France will dispatch, Friday, November 5, a rescue team to try to find the bodies of Louis Pachoud, Gabriel Miloche and Thomas Arfi, three young climbers swept away by an avalanche while they were attempting a first on the Mingbo Eiger (6,017 meters), a summit near Ama Dablam, in the Everest massif.
This team, made up of gendarmes, experts and an avalanche dog, will visit Nepal from November 5 to 17, Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel André told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday, Commander of the Mountain Technical Coordination Unit (UCTM).
Fourteen departing people
On the spot, the difficulties on the site of the avalanche go “Really depend on the type of snow put in motion, the weather forecast that followed and the orientation in the sun. There are a lot of things that make [la neige] can be more or less hard ”, according to Frédéric Jarry, project manager at the National Association for the Study of Snow and Avalanches, in Grenoble. “Generally speaking, a deposit [avalancheux] hardens over time “, he told AFP.
Of the fourteen people leaving, ten are rescuers from the high mountain gendarmerie platoon (PGHM). After a period of acclimatization to the altitude, they will pass “Eight to nine days” on the avalanche site, located in the Khumbu valley, he said.
The team also includes two identification experts from the national gendarmerie, a doctor from the high mountain military school, a high mountain guide from the French Federation of Alpine and Mountain Clubs (FFCAM) and a dog handler. They will take with them some 600 kilos of equipment.
Initial searches undertaken by Nepalese guides earlier this week were unsuccessful and were suspended for three or four days on Wednesday, according to Ang Norbu Sherpa, president of the National Association of Nepalese Mountain Guides and a member of the operation. search and rescue.
A possible fall of “several hundred meters”
Aged 27 to 34, Louis Pachoud, Gabriel Miloche and Thomas Arfi belonged to the National Mountaineering Excellence Group, an elite formation of the Federation, and the last telephone contact with them from their bivouac dates back to October 26, according to the FFCAM. Initial reconnaissance allowed their tracks to be located up to an altitude of 5,900 meters, whereas they had apparently turned around a hundred meters below the summit.
According to the information available, they have been “Thrown at the foot of the face” by the avalanche, i.e. a fall of “Several hundred meters”FFCAM president Nicolas Raynaud told AFP on Tuesday.
“We went to the foot of the face, we noticed that there was a very significant snow deposit with extremely compact snow, even completely frozen with clues on the surface, backpacks, equipment. And which suggests that the bodies of the three climbers are located under this avalanche deposit. “
The objective is now to recover them, “As long as we can do it”, he added.
“It is not excluded that we can only recover the bodies from the cast iron”, estimates for his part the former deputy commander of the PGHM of Chamonix Stéphane Bozon, who had supervised a search for victims in Nepal after a deadly avalanche at the foot of Kang Guru (6,981 meters) in October 2005, quoted Thursday by the Dauphiné released. Seven Frenchmen and eleven Nepalese, led by Daniel Stolzenberg, a seasoned sixty-year-old mountaineer, had been buried by a flow which had swept their base camp while they were asleep, and the last bodies were not cleared until July 2006. .