By Andrew MacAskill and Douglas Busvine

DHUNCHE, Nepal, May 7 (Reuters) – It was three foreign
trekkers who used their satellite telephone to call the rescue
helicopter that landed in Nepal’s Langtang Valley around midday
on Tuesday, April 28. Three days earlier, a 7.8 magnitude
earthquake had triggered a catastrophic landslide that buried
hundreds of people in one village in the valley.

But villagers clung to the chopper’s landing skids,
preventing it from taking off, witnesses said. They then led the
uninjured foreign trekkers out of the aircraft and carried
injured Nepalis aboard, including a toddler with broken legs, at
a rescue in another village, Kyanjin Gompa.

“Most helicopters were coming to pick up the foreigners, who
were healthy, not our injured people,” said Lhakpa Jangba, a
local baker who was interviewed at a monastery in Kathmandu
after his evacuation from the valley last week.

“We said to the foreigners, ‘You are healthy. Stay one or
two more days and let our injured people go.'”

Rescue workers are struggling to recover the bodies of
nearly 300 people, including about 110 foreigners, believed to
be buried under up to six metres (20 feet) of ice, snow and rock
from the landslide that destroyed Langtang Village. So far, the
bodies of nine foreigners have been recovered. That makes
Langtang one of the worst-hit sites in a disaster whose toll
throughout Nepal has reached 7,759 dead with over 16,400
injured.

Langtang Lirung, the 7,234-metre (23,734 feet) mountain
looming over the Langtang Valley, shook violently, survivors
recalled. It then shed a gigantic slice that fell hundreds of
feet, launching a massive torrent of air, snow, ice and rock
upon the village and its 55 guesthouses, brimming with trekkers
at the start of the climbing season.

The stunning landscapes of Langtang Valley, the nearest
Himalayan region to Kathmandu, which lies 60 km (35 miles) to
the south, make it popular with foreign climbers and trekkers.

This is the second successive year a catastrophe on the roof
of the world has disrupted the climbing season. Last year,
sherpas threatened a boycott of Mt. Everest expeditions after 16
were killed in an avalanche on the perilous Khumbu icefall.
Eighteen died at Everest Base Camp in April’s quake. It’s a big
business: Everest expedition companies charge clients between
$40,000 and $90,000, depending on the number of guides and other
services they want. Sherpas can make as little as $1,000 in a
whole season.

Those who come to the Langtang Valley are a mix of
experienced climbers and adventure trekkers.

“Everest is for very specialised, skilled climbers, while
those in Langtang were people on adventure holidays – most
without any guides,” said Prachanda Man Shrestha, a former head
of Nepal’s tourism department. “Anyone can get to Langtang, you
are walking at high altitude, but if you are reasonably fit you
can go there.”

‘SUBTERRANEAN UNIVERSE’

U.S. mountaineer Kevin Krogh was filming people fleeing a
shaking guest house in Kyanjin Gompa in the Langtang Valley in
the midst of the quake. The video abruptly ends with people
looking back toward the Langtang Himal range as a foggy cloud
enters the frame.

Krogh, 32, and his wife, Kat Heldman, 40, had left Langtang
Village early Saturday morning with the rest of their party for
the three-hour trek to Kyanjin Gompa.

The quake was “like nothing I’ve ever seen in California”,
real estate broker Heldman told Reuters in a telephone interview
from her home in San Diego after her evacuation.

“We see this giant cloud of white. It was moving very fast –
we knew it was an avalanche. Our guide screamed: ‘Avalanche,
run!’ We ran through the town as fast as we could, but you can’t
outrun an avalanche.”

Heldman said she ran about 100 feet before diving behind a
wall just as the juggernaut of ice, rock and snow caught up to
her. She crouched down, putting up her arms “so that I know
which way is up if I’m buried”. Someone else came up behind her
and she grabbed onto him until the avalanche ended. “When it
stopped, and it did stop, we could stand up. He had lost his
shoes.”

She looked around and saw Krogh digging out another member
of their party, Oscar Olea. “If you were on the wrong side of a
building, you were going to get buried,” Heldman said.

She ran into the guest house to get some rescue gear, past a
British trekker. “His face was totally bloody – just standing
there holding this baby. He gave it to the mother.”

Frightened yaks and horses wandered around “a subterranean
universe – all grey and white”, she recalled.

Her party had hired two guides from a Nepali company called
Expedition Himalaya, along with two cooks and 15 porters. They
had intended to climb the majestic 6,387-metre (19,680 feet)
Gangchempo peak in Langtang National Park.

Instead, they set up a triage station and a dining tent and
went in search of the missing. The fellow climber shown on
Krogh’s video fleeing from the guest house, nurse Brigida
Martinez, treated a number of head wounds after the avalanche.
The group had 12 days of food for their expedition that they
intended to share with survivors.

UNDER THE OVERHANG

Toyanath Rijal was just outside Langtang Village scouting
for a location to build a mobile telephone tower when the quake
knocked him and three colleagues off their feet.

First, he said he heard a sound like thunder, then an
almighty crack. He turned to see a chunk of rock and ice sliding
down the mountain, sweeping away everything before it. “It was
like watching a wave crashing down the hillside,” said Rijal,
40, interviewed in Dhunche, a town in the foothills of Langtang
National Park and the base for recovery operations in Langtang.

The landslide was so powerful it travelled across a plateau
below the mountain range, over a river and up the other side of
the valley, he said.

Rijal watched all this from under a 40-foot high slab of
overhanging rock where he had scrambled for shelter with his
colleagues.

When the avalanche passed, Rijal fell to his knees clutching
his upanayana, the sacred thread devout Hindus wear around their
neck, and wept. “I have been given another opportunity in life
and there must be a reason for that,” he said. “I’m going to use
it.”

He spent the next three nights living in the open,
scavenging for food and firewood around the smothered landscape
of Langtang Village, where only one building was left partly
standing.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR THE MISSING

Back in California, Kat Heldman’s sister Caroline began
calling satellite phone numbers that she obtained from
Expedition Himalaya as soon as she heard about the earthquake in
Nepal that Saturday, April 25. “I begged her expedition company
to give me whatever satphone numbers they knew of in the region
for guides,” Caroline Heldman said in an email interview from
Los Angeles, where she is a political science professor at
Occidental College. “I called them one after another until I
found her.”

Thirty hours later, calling almost nonstop, she finally got
through to Oscar Olea, the climber her sister’s husband had dug
out of the avalanche at Kyanjin Gompa. “I didn’t even know I was
talking to him at first. I didn’t know they were there.
Honestly, according to their itinerary, I thought they were
buried in Langtang Village.”

On the other end of the line, Kat Heldman was also
disoriented. “It took me a while to realise who was
calling…that was the first time she knew that we were alive.”

It was only then, when Caroline updated her with the news of
the quake, that Kat said she realized the extent of the
disaster.

Caroline quickly figured out that many families, authorities
and even embassies might be in similar predicaments in trying to
trace those missing in Nepal. So she started a #Langtang hashtag
on Twitter and a Langtang Survivors/Missing group on Facebook.
She helped create a Google doc that could be shared among users
and listed 440 names – 80 of which were missing at one point.
The number of missing has since fallen as survivors were found
and victims recovered and identified.

SEPARATE CAMPS

The first rescue helicopter landed in Kyanjin Gompa on
Monday, April 27, two days after the quake, carrying away a
half-dozen injured, mainly from the village.

The second helicopter came the following day, called in by
the three foreign climbers. That was one that the villagers
prevented from flying until it took the injured on board.

More helicopters came in the hours and days ahead, each
mobbed by village people desperate to get out, said Kat Heldman.

“All the mountaineers that had gear and tents and food
adopted the trekkers that didn’t have food,” she said.

Noted American alpinist Colin Haley, who was two weeks into
a climbing trip in the area, set up a water source for the
climbers camp on an open plateau.

The villagers camped in a separate area from the climbers,
by a garbage dump, because it was sheltered by a large boulder.
“But we would go to them to treat their wounds,” Heldman said.
“Eventually they started coming to us. There was a lot of
hugging.”

Heldman and her group were evacuated the Wednesday following
the quake. “Our party was initially broken up but we refused to
go without our porters.”

A U.S. Special Forces team in Nepal contracted a six-seater
helicopter four days after the quake. Panicky survivors grabbed
their bags and ran towards helicopters as soon as they landed,
said Dan, a rescue coordinator who spoke on condition that his
family name not be used.

“They had mountains on two sides and avalanches on the
other. So you can imagine the fear. They realised they couldn’t
get out unless someone came to get them.”

AFTER THE FOG CLEARED

Lhakpa Jangba, 34, the baker from Kyanjin Gompa who
witnessed the disputes between villagers and trekkers over the
helicopter rescues, was caught up in the avalanche that hit the
Heldman party. He sat weeping among a hundred or more other
evacuated Nepalis sheltering beneath tarpaulins on the grounds
of a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu as he recalled his
week-long ordeal.

He too heard the explosion on the mountain and saw the fog
rolling down. Within seconds it was upon him. “We had no chance
to run. I felt the snow hitting me on the back. It swept
everything away – houses, people, horses.”

Joining a group of foreign climbers, he headed toward
Langtang Village. Two sherpas carried a climber with a broken
back. They stopped not far from Langtang Village. “The fog
cleared and I could see that the whole of Langtang was gone.”

Lhakpa and a group of 80 or 90 survivors – most of them
women, children and the elderly – camped out in the valley. They
then returned to Kyanjin Gompa, waiting for rescue helicopters
and sometimes squabbling with the foreigners.

As of Thursday, at least 300 people had been rescued from
the Langtang Valley, said Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district
officer. Lhakpa said he thinks many people died of their
injuries in the valley because not enough helicopters arrived in
time.

Villagers had “strong words” with the pilots and foreigners,
but there was no violence, Lhakpa said. “Whoever survives has to
unite. There is no other option.”

The villagers in Kyangjin Gompa were grateful to an American
nurse and climbing group who treated many of their injured,
Lhakpa said, apparently referring to Brigida Martinez and the
Heldman group. “Our minds were lost. We were half-dead,
half-alive.”

(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill in Dhunche and Douglas Busvine
in New Delhi; Additional reporting by Andrew R.C. Marshall in
Kathmandu.; Writing by Bill Tarrant; Editing by Peter
Hirschberg)

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