A virtual base camp has been formed to ensure a thorough search-and-rescue effort
KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 9
Families of three missing mountaineers from Pakistan, Iceland, and Chile decided to proceed with their rescue mission after 72 gruelling hours of non-stop intensive search-and-rescue efforts came to a halt due to bad weather condition.
Ali Sadpara, 45, John Snorri, 47, and Juan Pablo Mohr, 33, had joined forces to make a summit bid on K2, the last eight-thousander unclimbed in winter until a team of 10 Nepalis summited the peak on January 16.
Rao Ahmad, Ali Sadpara's long-time friend and Sajid Sadpara, Ali Sadpara's son, along with British-American climber Vanessa O'Brien who also serves as Pakistan's Goodwill Ambassador and summited K2 with Jon Snorri, have formed a virtual base camp to ensure a thorough search-and-rescue effort, states a press release issued by the team from Pakistan.
The team has thanked everyone who expressed interest in Sadpara, Snorri and Mohr's climb -- who expressed concern for their wellbeing, who offered to help, who prayed for their safety and offered ideas and thoughts on the use of drones and search locations.
"There are reasons why K2 in winter had not been climbed before, and those reasons made a search-and-rescue mission almost impossible. The freezing temperatures and wind chill, averaging -50 degrees Celsius, along with exhausted climbers, created a challenge, but everyone did what they could," they said.
They shared that at their virtual base camp, they were fortunate to receive Hi-Res Satellite SAR imagery from ICEYE, a provider of persistent monitoring with radar-satellite imaging. SAT imagery has been used in past rescue operations, but no one has every quite used SAR imagery like this before. They were provided with the perfect visual acuity to view areas inaccessible to helicopters because of harsh winter conditions and excessive winds.
"We supplemented this data with input from other technological devices the climbers carried – Garmin, Thuraya, Inmarsat – together with interviews from witnesses, to create a timeframe of the climbers' locations during their summit bid," the team noted and said that they are grateful for the six helicopter flights by the Pakistan Army pilots, who pushed the upper limits during each of these search flights.
They also expressed their gratitude towards Canadian-filmmaker Elia Saikaly for capturing imagery during these search-and-rescue flights, and to others who have been involved in personal and official capacities in the search and rescue mission.
The team has appealed to the Pakistani government, on behalf of families of the missing mountaineers, to continue with search and rescue support, weather permitting.
Quoting Martin Luther King Jr, they said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
