DEHRADUN: Two foreign women mountaineers, Michelle Theresa Dvorak from the USA and Fay Jane Manners from the UK, were safely rescued from Chaukhamba-III peak by an Indian Air Force (IAF) team early Sunday morning, nearly 72 hours after they became stranded while climbing the challenging peak in the Garhwal Himalayas in Chamoli district.
“Both were located by an aerial team of the IAF, which took off early in the morning from Joshimath in search of the missing climbers.They were safely airlifted and brought to an Army base near Auli. They are healthy and doing fine,” said Chamoli’s disaster management officer, Nand Kishore Joshi, to TOI. “They were rescued from an altitude of 5,300 meters, approximately 300 meters above the advanced base camp,” Joshi added.
The breakthrough came on Saturday afternoon when a three-member French expedition team discovered the two missing climbers in urgent need of assistance.
The French team provided them with essential supplies and alerted officials at the advanced base camp about their location. Acting on the information received on Saturday, the IAF aerial team flew to the precise location and successfully spotted the missing mountaineers, who were found with the French climber, an official told TOI.
Significantly, while attempting to climb the peak on Thursday, one of their bags, containing food, a tent, and other crucial supplies, slipped into a deep gorge, leaving both trekkers stranded. The two IAF helicopters arrived at Joshimath on Friday morning to assist with the search and rescue operation. However, despite conducting multiple sorties over the mountain on both Friday and Saturday, the team was unable to locate the trekkers due to poor weather conditions and the lack of exact information about their whereabouts.
On Saturday, the IAF helicopters successfully air-dropped four State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) members at the advanced base camp at 4,990 meters in hopes of launching a ground search operation. Both Dvorak and Manners are seasoned mountaineers and have summited several peaks in Europe and America in the past.
Fay Jane Manners is a British alpinist from Bedford and is currently based in Chamonix, France, where she spends most of her time in the high mountains either ski mountaineering or alpine climbing. She has climbed several peaks in the past, including the Mont Blanc massif in France, the Eiger in Switzerland, and Denali Peak in Alaska. Meanwhile, Michelle Theresa Dvorak, hailing from Issaquah, Washington, works as a teaching assistant at the University of Washington while pursuing her passion for climbing and mountaineering.
In 2022, they achieved the feat of becoming the first women pair that year to scale the Cassin Ridge on Denali, North America’s highest peak, standing at nearly 6,200 meters. The British Foreign Office also issued a statement on Saturday saying, “We are supporting the family of a British woman reported missing in India and are in contact with the local authorities.”