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US skier suffers over missing friends

Dunya News

Renowned American extreme skier Glen Plake said Wednesday he feels lucky to be alive.

While expressing his dissatisfaction, he said he is heartbroken as he could not save two friends who remain missing.He is one of the survivors of the weekend Himalayan avalanche that killed at least eight people.Plake is a champion hot-dog skier who has appeared in many extreme-skiing documentaries, including 1988s The Blizzard of AAHHHs, and also is well known for the tall mohawk he wears on the slopes. He had planned to ski down Mount Manalsu, the worlds eighth-highest mountain, after reaching the summit.I was awake in my tent reading my Bible.The tent began to shake. We thought it was the wind but in fact it was an avalanche, Plake told reporters at the Katmandu airport after returning from the mountain in a helicopter. It was like an earthquake; it was like a tsunami.Though he said he is probably the luckiest person in the world, he was unable to find his friends and climbing companions, Remy George Lecluse and Gregory Ugo Costa, both of France.You are doing everything you can do because your friends lives depend on your next action, he said. Unfortunately everything I did prove to produce nothing. At that point, I had to think about my own life and start preparing.Lecluse and Costa are among three people still missing from the avalanche, which swept the tents at camp 2 at an elevation of 7,000 meters (22,960 feet) before dawn Sunday.Nepalese mountaineering officials say eight bodies have been recovered: Fabrice Priez, Philippe Lucien Bos, Catherine Marie Andree Richard and Ludovic Paul Nicolas Challeat of France; German Christian Mittermeyer; Italian Alberto Magliano; Spaniard Marti Roirg Gasull; and Nepali Dawa Dorji.Many of the survivors have returned to Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, and have abandoned their plans to climb the mountain this season.Sundays avalanche came at the start of Nepals autumn climbing season, when the end of the monsoon rains makes weather in the high Himalayas unpredictable. Spring is a more popular mountaineering season, when hundreds of climbers crowd the peaks.Mount Manaslu, which is 8,156 meters (26,760 feet) high, has attracted more climbers recently because it is considered one of the easier peaks to climb among the worlds tallest mountains. Avalanches are not very frequent there, but in 1972 one struck a team of climbers and killed six Koreans and 10 Nepali guides.