How Mexican Climbers Conquered Himalayan Terror Only to Vanish in Stormy Disaster

Two Mexican alpinists—Andrés Delgado Calderón and Alfonso de la Parra—set their sights on India’s Changabang, a jagged Himalayan fortress seldom climbed. They reached its razor summit but vanished in a storm, leaving behind a legend of equal parts inspiration and heartbreak.

Changabang: Beauty Carved in Hostility

Snow banners whip from the summit like warning flags, yet Changabang looks impossibly seductive from the valley—silver flutes of ice and black rock ribs gleaming under the high-altitude sun. At 6,864 meters, it is not tall by Himalayan standards, but its faces are too steep for avalanches to cleanse, too brittle for easy protection, and too exposed to forgive a slip. Veteran climbers call it The Shining Fang. Chris Bonington’s 1974 first ascent required siege tactics; Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker’s 1976 line turned siege into ballet, balancing along corniced ridges no wider than a boot sole. Fewer than thirty summits have been recorded in half a century. Many who tried returned scarred; some never returned.

Expedition permits are scarce, and the weather windows are shorter still. Whole seasons pass without a single attempt. That reputation—half siren song, half death knell—drew two ambitious Mexicans across continents in 2006. They were determined to climb Changabang and write a new chapter on Latin American alpinism.

Ambition Packed in Mexican Rucksacks

Andrés and Alfonso grew up on very different slopes—Andrés in Mexico City’s sprawl, Alfonso amid the cactus-studded hills of Querétaro—. Still, they met on Pico de Orizaba, roped together above 5,000 meters. Mexico’s volcanoes became their classroom, and the Andes became their university. By their early thirties, they had logged bold ascents on Alpamayo, Huascarán, and Denali. Still, their names rarely appeared in glossy mountaineering journals dominated by Europeans and North Americans.

Changabang was to change that. Months of planning unfolded across living room floors littered with topographic maps and weather printouts. Their route choice—a north spur to summit, then a traverse to descend via Bagini Col—stitched together fragments of past expeditions with fresh intuition. They sold gear, emptied savings, and courted sponsors who offered more encouragement than cash. When Indian permits finally arrived, friends threw a send-off party in a Mexico City taquería. Someone raised a mezcal toast: “Que vuelvan con la cima—o que la cima quede con ellos.” May they bring the summit home, or may it keep them?

Base Camp materialized on a moraine under cold stars. Sherpa cooked brewed sweet tea while the Mexicans stared up at a wall of night-lit granite. Each dawn, they ferried loads higher: ropes coiled like pythons, titanium ice screws clinking against fuel canisters. They joked in Spanish about cravings for mole poblano while digging snow ledges wide enough for a tent. Yet seriousness settled whenever they studied the route. One misplaced cam, one misread cloud, and the mountain would deliver its verdict without appeal.

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Twelve Hours of Glory, Three Days of Fury

On 12 October 2006, the radio at Base crackled: “Cumbre lograda—­estamos en la cima.” Summit achieved. The wind clawed at their words, but elation broke through. They described a panorama that defied camera lenses: Nanda Devi glowing rose in sunrise, glaciers unrolling like marble carpets below. They allowed themselves ten minutes of congratulations—then turned to descend. Every climber knows the summit is only halftime.

That afternoon, the sky darkened with unsettling speed. Snow began as powder, then thickened to stinging pellets. Visibility shrank to arm’s length. They bivouacked on a knife-edge ridge, nylon hammocks dangling over two-kilometer voids. Through the night, the storm deepened, loading slopes with unstable slabs. On the 13th, they radioed renowned Mexican mountaineer Carlos Carsolio: “We’re pinned by whiteout—will try to retreat via our ascent line.” Carsolio urged caution and promised to monitor weather reports.

October 14 dawned indistinguishable from night—blank haze, spindrift whirling horizontally. Avalanches thundered on unseen faces. They waited. Food dwindled; stove fuel threatened to freeze. That evening, they broke camp, gambling on motion over stagnation. At 8:02 A.M. on October 15, they placed one final call: “Conditions bad, but we’re moving. If there is no update by 6 P.M., activate rescue.” Static swallowed their sign-off.

Six o’clock passed. Then midnight. Radio silence expanded into dread. Carsolio alerted Indian authorities; monsoon leftovers still battered the range. A Czech team volunteered for a high-altitude search but found the approach couloirs loaded with slab avalanches ready to peel away without warning. Helicopters could not hover in the changing winds funneling down the Rishi Gorge. For three weeks, rescuers scoured debris fans using binoculars. They found no shred of bright Mexican Gore-Tex, no glint of crampon steel—only fresh snow erasing tracks, as though the mountain meant to keep its secret.

On November 8, the official search ended. Andrés and Alfonso were declared missing and presumed dead. Their last known altitude was above 6,400 meters, wrapped in the mountain’s frozen silence.

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Echoes Carried on the Jetstream

Back home, vigils flickered in churches from Monterrey to Mérida. Climbers gathered at Piedra Grande hut on Orizaba, lighting headlamps in a constellation for absent friends. Parents refused to speak of funerals without bodies; spouses navigated bureaucracy to settle estates half a world away. Mexican media ran headlines for a week; then, attention drifted to politics and football scores. Yet, inside the climbing community, their story grew roots.

Young alpinists study their expedition notes—still online, thanks to a blog updated until summit day. They trace red lines on faded photocopies of Changabang’s north face, imagining the crux pitch at 6,500 meters where Andres wrote: “Ice like glass, but we’re floating.” Their tragedy sharpened conversations about risk, satellite communications, and the thin boundary between courageous and fatal decisions.

Changabang itself gained a spectral aura. Years passed before another team dared the Boardman–Tasker line; some carried a small Mexican flag in tribute, tucking it under a summit rock. Locals in Uttarakhand occasionally mention two cheerful foreigners who handed out chocolate to children in Rini village before trekking toward the glacier—kindness now folded into regional folklore.

The legacy lives, too, in how Mexican climbers approach the greater ranges—more emphasis on weather modeling, redundancy in sat-phones, and psychological preparation for storm-bound days. Yet ambition persists; you cannot outlaw the human pull of a shining fang against blue Himalayan skies. A new cohort trains on Iztaccíhuatl’s Arzobispo Ridge each season, dreaming farther.

For Andrés and Alfonso, no tombstone exists to save the mountain. Somewhere beneath seracs, their ropes may lie fossilized in blue ice, destined to surface centuries later when glaciers recede. Until then, friends picture them bivouacked above the clouds, headlamps glowing like twin stars over Kumaon.

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Ultimately, their story is not a cautionary moral about arrogance or miscalculation. It is a testament to the raw bargain every alpinist signs—one life, staked against a moment of impossible beauty, witnessed only by the wind. They reached that moment. The cost was absolute. The memory endures, carried on jet-stream gales that race from Changabang’s summit across oceans, whispering to anyone who looks up at distant peaks: dream carefully, but dream big.