Life-and-Death Choices in a Himalayan Blizzard

He and around a dozen other hikers — mostly young Israelis and Germans — spent the night lying on top of one another, trying to fight off hypothermia by sharing body heat and talking about anything they could think of to keep from falling asleep.

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Around 350 hikers, porters and guides were making their way across the Thorong La pass on Tuesday morning when a ferocious, lashing freak snowstorm — the tail end of a dying cyclone that had ravaged India’s eastern coast — closed in on them, burying their legs in snow and making their progress down the steep path to safety agonizingly slow.

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October is peak season for the route because the weather is optimal. Temperatures are usually moderate, and there would have been little worry about snow. Anyway, in the days leading up to Tuesday, Mr. Dahal said, “there was not even a drop of cloud in the sky, it was all blue sky.”

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Members of the Israeli group had just crossed the pass and were beginning their descent toward Muktinath when the wind whipped up, lashing their faces with snow and making it difficult to see, Mr. Dahal said. The path is both steep and exposed, offering virtually nothing that could serve as shelter. As the snow accumulated, some hikers found that it was taking them as long as five minutes to make a single meticulous step, he said, and some hikers lost their shoes in the snow.

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Everyone was freezing, everyone was trying to put their feet in the right place, slowly, slowly,” he said. “Everything looks white, and you can’t find the real path.”