An Indian-origin mountaineer and his Nepalese Sherpa guide lost their lives in an overnight avalanche near Camp 3 on Mount Manaslu (8,163m), after the pair pushed on toward the summit while six fellow climbers turned back due to deteriorating weather, expedition organizers said this Sunday. Rescue teams located Dhrubajyoti Guha and Fursemba Sherpa, both 47, buried inside their tent — bringing the autumn death toll on the world’s eighth-highest mountain to four.
Guha, who lived near Frankfurt, Germany, had earned a mechanical engineering degree from Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur (now IIEST Shibpur) in 2002. Over his career, he worked at companies including ABB, IBM, Pfizer, and Nestlé, and was also a dedicated ultra-endurance trail runner, having completed 32 UTMB World Series races, several of them exceeding 100km. Sherpa, registered with Nepal’s Mountaineering Association, hailed from the Makalu region and had summited Everest nine times, along with previous ascents of Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Cho Oyu, and Manaslu itself.
Mohan Lamsal, managing director of the expedition company Makalu Adventure, said weather conditions worsened as the team pushed toward the higher camps. He mentioned that six climbers chose to retreat from Camp 2 and were safe, but Guha and Sherpa opted for an early summit push, setting out for Camp 3 on Saturday evening.
Contact with the two was lost during the night. Lamsal said the team was alerted around 11:30 am Sunday after the climbers stopped responding, prompting them to dispatch four Sherpa climbers to Camp 3 in search. The rescuers dug through the snow and found both men inside their tent, buried under nearly seven feet of snow.
Ongoing snowfall and avalanche danger made it too risky to bring the bodies down to base camp immediately. Lamsal said he instructed the rescue team to retreat to lower camps for safety, with plans to recover the bodies once weather conditions improve.
Heavy snow began falling Friday evening and continued through Sunday, with base camp recording up to 60cm of accumulation, forcing hundreds of climbers to either retreat or hold at lower camps. Some teams had started ascending Saturday, anticipating a favorable weather window beginning Monday, though meteorologists had cautioned that another storm system developing over the Bay of Bengal, was likely to bring further bad weather around Wednesday.
These deaths follow two earlier fatalities on Manaslu this season. Singaporean climber Lau Wee Seng, 50, died around the 6,000m mark while descending from Camp 2 on September 17, and Tashi Sherpa, a 20-year-old Nepali high-altitude worker, was found dead in his tent at base camp on September 5.
This autumn, Manaslu has attracted a record 480 foreign climbers along with more than 500 Nepali guides and support staff. With these latest deaths, the total number of reported mountaineering fatalities across the Himalayas and Karakoram this year has reached at least 24 — making 2026 one of the deadliest years for climbers in the region in recent memory.
