Five hikers missing since Saturday in the Tête Blanche region of the Swiss Alps have been found dead. The cantonal police announced this in a statement, according to the newspaper Le Nouvelliste. A sixth missing person has not yet been located and the search continues.
The six Swiss ski mountaineers – of which five were found dead – who have been missing since Saturday are between 21 and 58 years old, five of them belong to the same family from Valais while another person, a woman, comes from the canton of Fribourg. According to what was reported on the website of the Swiss newspaper Le Nouvelliste, they are three brothers including a municipal administrator, their uncle, their cousin and the friend of one of the three brothers. Several of them were experienced mountaineers and some were training for a world-famous ski mountaineering race scheduled for April, the Patrouille des glaciers, whose route also passes along the Zermatt-Arolla route they were following.
The alarm was raised on Saturday afternoon around 4pm by a family member who was waiting for the group in Arolla, in the Val d'Hérens. A phone call made shortly afterwards, at 5.19pm, by one of the six missing people allowed them to be located in the Col de la Tete Blanche sector, at around 3,500 meters above sea level, just over half a kilometer as the crow flies from the border with Italy and the Aosta Valley. During the night between Saturday and Sunday, five Swiss rescuers attempted to reach the group on foot from Zermatt, but due to the terrible weather conditions and the danger of avalanches they had to give up. The Aosta Valley Alpine Rescue Service had also been alerted, in the hope that the weather conditions on the southern side would allow intervention by helicopter. Yesterday, in another accident, a skier who was off-piste died in hospital in Sion (Switzerland) from injuries sustained after being hit by an avalanche in the Swiss Val Ferret.
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