29 People Died in One of the Worst Mountaineering Accidents in History. What Happened?
This article originally appeared on Outside
At 1 A.M. on October 4, 2022, Ankush Sharma woke for tea. He was high on India's Draupadi Ka Danda II, an 18,600-foot peak in the Gangotri range of the Garhwal Himalayas, near the Chinese border. The mountain, often called DKD2, is surrounded by intimidating 6,000-meter giants like Thalay Sagar, Shivling, and Meru--the latter home to the Shark's Fin, a wall of granite that was first climbed in 2011 by Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk and chronicled in the popular 2015 documentary Meru. DKD2, while 3,200 feet shorter and far less severe in comparison, is still glaciated and crevassed, and it harbors some of the same deadly hazards as the range's fabled peaks.
Sharma, then 23, was on a 28-day advanced mountaineering course run by the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM), one of India's top climbing schools. Around him the other students were waking up, too. It was summit day. Outside it was breezy and snowing lightly--"slittering" some of the students called it.
Sunil Lalwani, a 28 year-old from Mumbai with short brown hair, slept for an extra hour instead of getting up for tea. Lalwani once had a busy marketing job with little free time, but he quit after discovering hiking in 2015. The outdoors changed the course of his life. Another 28-year-old, Deep Thakkar, a part-time fund manager who wore a close-cropped beard and glasses, wanted to climb iconic mountains, like Nepal's Ama Dablam, so he moved from the coastal Indian city of Gujarat north to the mountains in the state of Himachal Pradesh to train. DKD2 would be his first 5,000-meter peak.
By 3:30 A.M. the sky was clear. From Camp 1 at 15,800 feet, seven instructors led 34 students, three porters, and one nursing assistant who worked for NIM out into darkness. A solo climber unaffiliated with the group who planned to ski off the top set out after them. He was the only other person on the mountain. It was NIM's first trip to the summit since the pre-monsoon climbing season in the spring. When the group reached their first landmark, Rambo Rock, at about 16,800 feet, they clipped into a fixed line--the first of many that day--and used ice axes and crampons to navigate the brief rocky section. Lalwani was in the middle of the long, tightly packed row, their headlamp beams bobbing up and down upon the snow as they traversed right and weaved upward, carefully skirting small cracks in the glacier. Soon the sky started to brighten with the first hints of morning. Those at the front of the pack broke trail through shin-deep snow. As they ascended the final stretch, they passed just uphill of a deep, narrow crevasse.
Yes! This is going to happen, Thakkar thought when the summit came into view. A few instructors and strong students had nearly reached it already and were fixing ropes that would make the final 500 feet easier for the others still en route. All 46 climbers were together on the slope, and almost everyone was attached to the fixed line with a carabiner, waiting to move up. They wore standard-issue orange helmets, and jackets in reds and blues with a NIM patch on the chest.
As they climbed, a small amount of snow slid down from above. "Hey, it was a mini avalanche," Lalwani said. Though it wasn't enough to knock anyone off their feet, the slide alarmed Lalwani. He calmed himself with the knowledge that NIM had been taking climbers to DKD2 since 1981; he'd never heard of an accident.
"Over the past few years," says Indian mountain guide Karn Kowshik, "we've had more accidents in India than we've ever had before."
Just after 8:30 A.M., Sharma reached the summit snowfield at the end of the fixed line, unclipped himself, and walked toward one of his instructors who was already on the top. Behind him, a crack shot silently across the slope and released a large slab avalanche. Everything below the fracture line began to move as the entire slope broke into chunks of snow and ice that flowed like water. A few hundred feet below, Thakkar watched in horror. There was no time to react. The slide toppled climbers, gaining momentum as it churned downhill. The man uphill from Lalwani fell on top of him. Lalwani plunged his ice ax into the snow, hoping to arrest their movement, but they were swept down the mountain. As they slid, he tried to keep his head above the mass of snow, but he felt like he was drowning.
Sharma, nearing the summit, glanced over his shoulder. The fixed rope was gone. His friends had all vanished. And yet he'd heard nothing: no screams, no commotion. "Everything happened in the blink of an eye," he says. "And everything happened in silence."
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