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    Avalanche Buries Road Workers’ Camp in India, Killing 8

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    Rescuers working in extreme conditions evacuated 46 other construction workers trapped beneath feet of snow.Eight road construction workers died after becoming trapped under an avalanche in northern India, the Indian Army said on Sunday. Rescuers operating in several feet of snow evacuated 46 other workers.The workers were buried by the snow early on Friday in the village of Mana, in the state of Uttarakhand, as the avalanche hit their camp site.Disaster response teams coordinated the rescue efforts under extreme weather conditions, and the work was halted several times because of incessant snowfall and rain. GPS, sniffer dogs and thermal imaging cameras were used to find the workers.India’s Meteorological Department warned of the possibility of further avalanches in the area, which is known as a gateway for Himalayan mountain trekking.The rescued workers, many in critical condition, were taken by helicopters to hospitals in neighboring Joshimath. The workers belong to the Border Roads Organization, a division of the Indian armed forces that develops and maintains road networks in India’s border areas.Mana sits at an altitude of 3,200 meters, or more than 10,000 feet, and is about 15 miles from the Tibetan border. During the winter months, the village’s entire population migrates to lower elevations to escape the snowfall.Uttarakhand is prone to avalanches and floods. One of the country’s worst natural disasters took place there in 2013, when flooding killed more than 1,000 people. In 2021, 11 people died when an avalanche hit a Border Roads Organization camp in the district that includes Mana.As the Uttarakhand rescue efforts were completed, an operation to reach eight workers trapped in a tunnel in southern India were still underway, more than a week after the tunnel’s ceiling collapsed. Officials have said that the workers’ chances of survival are very remote. More

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      Colorado Snowboarder Becomes Fourth Avalanche Victim in a Week

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      The victim was traveling on a terrain feature known as The Nose near Silverton, Colo., when the avalanche occurred on Thursday, officials said.A backcountry snowboarder was killed in an avalanche on Thursday in a remote part of southwestern Colorado, the fourth person to die in a mountain slide this week in the western United States following several winter storms.The Colorado Avalanche Information Center said that the victim was traversing a terrain feature known as The Nose, near Silverton, Colo., when the person got caught in the avalanche.A skier who was with the snowboarder escaped the avalanche, the authorities said.Emergency responders used a helicopter to try to rescue the snowboarder, but the person did not survive, the center said. Rescuers were alerted about the avalanche by the staff from a nearby backcountry hut.The avalanche added to what has been a deadly week in the West.On Monday, two skiers were caught in an avalanche in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, one that occurred at a height of 6,700 feet on a south-facing slope. Their bodies were recovered on Tuesday.Also on Monday, an avalanche claimed the life of a backcountry skier in California near Lake Tahoe.The Sierra Avalanche Center said that the skier was traveling alone when he triggered the avalanche, which carried him downslope over rocks and through trees. The victim was buried beneath more than four feet of snow against a tree, the center said. More

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      American Climber’s Body Found on Mountain Peru After 22 Years

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      Melting glaciers on Mount Huascarán in Peru helped uncover the body of Bill Stampfl, who disappeared while climbing the mountain with two friends.Two decades after Bill Stampfl went missing during an avalanche while climbing Peru’s highest mountain, his daughter, Jennifer Stampfl, had more or less accepted that he was gone forever.Sometimes she still had dreams of him, alive in Peru, amnesiac and unaware that he had family in the United States. She knew he had hated the cold, so the idea of his being trapped in ice was unsettling. But she thought she had made her peace with the mountain keeping her father.Then, one Saturday last month, she got a call from her brother, Joseph Stampfl. He began: Are you sitting down?“He told me that they found Dad,” she said. “And I said, ‘What?’”A fellow American, Ryan Cooper, had tracked down Joseph Stampfl to tell him that he and a group of climbers had stumbled upon his father’s body on Mount Huascarán, a 22,205-foot peak in the Andes range. As climate change helped melt the mountain’s glaciers, Bill Stampfl’s body emerged from the ice that had preserved it since he went missing during an expedition with two friends in 2002, the Peruvian police said on Tuesday.On June 27, the climbers were descending Mount Huascarán when they saw a dark shape that stood out against the snow, Mr. Cooper, 44, a personal trainer from Las Vegas, said in an interview on Tuesday. As they drew closer, they saw that it was a body, curled in a defensive position, like someone trying to protect himself during an avalanche, he said.The body was completely exposed atop the ice, Mr. Cooper said. “Not like half of him was under the ice or anything — he was on top of the ice,” he said. Judging by the outdated clothing and the mummified condition of its skin, Mr. Cooper said, it was clear that the body had been there for a “really long time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Snow Storm Leaves Thousands in California and Nevada Without Power

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      Up to two feet of snow fell in some areas and combined with gusty winds as the risk of avalanches remained high. Thousands of residents were left without power, and life came to a standstill for many in the Sierra Nevada region on Saturday after a winter storm dumped as much as two feet of snow overnight and created treacherous conditions.About 49,000 customers in Nevada and California were without electricity on Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. With whiteout conditions in the mountains, ski resorts in the Lake Tahoe area paused operations. And highway officials shut down Interstate 80, the main artery that traverses the Sierra Nevada over Donner Summit, a key trucking route from the San Francisco Bay Area. Traffic cameras revealed semi trucks parked alongside the highway, waiting out the overnight closure.​​California Highway Patrol said there was no estimated time of reopening the freeway. The Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, a research station located atop Donner Summit, reported that 20.7 inches of snow had fallen by Saturday morning, and that 39.8 inches had fallen over the 48 hours leading up to it. Palisades Tahoe, a resort that closed ski area operations on Saturday across all terrain, reported 24 inches of new snow in the past 24 hours.Yosemite National Park remained closed at least through noon Sunday, park officials said.A maintenance worker clearing snow in South Lake Tahoe.David Calvert for The New York TimesEd Miller, a resident of Tahoma on Lake Tahoe’s West Shore, said he lost power around 10 p.m. on Friday night, before his generator kicked in a few minutes later. Mr. Miller, who has lived in the Lake Tahoe area for almost 50 years, is accustomed to power outages. He said having a generator is essential for living in the mountains, where wind gusts knock branches off trees and take down power lines on a regular basis.In the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the huge mountain range that runs along the spine of California, forecasters rated the avalanche danger as high, and they expected avalanche hazards to worsen throughout the day because of the new snow and continued winds. Overnight on Friday, winds reached as high as 171 miles per hour. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More