Well very sadly ... as someone already posted. They have called off the search. And the S&R team confirmed that they just could not get off the ground - no way to even reach a location up on the mountain.

About PLB's and batteries. Climbers have problems with batteries for other reasons as well - for example cameras. You need batteries to take pictures (something almost every climber wants to do!). The solution is to carry the batteries taped onto the skin on your chest or belly. Body heat keeps them warm. This works even in the Himalayas.

About my earlier "analysis" above ... someone asked why I needed to be so specific. The answer was not obvious because of how the answer played out. My goal was to see if the descent route of the 3'd climber (Mr Gullberg) could be figured out, based on the few facts reported in the press. If someone could do this, then you could backtrack his descent route and work out where the other 2 climbers might be located. As noted above, by another reader, if Mr Gullberg had carried even a small hand-written note explaining the situation of the team trapped on the mountain, it could have helped. Ironically, to do that he would have needed to admit to himself that he could die while making his way out in the storm.

Anyway, back to my analysis. I started while working off the proposition that the climbers took the standard route up the mountain. That raised a big discrepancy about why Mr Gullberg's body was recovered on a glacier that is quite some distance from the standard ascent route. One possible explanation could have been that he lost his bearings while descending off the summit, and came down the wrong ridge on the mountain by mistake. Analyzing the pattern of his fall would give the ridgeline that he actually descended. Tracing that ridgeline back up the mountain gives a very valuable clue at to his early starting point. Hence the possibility that his companions could be stranded near the top of the mountain. That logic would have given S&R a place to look for life, if they had a short time window on the mountain on Tue.

Unfortunately, the climbers took a different route and it was not so easy to tie the logic together. Insufficient data. The media often forget that when they fail to report facts accurately, they may be screening out a solution to the problem that is taking place. The news is not about writing "stories" ... it's about getting the facts.

other Pete