Rescuers Rush Up a Nepal Peak After 12 Disappear

Rescue teams recovered four bodies from the base camp of Himlung Himal in Nepal's Manang district and were still looking for 12 people on Monday, a day after an avalanche buried tents on the 7,126-meter (23,380-foot) peak.

Eight guides from the Nepal National Mountain Guide Association, which is running the search, used a break in the weather Monday to dig through the snow that had covered the camp. Everyone killed or missing was a Nepali national.

The four men who have been found

The association identified the two men recovered Monday as Birendra Gurung and Ghanshyam Rai. Two others, Chhebi Bhote and Pasang Bhote, were recovered and identified on Sunday.

Association president Tul Singh Gurung said the search and rescue team kept working in the avalanche zone on Monday and planned to stay out another three to four hours if the weather and mountain conditions held.

"Four bodies have been recovered and identified. Twelve people are still missing, and the search for them is continuing," Gurung said.

Ten people came off the mountain alive

Helicopters pulled 10 people off Himlung after the avalanche hit early Sunday, burying tents under deep snow. The mountain sits in north-central Nepal, close to the Chinese border.

The two bodies found Sunday were flown from Chame Hospital to Kathmandu by a Kailash Helicopter chopper, then taken by hearse to the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital. Family members and friends gathered at the hospital morgue as the remains arrived. They did not speak to reporters.

The crew had been at the camp since September 18

More than two dozen Nepali high-altitude workers and guides from two operators, Himalayan Holidays and Imagine Nepal Trek and Expedition, had traveled from Kathmandu to Himlung about two weeks before the slide. Their job was to build the base camp and work on the climbing route.

The team reached base camp safely on September 18, carrying food and climbing equipment, Barun Bhandari, general manager of Himalayan Holidays, told CNN. Sherpas, kitchen staff and general crew were all on the mountain.

"They have been there setting up tents, fixing ropes for the climb, monitoring the conditions on the mountain and setting up the kitchen," Bhandari said.

The work was being done for a group from the United Arab Emirates that was set to arrive on October 1 for the autumn climbing season, which opened in September.

A flat camp, and a first for the operator

Bhandari said the company had never had an avalanche like it in that exact spot. "The ground is very flat at the base camp so we are quite surprised. But you never know, the mountain is unpredictable," he told CNN on Sunday.

"We are very devastated," he said. At that point, Bhandari said, the company had heard that six or seven of its crew were missing and was working with Nepal's tourism board to pin down the real number. Heavy rain and limited communication lines from the remote camp were slowing that down, and the company was trying to get a rescue helicopter up to the site.

Rescuers did not reach the site until Sunday evening

Mingma G Sherpa, the operator of Imagine Nepal Trek and Expedition and an international mountain guide, is leading the rescue team. The first guides reached the camp on Sunday evening. Others, held overnight in Chame by the weather, were flown by helicopter to the Himlung base camp on Monday morning.

"We could have saved lives but due to bad weather, we reached the accident site only in the evening (on Sunday)," Sherpa wrote on Facebook.

Senior Captain Pasang Norbu Sherpa of Prabhu Helicopter said his crew flew the team in. "We took the rescue team to the Himlung base camp this morning," he said. The search resumed once the helicopter dropped the guides off.

Guides with high-altitude experience are checking likely locations and sizing up the conditions. Bad weather and difficult ground on the mountain have made the operation harder.

The count shifted through Monday morning

Earlier Monday, before the two additional bodies were recovered, Tul Singh Gurung put the toll at two dead and 14 expedition workers missing. "Two bodies were found as rescuers worked until 6pm last night," he told AFP. "The search continues for 14 expedition workers who are still missing."

Mingma G Sherpa said the two men found first were both guides, and that the missing were kitchen staff working at the expedition camp. Organizers had initially reported at least 10 people missing.

A 14-member rescue team was deployed for the search, officials said Monday.

Rain since Thursday, warnings for the whole country

The avalanche came with severe weather warnings posted by the government across all of Nepal. Heavy rain that began Thursday triggered floods and landslides in other parts of the country.

The district administration office in Manang reported flooding and landslides there over the weekend, all from heavy rainfall. Manang residents who had been displaced by the flood risk returned home as the threat eased.

The National Trust for Nature Conservation had suspended entry permits to the Annapurna and Manaslu conservation areas from September 24 to 26 because of the rain. Those areas hold some of Nepal's busiest trekking routes, and Himlung is part of that region.

21 other deaths between Thursday and Sunday

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said 21 other people were killed and five more were missing elsewhere in the country between Thursday and Sunday. Those figures are separate from the Himlung toll.

The August flood is still being counted

Nepal is still rebuilding from a glacial flood on August 26 that swept away several villages, killing more than 1,400 people. The disaster came after a glacier collapse and landslide on the Nepal-China border.

The disaster authority said 5,285 people were still missing from that flood and 13,795 had been rescued. The Nepali government has been urging foreign visitors not to cancel their trips in spite of the damage.

Why crews are on the mountain before the clients

Nepal is home to eight of the world's 14 highest peaks, and mountaineering and trekking money runs through the country's economy. Foreign expeditions do not arrive to an empty mountain. Nepali guides, kitchen staff and porters go up first, fix ropes along the route, pitch the tents, haul the food and watch how the snow is behaving.

That is the work the crew on Himlung was doing when the snow came down on the camp. The clients had not yet landed in the country.

Search efforts were continuing Monday, the guide association said, with 12 people still unaccounted for.