At minus 15 degrees with snow and ice being the only things in her sight, Jayshri Dumbre woke up to prepare for the last task of her Advanced Mountaineering Course. It was her day to climb to the summit of the Draupadi Ka Danda-II (DKD-II) at 18,740 feet and complete her advanced mountaineering course.
On June 16 night, at 15,800 feet as the 33-year-old metallurgy scientist from Pune moved out of her tent to freshen up, she suddenly fell into a crevasse as deep as 200 feet. "Luckily, she got stuck at about 30 feet," Devendra Rawat, who was accompanying the instructors attached to 35 women in the advanced mountaineering course offered by the Uttarkashi-based Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) to film it for a documentary, said. She was on a 28-day course which began on May 26, Dumbre told The Hindu .
"On the night of June 16 at around 1:30 am I got up to get ready before moving on for DKD-II peak. However, while moving away from the tents to freshen up, my foot went through a thin snow cover into a deep crevasse and my body followed," Dumbre said.
The crevasse (a deep fissure in a glacier) in the Dokriani Bamak (Bamak being a glacier in the local Garhwali dialect) in Uttarakhand's Uttarkashi region was a hidden one. Snowfall during winter months had hidden the fissure, making it impossible for anyone to recognise the crevasse.
When Jayshri fell into the fissure, two girls accompanying Jayshri rushed to inform the instructors. The crevasse being narrow, a light-weight instructor was chosen for the task.
While the other instructors were ready with the rescue equipment, Shivraj Panwar, a 31-year-old instructor with NIM harnessed himself to get ready for the task.
"When I went inside the crevasse, I found it too narrow. Through the torch light I could see that her feet were swigging inside the crevasse and beneath her feet everything was dark. At this time we didn't know that the crevasse was about 200 feet deep," Panwar said.
After two failed attempts, Panwar, as he went into the crevasse for the third time, knew that Jayshri had to be saved this time, or she might not survive.
"It had been an hour and a half since the rescue began. And a slight inward or outward movement in the crevasse would have been fatal. We couldn't take any more time," Panwar said.
A kettle with hot water was used to melt the ice on her sides and as Dumbre shouted "Pull me up. I'm slipping", the entire team pulled her up with the rope that Panwar had successfully managed to tie around both her hands while she was stuck in the crevasse.
"At that time I only knew that I had to save her. I told myself that whatever happens she needs to come out, alive," Panwar said.
While Dumbre did get rescued and was pleading the instructors to let her climb up the DKD-II, she was asked to stay put.
"We were scared that she might suffer from hypothermia. We couldn't take any chance, so we made her sit in the kitchen for quite some time so that she regains get normal body temperature," Panwar said.
Vishal Ranjan, a curator with NIM who also manages mountaineering courses said that such an incident had never happened in the history of NIM.
"This was the first time when someone fell in the crevasse. And the accident only happened because it was a hidden crevasse and had a thick snow cover on it," Ranjan said.
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