Bodies of mountaineers missing on Nanga Parbat found

GILGIT: Tom Ballard and Daniele Nardi, two mountaineers who went missing while climbing Nanga Parbat in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, are believed to be dead.

Their bodies have been located on a part of the mountain known as the Mummery Spur, at an altitude of almost 20,000 ft.

The two mountaineers had made last contact with their base camp on February 23. Since then, a search operation had been launched with the help of Pakistan Army. Several sorties were made by the choppers to locate the missing mountaineers without success.

 

With great sadness I inform that the search for 🇮🇹 @NardiDaniele and 🇬🇧 Tom Ballard is over as @AlexTxikon and the search team have confirmed that the silhouettes spotted on Mummery at about 5900 meters are those of Daniele and Tom. R.I.P. #NangaParbat pic.twitter.com/vBmsRKJgKC

— Stefano Pontecorvo (@pontecorvoste) March 9, 2019

It has now, officially, been confirmed by Italy’s ambassador to Pakistan that the bodies of the two mountaineers, belonging to Italy and the United Kingdom, have been found on the Mummery Spur.

The “Mummery Spur” is named after Alfred Mummery, a mountaineer killed in 1895 by avalanche while trying to scale the peak, along with two Gurkha climbers. 

Pamir Times has learnt that it would be very difficult to retrieve the bodies because of ‘high risk of avalanche’ in the area where the bodies have been spotted.

Tom Ballard’s mother, Alison Hargreaves, an accomplished mountaineer herself, had also perished while descending from the summit of K2 in 1995.

Nanga Parbat is infamously known as the “Killer Mountain” because a very large number f people have died while trying to climb it.