The 1937 Nanga Parbat Disaster — Sixteen men buried alive in their sleep

On the night of 14–15 June 1937, an avalanche of ice swept down onto Camp IV of a German expedition on Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalaya, and buried sixteen men as they slept. All of them died — seven German climbers and nine Sherpa porters, almost the entire climbing party — without warning and, by every later account, without waking. It was the deadliest single event in the history of mountaineering to that time, and it remains one of the worst. The mountain stands at 8,126 metres in what is now the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan; Camp IV lay at roughly 6,180 metres on a snow terrace above the Rakhiot Glacier, beneath the ice cliffs of Rakhiot Peak.

The expedition was led by Karl Wien and was the latest German attempt on a mountain that had become a national obsession after the disaster of 1934, when Willy Merkl’s expedition lost climbers and porters in a storm high on the same Rakhiot face. The 1937 party was working its way up that face, establishing camps in heavy snow, when the entire camp was overrun. The dead Germans were Karl Wien, Hans Hartmann, Adolf Göttner, Günther Hepp, Martin Pfeffer, Pert Müllritter and Otto Fankhauser. The nine Sherpas killed alongside them — men whose labour carried every load up that mountain and whose deaths were long recorded more faintly than the climbers’ — were Pasang, Nim Tsering, Mambahadur, Kami, Gyaljen Monjo, Jigmay, Chong Karma, Ang Tsering II and Da Thondup. This record names them in full.

The disaster left no survivors at the high camp to describe it, so its sequence was reconstructed only weeks later, when a relief expedition under Paul Bauer dug down through the avalanche debris to the buried tents. What they found — men still in their sleeping bags, faces calm, killed in an instant — established what had happened: a mass of ice had broken from the cliffs hundreds of metres above and crossed the supposedly safe terrace in seconds, entombing the camp under metres of snow and ice before anyone could stir.

The 2014 Everest Avalanche — Sixteen Nepali workers killed, and a mountain shut down

At about 6:45 on the morning of 18 April 2014, a serac broke from the western shoulder of Mount Everest and crashed into the Khumbu Icefall at roughly 5,800 metres, killing sixteen Nepali mountain workers — the great majority of them Sherpas — in what was then the deadliest single day in the mountain’s history. The dead were not paying clients but the local staff who do the most dangerous work on Everest: ferrying loads, fixing ropes and breaking trail through the icefall before dawn, when the ice is most stable, so that fee-paying foreigners can climb later in the season. No foreign climber was killed. Thirteen bodies were recovered within two days; three were never found, entombed in the moving ice.

The avalanche struck a section of the icefall known to guides as the “popcorn field,” below Camp 1, where a column of climbing Sherpas was carrying gear up the route in the pre-dawn cold. The released serac was enormous — later estimated at tens of metres thick and many thousands of tonnes — and there was no outrunning it. Twenty-five men were caught; sixteen died, several more were injured, and the survivors carried their dead and wounded down through the same lethal ground they had just been climbing.

What followed made 2014 a turning point as much as a tragedy. In the days after the avalanche, Sherpas at Base Camp, grieving and angry, refused to continue working for the rest of the season — partly to honour the dead and partly to protest the pay, insurance and treatment of the men who bore the mountain’s worst risks. The Nepali government’s initial relief offer of about 40,000 rupees (roughly 400 US dollars) per family, barely the cost of a funeral, deepened the outrage. By late April nearly all the season’s expeditions had been abandoned, Base Camp had emptied, and the climbing of Everest from Nepal had, for that year, effectively stopped. The dead are named below; they were the centre of this event, not its background.