Bengaluru man's body found in Himachal Pradesh glacier

BENGALURU: Two months after a mountaineer from Bengaluru fell into a deep, narrow crevasse on the Dhaka glacier at an altitude of 5,300 metres (17,388 feet), his body was retrieved by a search team on Tuesday morning.
The 11-member team from Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports has set a record by retrieving Vedavyasa's body from a crevasse at such a high altitude. It took eight days for the team to reach the body and pull it out of the diagonal crevasse.
Vedavyasa's body is now being lifted to the base from where it will be shifted to Keylong hospital in Lahaul-Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh for postmortem. Later, it will be handed over to family members who had lost hope of finding him.
Vedavyasa had accidentally slipped into the crevasse on June 26, when he and three friends - Prasanna of Bengaluru, Ravi of Jaipur and Kushal of Shimla - were returning from a failed expedition of CB-13 peak due to poor weather conditions and health issues.
The only rope that the group was carrying had fallen into the crevasse along with Vedavyasa. The friends had tried to reach him using a metal cable which they found from the debris of an old aeroplane crash site at the Dhaka glacier.
Later, rescue teams from the institute, Army's Dogra Scouts, police and administration tried to reach the body but failed. The search-and-rescue operations were stopped as it was snowing and the crevasse was too narrow to enter.
Institute director Avinash Negi said, "The body was retrieved after relentless efforts of our team members. The search operation resumed after two months at the request of the Lahaul-Spiti administration and family members of the victim. The weather was bad, but the team did not stop."
Dhaka glacier is located amid the Chandra Bhaga mountain range in Spiti valley. The glacier is infamous for the 1968 Indian Air Force aircraft crash that killed 98 soldiers and four crew members.
The wreckage of the crashed plane is strewn across the glacier and most bodies could not be recovered. As the glacier is melting fast, it has developed many crevasses, some of which remain hidden under a thin layer of fresh snow.