KATMANDU, Nepal — Freezing, exhausted, and blinded by snow, Yakov Megreli, an Israeli medical student, had a few minutes to make a choice.
He could spend the night shivering in a flimsy wooden tea stall with a few others, as snowdrifts crept up the walls outside and began to fall in through cracks. Or he could press forward into the blizzard with a large group of trekkers headed toward town and led by the tea shop’s owner, who promised to help them to safety if they each paid him 1,000 rupees, about $10.
Megreli, 24, cannot quite explain why he stayed behind in the wooden shack, but that is probably why he was alive Thursday, a survivor of the worst trekking disaster to hit Nepal’s Himalayas in recent memory.
He and about 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. But they were a small group. The rest of their group, some 40 to 50 young people, “decided to go to Mukhtinath,” he said, in an interview from a hospital in Katmandu. “And we don’t know what happened to them.”
About 350 hikers were going across the Thorong La pass on Tuesday when a ferocious, lashing surprise snowstorm — part of the aftermath of a cyclone that 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. Of those, 244 reached their destination, according to Ramesh Dhamala, chairman of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal.
The bodies of seven trekkers, six of them visitors from other countries, were retrieved Thursday, according to the association, bringing the number of dead to 27. Many more bodies had yet to be retrieved, presumably buried in snow along the path.
Harry Dahal, a director of Swissa, a tour agency that caters to Israeli trekkers, said that about 100 of his clients were planning to cross the pass on the day of the storm and 40 were still missing.
Nepal’s army and police began rescue operations after dawn Thursday. More than 60 people were delivered to safety, and dozens more were believed to have taken shelter at a lodge near the pass, said Gopal Babu Shrestha, an official with Trekking Agencies.
Meanwhile, dazed survivors were arriving in Katmandu’s army hospital.
“It was a terrible experience,” Megreli said. “It seemed that everything was fine. The weather was fine. The trail was not so hard. Until the storm.”
The Annapurna Circuit, as the trekking path is called, is a popular route. Those crossing the pass often stay overnight in lodges that offer thick blankets, yak-dung fires, and simple foods such as rice and soup, said David Ways, a travel writer who has made the journey twice.
In October, there would have been little worry about stormy weather, and for the days that led up to Tuesday, Dahal said, “there was not even a drop of cloud in the sky, it was all blue sky.”
Members of the Israeli group had just crossed the pass and were beginning their descent toward Mukhtinath when the wind whipped up, lashing their faces with particles of snow and making it difficult to see, Dahal said. The path is both steep and exposed, offering virtually nothing that could serve as shelter.