R.I.P.

Tragic incident on the eight-thousander Dhaulagiri in western Nepal: Yesterday an avalanche hit a seven-man Sherpa team of the operator “Seven Summit Treks”, who were fixing ropes between Camp 2 (6,400 m) and Camp 3 (7,400 m). “Six (Sherpas) survived the avalanche unharmed, but the only 24-year-old Dawa Gyaljen, born near (the eight-thousander) Makalu, is missed,” Spaniard Luis Miguel Lopez Soriano wrote on Facebook. Luis accompanies his 79-year-old friend Carlos Soria, who this fall is trying for the tenth and, in his own words, probably last time to scale Dhaulagiri. The 8,167-meter-high mountain and Shishapangma (8,027 m) are the last two eight-thousanders still missing from Carlos’s collection.

Billi Bierling and Herbert Hellmuth on Dhaulagiri

Dhaulagiri

Billi Bierling also confirmed Dawa Gyaljen’s death in the avalanche. She had reached Camp 2, but returned to base camp because of the incident, Billi wrote today on Twitter. The 51-year-old German mountaineer and journalist, who heads the mountaineering chronicle “Himalayan Database” in Kathmandu as successor to the late legendary Elizabeth Hawley, belongs to a group of the Swiss expedition operator “Kobler & Partner”. She has already scaled five eight-thousanders: Everest in 2009, Lhotse and Manaslu in 2011, Makalu in 2014 and Cho Oyu in 2016. On Manaslu and Cho Oyu, Billi climbed without bottled oxygen.

German Herbert Hellmuth, who has a permit for a ski descent from the summit with his Russian team mate Sergey Baranov, is also en route on Dhaulagiri. Last May, the 49-year-old reached the top of Kangchenjunga, his third eight-thousander after Manaslu (2011) and Mount Everest (2013). On K2 he had to turn around at 7,000 meters in 2015.