Hilaree Nelson, a well-known US ski mountaineer, was found dead on Wednesday as her boyfriend removed her bodybag from a rescue chopper.
After climbing Nepal’s Manaslu peak with her companion Jim Morrison on Monday, Nelson lost control of her skis and vanished two days ago while skiing down the eighth-highest mountain in the world.
The search activities were being led by Morrison, who had lost his wife and their two young children in a plane disaster in 2011, and he had departed on a chopper early on Wednesday to resume his search.
He was seen removing the body from a rescue helicopter and placing it in a van belonging to the neighbourhood mortuary unit.
The search crew that departed on a helicopter this morning discovered her body, according to Jiban Ghimire of Shangri-La Nepal Trek, the company that planned the expedition. According to Ghimire, the body was transferred to the peak’s base camp and would then be transported to Kathmandu by plane.
After spending more than an hour trying to get the body out of the snow, officials remarked that it was “badly damaged.”
The North Face, Nelson’s sponsor, calls her “the most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation.” Nelson is 49 years old.
She was the first woman to conquer Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, and the nearby Lhotse peak within a 24-hour period ten years ago.
After conquering and skiing down Papsura, popularly known as the Peak of Evil, in India, and then repeating the feat on Denali in Alaska, she was also named a National Geographic adventurer of the year in 2018.
Nelson stated last week on Instagram that her most recent ascent had been extremely difficult due to ‘incessant rain’ and hazardous weather.
‘I haven’t felt as sure-footed on Manaslu as I have on past adventure into the thin atmosphere of the high Himalaya,’ Nelson wrote in a post on Thursday.
