It was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime spiritual awakening. Instead, it became a desperate wait for news from the wreckage of a Himalayan valley.
A catastrophic flash flood, believed to have been triggered by a glacial collapse, tore through a remote stretch of the Nepal-China border on Wednesday, obliterating buildings, sweeping away bridges and reducing a riverside town to splinters. Rescue teams are now scrambling to locate roughly 1,500 people feared lost in the torrent, including at least 25 Canadian citizens and permanent residents caught up in two separate pilgrimage groups.
The sheer force of the wave — described as a wall of mud several storeys high — left virtually no warning. Telecommunications across the region remain shattered. Roads have been severed. And with no comprehensive tally of victims yet possible, the full human cost of the disaster remains stubbornly out of reach.
“The number may fluctuate as new information comes in,” Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand warned in a statement, underscoring the fraught nature of the search.
The Canadian Connection
Two distinct groups of Canadian pilgrims were in the path of the flood. The first, a party of ten, had been staying at the Hotel Kailash, a modest guesthouse in the small Nepali border town near the Rasuwagadhi crossing, just across from Tibet. They were clients of Himalayan Glacier, an adventure-travel company, and had been preparing for breakfast when the wave struck.
Among them were Himanshu Agarwal, a resident of Oakville, Ontario, and Poonam Dilipkumar Thakkar, a Canadian citizen based in Chicago. Their friend, Somali Raturi, had been planning the trip with them for the better part of a year before a training injury forced her to withdraw. She last spoke with them over video on Tuesday.
“We’re hearing different messages. Because nobody has a clue what’s going on right now on the ground,” Ms Raturi said, her voice tight with uncertainty.
Ms Thakkar, who is asthmatic, had spent weeks hiking around the Chicago area to build her stamina for the high-altitude trek. Her sister, Bhumika Sachdev, said they last spoke by phone the day before the flood.
A second group — 12 Canadians among 80 travellers — was moving through the Gyirong Port immigration centre on the Tibet side of the border at the moment disaster struck. They were on a spiritual journey organised by the India-based Isha Foundation, headed for the sacred sites of Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. The group leader managed to send a message at 9:05am confirming they had reached the checkpoint. Then, silence.
The immigration building itself has since been washed away entirely.
A Community Gripped by Grief
The human stories behind the statistics are achingly intimate. Anisha Grover, who lives in Toronto, learned from an email sent by the Isha Foundation that her parents — Samira, an elementary-school teacher, and Anil, an accountant — were at the border office when the flood hit.
Both were deeply devout, volunteers at their local temple and devoted followers of Sadhguru, the foundation’s spiritual leader. They had, their daughter said, rarely done anything purely for themselves.
“They were really excited to do something for the first time for themselves, to just explore and go out and be able to be surrounded by other religious people,” Ms Grover said.
Her mother, in particular, had long dreamed of seeing Sadhguru in person.
In a video posted to Instagram, Sadhguru — Jaggi Vasudev — struggled to conceal his anguish. People could be heard sobbing in the background as he delivered the grim update.
“We have no … official confirmation of any kind. But looking at the scale of destruction, it looks bad.”
He noted that the same immigration building had hosted the group just a week earlier. Now it had vanished.
“All phones are off, all telecommunications are down. Roads are blocked. We’re unable to go there.”
A Region Haunted by Memory
The death toll in Nepal reached 469 on Friday, according to police, and is expected to climb. Some 540 foreign nationals are officially listed as missing. In Surrey, British Columbia, Raju Bhattrai, president of the Nepal Cultural Society of B.C., has spent the past two days coordinating fundraising for relief efforts. But the grimness of the situation has also stirred the ghosts of past catastrophes — most notably the magnitude-7.8 earthquake of April 2015, which killed more than 8,000 people across the region.
“It feels exactly like 2015 right now for us,” Mr Bhattrai said.
The geography that draws pilgrims to this corner of the world — the towering, sacred massif of Mount Kailash, revered in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bon — is the same geography that has made it so catastrophically vulnerable. Climate scientists have long warned that warming temperatures across the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region are accelerating glacial melt, raising the frequency and violence of sudden outburst floods.
For now, the families of the missing can do little but wait. Some have travelled to Nepal. Others, thousands of kilometres away, cling to flickering mobile phones and rumours. The Hotel Kailash has not responded to inquiries. The Himalayan Glacier company has said only that its clients remain unaccounted for. The Isha Foundation continues to appeal for information, though it has acknowledged there is none to give.
What is already beyond doubt is the scale of the devastation — and the slender, fading hope that the missing may yet be found alive in the wreckage.
Why it Matters
Beyond the immediate tragedy lies a sobering truth: the Himalayan pilgrimage routes that draw tens of thousands of spiritual seekers each year are growing increasingly perilous as the climate crisis accelerates. A glacial collapse that once might have been a once-in-a-generation event is becoming a recurring nightmare, and the communities — and travellers — who place their trust in the stability of these sacred landscapes are paying the price. For the Canadian families now caught in an agonising limbo, this disaster is a stark reminder that even the most carefully planned journeys into the roof of the world can be undone in a matter of minutes — and that in such remote terrain, rescue itself is an act of almost impossible endurance.
