At first it was an apprehension, now it is a sad certainty: five Russian climbers with whom radio contact was lost on Sunday on the eight-thousander Dhaulagiri in western Nepal are dead. According to the newspaper “The Himalayan Times”, the crew of a rescue helicopter discovered the bodies of the five missing mountaineers at an altitude of around 7,100 meters. It is assumed that Alexander Dusheyko, Oleg Kruglov, Vladimir Chistikov, Mikhail Nosenko and Dmitrii Shpilevoi fell around 500 meters to their dead, it said.
Two climbers at the summit
The Russian expedition was the only one this fall on the 8,167-meter-high Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain in the world. They wanted to climb it without bottled oxygen and without Sherpa support. After a snowstorm had raged for several days, the climbers set off from base camp on Monday last week to attempt the summit. Denis Aleksenko and Artem Tsenzevintsky reached the highest point on Saturday.
A second group of six climbers then also made their way to the summit. One of them, Valerii Shamalo, did not feel well and descended alone. According to the Russian portal “mountain.ru”, he was rescued by the crew of the rescue helicopter from a camp at 6,100 meters and flown to Kathmandu. For the other five climbers, any rescue came too late.
Update 16 October: According to the “Himalayan Times”, the bodies of the five Russian climbers were retrieved by helicopter. They are to be handed over to the affected families in Kathmandu.
