further down the mountain.
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