Category: World / September 26, 2012 9:51 AM EDT
U.S television star and extreme skier Glen Plake on Wednesday spoke of his narrow escape from a Himalayan avalanche that killed 11 people on the weekend: "It's like an earthquake, it's like a tsunami, and it’s an avalanche and especially an avalanche in the Himalayas. This is....it's the biggest thing you have ever seen, you know. I am terrified when I was searching for my friends that are still missing. This is this always terrifying any time you're in any sort of accident, whether it's here on the street or somewhere else, you have, you know, you are doing everything you want to do because your friends' lives depend on your next actions and unfortunately everything I did proved to produce nothing. So, at that point I started thinking about my own life, and start preparing. I was still at 6600 meters so I was standing, standing with no shoes on". Sunday’s avalanche was Nepal’s deadliest in nearly two decades. Most of the dead were French climbers; the causalities also included two climbers from Germany, and one from Spain and Nepal. With Sunday’s avalanche the mountain has now claimed more than 60 lives. The last major disaster was in 1995 when heavy snowfall and avalanches killed at least 42 people in the Mount Everest region.









