The 49 -year -old American adventurer was a great figure in mountaineering, notably achieving the first ski descent of Mount Lhotse.
Le Monde with AFP
The mountain will have been almost his whole life, and the place of his death. The body of the American mountaineer Hilaree Neslon was discovered in the Himalayas on Wednesday, September 28, two days after his disappearance on the slopes of Mount Manaslu, Nepal. “The research team which left this morning as a helicopter spotted their body and brings it back,” said Jiban Ghimire, a member of Shangri-La Nepal Trek, who organized the expedition on Wednesday, September 28. Mr. Ghimire clarified that the body had been brought back to the base camp and would be transported by plane to Kathmandu.
Hilaree Nelson, 49, started to ski down this Himalayan mountain after having succeeded on Monday the ascent, with his companion, Jim Morrison, of the 8,163 meters of the manaslu who make this mountain the eighth plus high of the world. “She had an accident on Monday when she was going down, shortly after her ascent,” said Jiban Ghimire. That same day, an avalanche struck the manaslu, killing a Nepalese mountaineer and injuring a dozen people, according to the government’s tourism department.
“Jim and other people left for air research in order to find it. It is difficult to land or take off in the area,” said the organizer when research resumed on Wednesday. The day before, the emergency services had returned empty -handed, while Monday the helicopters had not been able to take off.
Dangerous conditions
In an Instagram publication last week, the mountaineer said that the ascent had been particularly difficult due to “incessant rain” and dangerous conditions. The very day of his disappearance, an avalanche occurred between camps 3 and 4 of Manaslu, killing a Nepalese mountaineer and injuring ten people, according to the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism.
The career of Hilaree Nelson, described by his sponsor The North Face as “the most prolific skier-alineist of her generation”, extends over two decades. In 2012, she was the first woman to reach in twenty-four hours the Everest summit, the highest mountain in the world, and the neighboring summit of the Lhotse. In 2018, she returned to the Lhotse and made the first ski descent of this mountain, which earned her the National Geographic Prize for the year.