Six Indian trekkers are missing in Nepal’s remote Dolpa district after heavy snowfall closed in on the route to Shey-Phoksundo Lake, the deepest lake in Nepal.
The group is made up of two women and four men, Hiru News reported at 11:38 a.m. Colombo time on Sunday, citing foreign media.
Where they were last seen
The trekkers were walking towards Shey-Phoksundo Lake when contact was lost. They were last seen in the area of the Numla and Bagla mountain passes, which lie between wards 4 and 8 of Shey-Phoksundo Rural Municipality.
Local guides believe the party was most likely cut off by heavy snowfall across the Himalayan belt. The passes on this route run high — Dolpa is one of the most isolated districts in Nepal, with no road access to much of it and patchy mobile coverage at altitude.
Hiru’s filing is internally muddled on one point of geography: it first places the departure in wards 4 and 8 of Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipality and then places the passes in wards 4 and 8 of Shey-Phoksundo Rural Municipality. These are two different municipalities that happen to share ward numbers. Read in sequence, the account describes a party that set out from the Dolpo Buddha side and went missing on the Shey-Phoksundo side, which is a coherent route; the repeated ward numbers should not be taken to mean one place.
The cyclone link needs care
Hiru attributes the snowfall to “the influence of Cyclone Arnab, which is developing in the Bay of Bengal”. That phrasing merges two distinct weather systems, and this site has been tracking both.
Arnab is no longer developing. It reached very severe cyclonic storm strength and crossed India’s Andhra Pradesh coast several days ago. Moisture drawn north by a decaying tropical system can and does fall as snow on the high Himalaya, so Arnab’s remnants are a plausible cause of the snowfall — but the storm is a past event, not an approaching one.
The system currently developing in the Bay of Bengal is a separate, unnamed depression that the Department of Meteorology expects to reach severe cyclonic storm strength by 2 November. It is a different storm, and it has nothing to do with the snowfall that trapped this group. Readers should not take Hiru’s sentence to mean the new system has reached Nepal.
Not reported
The filing does not name the missing trekkers, give their ages or home state, or say when they set out and when they were due back. It does not say who raised the alarm or when contact was lost, and it carries no figure for the depth of snow or the altitude of the passes. Most significantly, it does not say whether a search has been launched, by whom, or whether contact has since been re-established — Nepal’s Kathmandu Post carried a same-day report whose headline refers to an army helicopter being arranged for a rescue, but that page could not be fetched to verify its contents, so nothing from it is reported here.
Single verified source. This account rests on Hiru News, a verified newsroom, which is itself relaying foreign reporting rather than reporting from Dolpa. No verified international outlet in this site’s source list had filed on the disappearance at the time of writing. The detail above should be treated as provisional until a primary Nepali or Indian account can be read directly.
