Summary Search for Hari Simran Singh Khalsa, began Tuesday after he went missing in Tepoztlan.
WASHINGTON (AP) An American has been missing in rugged wilderness of central Mexico for four days after going on a hike wearing only a T-shirt and shorts and with little food and water, according to his wife and a Mexican official.
The search for Hari Simran Singh Khalsa, 25, began Tuesday after he went missing in Tepoztlan about an hour south of Mexico City
and has included 150 searchers and three helicopters, said Carlos Mandujano, a civil defense coordinator in the central Mexican state of Morelos.
"Our orders are to do everything humanly possible" to find him, Mandujano said Friday.
Khalsa s wife, Ad Purkh Kaur, said Friday from Tepoztlan that her husband is a yoga instructor born and raised in Brooklyn. The couple now live in Leesburg, Virginia, and were planning to move back to Brooklyn at the end of the month.
Kaur, whose legal name is Emily Smith, said she and her husband arrived to Tepoztlan for a yoga retreat on Dec. 26.
She said her husband decided to go for a day hike in the nearby mountains on Tuesday, and left with only a T-shirt, shorts, a liter of water, a handful of trail mix and a knife. Temperatures in the area where Khalsa went missing can get below freezing this time of year.
Kaur said she heard from her husband at 12:30 p.m. CST on Tuesday, when he sent a picture of himself on a mountain top, pointing down to the site of the yoga retreat where she was, with the message: "Looking down on you!"
She last heard from him about two hours after that, at 2:20 p.m. CST, when he sent a text message.
"I accidentally summited another mountain," he wrote, Kaur said. "Looks like I ll be a little later coming back. Save me some lunch if you can."
Kaur said that searchers have pored over the location they believe Khalsa sent his last text messages with no luck and that helicopters have made many runs overhead, leading her to believe he s injured and may be in a cave or crevasse.
Mandujano, the civil defense coordinator in Morelos, said that the area is crisscrossed by ravines and gullies that lead off in different directions, and that Khalsa may have taken one of those.
Kaur said her husband is an experienced hiker who was just getting into backcountry hiking, though she said he doesn t have much survival training that she knows of.
"He hasn t done a lot of overnight hikes, or a lot of backcountry hikes," she said. "He has gone on accidental overnight hikes before and had to come down the next day ... He s very adventurous and strong and smart and capable.
"I believe he has enough resources to keep himself alive until we can find him," she said.
Her optimism was boosted after she said the U.S. Embassy became involved in the search effort Friday and helped obtain cellphone data for Khalsa, which she s hoping will help pinpoint his location.
"I don t have any other choice than to believe 100 percent we re going to find him," she said.
