MOSCOW, July 17, 1990— One of the worst tragedies in the history of mountain climbing has claimed the lives of at least 40 members of an international team killed Friday by an avalanche in the remote Pamir mountains in the Soviet Union near the Chinese border, according to Government reports.
The victims were buried when an earth tremor destabilized a mass of snow and debris, which fell onto a climbers' camp about two miles below the acme of Lenin Peak in the Central Asian range, the highest in the nation.
The victims included 27 Soviet climbers, principally a 23-member Leningrad alpine team led by Leonid Troshchinenko, one of the nation's leading climbers, according to Soviet officials.
Three Climbers Unaccounted For
They said the dead also included six Czechoslovak climbers, four Israelis, two Swiss and a Spaniard. Three other climbers have not been accounted for, and there have been conflicting reports that they died.
''This is a tragedy unprecedented in Soviet and, I think, world mountaineering,'' Vladimir Shatayev, the Soviet state sports committee mountaineering coach, declared, according to Tass, the Soviet press agency.
What alpine experts rate as the worst previous climbing tragedy occurred in December 1952, when a large team of Soviet climbers perished in an assault on Mount Everest. Soviet officials have never acknowledged the loss, but Polish climbing experts reported that 40 climbers died in that tragedy.
The Pamir victims were part of a 140-member expedition climbing Lenin Peak, most of whom scrambled to safety as the avalanche roared down the face of the mountain, Tass reported. It struck their camp on an alpine ledge known as the frying pan, a resting spot on the way up the 23,456-foot-high mountain. It is the third highest in the nation, and one of the most fascinating to sports mountaineers.
Snow-Capped Swath
The Pamirs, which contain some of the most challenging alpine treks in the world, rise up as a forbidding snow-capped swath of the border regions of Tadzhikistan and Kirghizia. They include Communism Peak, the highest in the Soviet Union at 24,584 feet, and more than 1,000 glaciers, some of them 40 miles wide.
The frying pan camp has been used for six decades by climbers pausing in their ascent of Lenin Peak, part of the Pamirs' highest central peaks, which lie between the Tersagar and Kyzylart passes.
''Camps for 100 and sometimes more people have been set up at this place since 1974,'' Mr. Shatayev told Tass. ''Nobody could expect what happened. Deep snow is hindering rescue work. Efforts to find bodies have been in vain.''
He said the initial estimate was that 43 climbers died but that more recent reports indicate the total may have been 40. ''Evidently the other three managed to survive,'' Mr. Shatayev said, describing reports from some climbers that these three darted to safer ground ''at the moment the avalanche swept down.''
Climbing and rescue specialists from the Pamir region rushed to the scene to search for victims, and other specialists were flown out from Moscow.
The frozen slopes of the Pamirs, which run through the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and China, have long been the locale of both daring climbs and tragic deaths by Soviet and world alpinists.
In 1974, Lenin Peak claimed the lives of eight women who were pinned down by a fierce storm and died of exposure. Three years later, Communism Peak was the scene of a spectacular rescue in which a pilot pressed his helicopter beyond its altitude range to evacuate a mortally injured climber from a snow swept plateau 19,500 feet up the mountain.
from http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/18/world/avalanche-kills-40-climbers-in-soviet-central-asia.html