“We would have liked to bring Laura home. But it wasn’t possible to get her,” Andreas Dahlmeier, father of former world-class biathlete and mountaineer Laura Dahlmeier, who died in an accident on the six-thousander Laila Peak in Pakistan at the end of July, told the German magazine “Der Spiegel”.
“It was too dangerous after the accident. When Thomas went back to Laila Peak, she was nowhere to be found. So Laura remains on the mountain. There is no chance of recovering her.” Andreas Dahlmeier gave the interview together with German top climber Thomas Huber – in the hope that peace will finally return.
Now “all doors to speculation are closed,” Thomas hopes on Instagram. As if losing their child or sister wasn’t bad enough, the Dahlmeier family was confronted with unspeakable discussions and disrespectful comments on (un)social media after Laura’s fatal accident.
No sign of life
Andreas Dahlmeier, head of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen mountain rescue service, says that immediately after receiving the first report of the accident, he called together a kind of local crisis team made up of fellow mountaineers and mountain rescuers to discuss what made sense in this situation and what did not.
Laura’s father also asked Thomas Huber, a friend of the Dahlmeier family who was climbing with a team in the Latok Group in the Karakoram at the time, for help.
Thomas was in the helicopter when the pilots discovered the climber’s body the day after the accident and flew as close as possible. “We couldn’t detect any vital signs,” Huber told Der Spiegel. This coincided with the information provided by Laura’s German rope partner Marina Krauss. Dahlmeier’s helmet had been smashed by the rockfall, Marina reported. She had been able to see a serious, open head injury, and Laura had been hanging motionless from the rope, according to Krauss.
Body untraceable
Due to the continuing rockfall, the rescue operation was called off – as Laura stipulated in her will for such a case. Nevertheless, the family was not giving up on trying to recover Laura’s body. “We knew she was in a place where other expeditions might pass by. We didn’t want anyone to take photos of her,” Andreas Dahlmeier told Der Spiegel. “That’s why we wanted her to be retrieved when conditions allowed.”
In September, the family asked Thomas Huber to check Laila Peak again after his expedition to see if it was possible to recover the body. But Thomas and his US teammate Tad McCrea, who was also involved in the rescue operation at the end of July, could no longer find Laura’s body at the site of the accident.
“We had a spotting scope with 30x magnification with us, which we used to search the area, as well as a drone. If we had found Laura, we would have climbed the wall and recovered her,” Huber told Der Spiegel. The two climbers also checked the crevasses at the foot of the wall – without success. “We searched all the crevasses, climbed into a large ice hole, but we found no traces.”
Thomas assumes that the Abalakov thread to which the rope was attached melted after a while, Laura’s body fell down the wall into a crevasse and was covered by falling rocks. May she rest in peace in her grave – wherever it may be!
P.S. After the experiences at the end of July/beginning of August, I am deliberately disabling the comment function for this article.
