Avalanches on Makalu are rare.
The pyramidal mountain rises only 12 miles southeast of its more famous cousin, Mount Everest, in the Himalayas. At nearly 28,000 feet above sea level, it is the fifth-highest peak on Earth and more than three times higher than Utah’s Mount Olympus.
Temperatures on Makalu, especially at higher elevations, often dip below zero in climbing season, and are as cold as -40 degrees in winter. And it’s very dry, a difficult environment in which to form snow, which requires moisture in addition to low temperatures.
On the off chance there is a major storm, the rocky slopes are so steep that snow typically blows right off the mountain instead of sticking to the dangerous pathways carved by generations of adventurous mountaineers and their Nepalese Sherpa guides.
But there are always exceptions to the norm, often with tragic consequences.
May quickly became a devastating run of disasters as hikers on Mount Everest, Makalu and other Himalayan peaks were slammed by a series of unexpected storms. Weather conditions and avalanches claimed the lives of experienced mountaineers from all over the world, including 53-year-old Shelley Johannesen, a Kamas resident and co-founder of Dash Adventures. Her life and business partner, David Ashley, survived the ordeal.
Life, love and a passion for adventure
“The Shelley I knew was different from the Shelley you would hear about from her children or her family because we met late in life,” Ashley said. “She had decided not to work anymore when COVID hit because she was really enjoying endurance running and adventure racing. She wanted to take a different direction in her life.”
The pandemic ushered in an era of change for Johannesen, who met Ashley when he hosted a rim-to-rim Grand Canyon run shortly before lockdowns started. The two were active in local Facebook groups in Virginia, where they lived. They connected online and then in person over their passion for endurance challenges.
The couple loved adventure racing in particular, which involves trail running, mountain biking and paddling a kayak or canoe to find checkpoints outdoors with only a compass and a map for navigation. Ashley, who had retired from the military after 27 years of service, invited Johannesen to join his racing team after she impressed him with her speed.
“We got along great, and then when both of our marriages ended in late 2023, we started dating,” Ashley said. “The rest was her chasing me and me chasing her through the woods ever since.”
As they grew closer, they started to explore the world together: jetsetting to Spain and the United Kingdom for adventure racing competitions. But after more than 20 years of adventure racing, Ashley discovered a love of high-altitude mountaineering, and a new hobby soon consumed him — conquering the highest mountain peaks on Earth.
“I’m a living kidney donor, and I wanted to raise awareness about how you can be a living donor and still live a life full of adventure, endurance and athletics, so I decided to climb what’s known as the Seven Summits, which are the highest mountains in each continent,” Ashley said. “Eleven months and two weeks later, I had done all seven. I finished on Mount Everest on May 13, 2022.”
Ashley and Johannesen started Dash Adventures for a similar reason. They hoped to create a connection and a sense of community among high-altitude mountain climbers in the wake of the pandemic, especially as Johannesen started to fall in love with climbing, too. The two then started leading their own treks, inviting friends and clients to join them on renowned climbs across the world.
Dash Adventures has a simple motto that Ashley said encapsulates how he and Johannesen approached their lives: climbing mountains and making friends.
“You put your cellphone down for a week or two and really get to know the people that you’re with in an environment where there’s nothing like it, like Machu Picchu (in Peru), Cayambe down in Ecuador,” Ashley said. “I really love the different cultures, the different food and bringing people and exposing them to that, seeing the joy that they find in it.”
Leading Dash Adventures meant Ashley and Johannesen could climb mountains more often, and they quickly realized that living 300 feet above sea level in Virginia didn’t do them any favors. So they packed up, traveled around the United States and ultimately decided to move to Kamas two years ago.
“I feel like we found a gem with thousands of trails to explore, tons of reservoirs to paddle,” Ashley said. “We figured we’d spend pretty much the rest of our lives exploring this area.”
The couple joined the Wasatch Mountain Club and started hiking Utah trails like Grandeur Peak and Mount Olympus. The treks were an “epic preparation” for their international travels, especially because it’s possible to have a vertical gain of 1,000 to 2,000 feet in only one mile of hiking, depending on the trail.
Ashley said he enjoys hobbies with an element of risk because it makes him feel more alive. He said Johannesen came to love adventure later in life after spending decades as a wife and mother of three. As her children grew up, she explored the outdoor endurance lifestyle and ultrarunning. That became a great transition into adventure racing, Ashley said.
The couple balanced each other well, with Ashley taking the lead on treks because of his more extensive mountaineering experience. He served as the trip leader on Dash Adventures excursions, making sure people were on time, had the right equipment and were properly trained for a climb. Ashley said their dynamic was successful.
“Shelley was much more of a people person. Her emotional IQ was off the charts, and mine’s probably negative,” he joked. “She would pick up on when someone was struggling, so she would come up and find out if they’re getting a blister or if they need a water bottle or if they’re thinking about their wife back home because they’re having marital problems, and she would pull that out slowly. She was masterful in working with people.”
The avalanche
The fatal journey in Nepal was originally advertised as a Dash Adventures trip, but no one signed up to tackle the 27,838-foot summit. The duo decided to climb the mountain anyway, enlisting the help of a Sherpa guide company Ashley had worked with since 2022.
Ashley and Johannesen landed in Kathmandu on April 5. They checked their gear, bought some supplies and headed to the village of Num.
The weather was already showing signs of unpredictability as the couple made the nine-day hike through the foothills in the mountains to Makalu’s base camp, a staggering 18,600 feet above sea level. The tallest mountain in Utah — Kings Peak in Duchesne County — is only 13,500 feet above sea level at its summit.
Snow pelted them as they hiked from Num, and they spent three weeks acclimatizing on the mountain, traveling from low camps to high camps and back again, until they were ready to approach the summit.
“Makalu is known for high winds and cold, and most injuries that happen on Makalu are related to that, like frostbite,” Ashley said. “We just missed a window in late April where we could have gone up, and then there were nine days of high winds. We were sitting there at base camp twiddling our thumbs.”
Conditions seemingly changed after weeks of waiting, and the group was told there would be at least three days of good weather with low winds. The couple joined forces with Tawa Sherpa and Sonom Sherpa, guides from Nepal trained to take mountaineers on dangerous high-altitude climbs. They set off for the summit and reached it late in the morning on May 9.
“The weather started to change on our way down,” Ashley said. “There was one other climber who got there after us, a Russian named Konstantin. He has his own story, but he’s probably going to lose all of his fingers and part of his thumb from frostbite because he had a problem coming down later behind us.”
As the group started their descent, they faced snow drifts up to their thighs, a sight incredibly rare at such a high elevation on Makalu. Wading through the snow took a lot of energy, slowing their pace and forcing them to camp overnight. Ashley said they packed enough bottled oxygen to sleep with, aiding in their recovery, because a 24-hour day above almost 28,000 feet is “pretty tough.”
“The wind and snow were so bad,” Ashley said. “Normally, you can unzip your tent, and you’ve got a vestibule, and you can light your stove, put some snow in there, melt it and make water for everybody, which takes a long time at that elevation. But the wind was blowing the snow so much that the stove wouldn’t even stay lit.”
The group zipped the tent up and moved the oxygen bottles as far away as possible before lighting the gas stove, hoping to create at least some water for the continued descent the next day. It was slow work, though, and Ashley estimated they each had only half a liter of water by the morning.
The weather forecast for May 10 claimed winds would die down by 10 a.m., allowing the group to make their way down the mountain. But the winds did not stop, and the group had to keep moving.
“With that deep snow, it was going to take us the rest of the day to get safely down. … We didn’t want to be out there in the dark,” Ashley said. “We couldn’t take the tent because there was so much snow and it had hardened with the wind, so it would have taken an inordinate amount of energy to break through that crust, get the guidelines out, get the tent out, and at that point, we’re running low on oxygen and need to get going.”
They abandoned their tent, and Tawa, who had summited Makalu five times and had the most experience, led the way. In a line of four, the two Americans and two Sherpas headed into the snowstorm, facing winds blowing between 50 and 60 mph.
After hiking for about half an hour in a flatter area, they transitioned to ropes secured to the mountain with ice screws. With the wind whipping their faces, they started a precarious 500-foot descent, pausing to switch to a different rope halfway down.
Tawa and Johannesen were 10 feet ahead of Ashley and his guide, Sonom, and easily made the transition to the second rope. But then Ashley looked up and spotted a crack in the snow — and the ground started to move. An avalanche had been triggered.
Ashley and Sonom stopped moving with about 10 feet left on their line. The force and speed of the snow wasn’t strong enough to break their rope, but the same wasn’t true for Johannesen and Tawa.
“I looked down, and I saw this ball of white go off a rock. I could see a rope flapping in the breeze, and I could see one of Tawa’s mitts on a rock. That’s all we could see,” Ashley said.
The terrain added to fears for their companions. It was a rocky area known as the crux of the hike, a steep section where mountaineers need to navigate boulders to avoid crashing into them on the cliffside.
Ashley and Sonom knew they had to find Johannesen and Tawa, but they had no idea in what state they’d be in, or if a rescue was possible.
“Would they be buried? Would they have tons of broken bones?” Ashley said. “The odds of how they could survive that were low, but of course we have to assume they did. Sonom and I free climbed down, because we didn’t trust the rope anymore. … Then we blew whistles, we yelled, but the winds were blowing, it was snowing, and we had maybe 30 to 40 feet of visibility. We couldn’t see anything.”
Sonom took the lead, picking his way through the boulders to reach the cliffside where they thought Johannesen and Tawa landed. But they soon realized there was another problem.
Days earlier, the group had gifted one of their two radios to a Sherpa guide responsible for shepherding the Russian, Konstantin, to the summit. Tawa had kept the remaining radio, which was now lost with him in the avalanche.
Ashley grabbed his Garmin inReach, a small, satellite communicator that lets hikers text emergency responders and share GPS coordinates. He managed to contact the owners of a guiding company in Kathmandu, who called the base camp to alert the rescue coordinator stationed at one of the higher elevation areas.
The group was stranded between Camp 2, which is 21,650 feet above sea level, and Camp 3, 24,600 feet above sea level. The rescue team would be departing from Camp 2, but Konstantin’s Sherpa guide was still at Camp 3, where he heard the avalanche and was told to help if at all possible. Ashley said the Sherpa climbed down quickly, giving them access to a radio.
“We climbed a little bit further down, very slowly, trying to find them. Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Ashley said. “Then we got a radio call from Shelley. She was alive. Tawa was alive. They were both so injured they couldn’t even stand up. She was crawling on the snow, and they were about 10 feet from a big cliff.”
The rescue attempt
Johannesen and Tawa could see the fixed lines on the cliffside, but they couldn’t reach the ropes themselves. Johannesen grabbed her ice axe, secured it and hooked her and Tawa’s safety devices onto it, preventing them from accidentally careening off the side of the mountain.
She then pulled out her sleeping bag, and the pair used it to block the wind.
“Unfortunately, where they stopped near a cliff, the winds are almost always very strong, and that’s where they were,” Ashley said. “These insane gusts would come, and you would just get pelted by ice particles.”
Johannesen described what she could see over the radio, and Sonom accelerated down the mountain to find them. The avalanche happened around noon, and Sonom reached the two injured hikers around three hours later. Ashley followed, reaching the group about an hour after that.
Johannesen and Tawa were perched on a steep cliffside with only their safety devices keeping them from sliding over the edge as snow and winds continued to slam the mountain.
Miraculously, they did not have any compound fractures and weren’t visibly bleeding. But Tawa was complaining of severe lower back pain, and Johannesen said her hips and her right side were hurting so badly that she couldn’t stand up to walk. Despite their injuries, they seemed alert, awake and aware of the situation.
Ashley pulled out his sleeping bag, too. The four — Ashley, Johannesen, Sonom and Tawa — settled in to wait for the rescue team they were told would reach them in less than three hours. Yet no one came.
“We heard that the winds were … around 70 miles an hour that afternoon, and the six-person rescue team was worried about their own safety, so they had to turn back,” Ashley said. “It was starting to get dark, and now we had nobody coming, no tent and two sleeping bags between the four of us.”
Sonom, worried about the group’s depleting oxygen resources, volunteered to trek down to Camp 2 to get more supplies and convince the rescue team to come back. As he left, he tried to convince Ashley to come with him, but Ashley refused, saying he needed to stay with Johannesen.
“He went down, and we stayed there lying on the snow all night,” Ashley said. “Occasionally, I’d lift up the sleeping bag just to peek and see if there were any headlamps coming. I think it was around midnight, and I saw two headlamps.”
Around 2:30 a.m., a small group reached them. They replenished their oxygen supplies, which likely saved Tawa’s life because oxygen allows the body to stay warmer, and he had already lost one of his mittens. But Ashley started getting nervous when Johannesen refused oxygen.
“She was getting a little loopy at this point, saying things that didn’t really make sense,” he said. “She was scooting away from me in the sleeping bag out into the wind, and I’d have to pull her back in. She kept asking about Tawa and wanted to check on Tawa. … That was the first time I realized there was something really not right with Shelley.”
Then the supply team left, leaving the group on the mountain without a tent in extreme weather. They didn’t have the manpower or ability to rescue the group because of the harsh conditions, so the three remaining hikers huddled down to sleep, hoping things would change in the morning.
The next morning
When Ashley awoke, Johannesen’s head was still in his lap, but at a strange angle. He had spent the night waking intermittently, trying to fix an oxygen mask to Johannesen’s face before giving up after she continued to push him away.
Ashley told her to wake up, shaking her when he didn’t get a response. He was confused and exhausted after spending more than 10 hours at 23,400 feet above sea level without oxygen, and he was dehydrated and malnourished.
He thought maybe Johannesen was feeling the same way, too exhausted to rouse herself from sleep.
“I turned her head and she was covered with snow,” Ashley said. “That’s not normal. I’m trying to get it off her face. … I realized there was something really wrong. I said, ‘Tawa, please help.’ He looked at Shelley, and he looked away. I checked her pulse. I checked her breathing. Gone. She died in my arms.”
Ashley grabbed his Garmin inReach and demanded a helicopter rescue, but the operators said there was no way they could make it happen, considering the strength of the winds and the high altitude. Tawa told Ashley it was time. They had to leave, or they risked further complications; Tawa showed Ashley his fingers that had turned black from frostbite.
Ashley, in shock, started working his way down the mountain. Tawa managed to follow despite a broken back and damaged hands, hoping he could at least make it to a low enough altitude to get help. They made it to Camp 2, and a helicopter picked them up and flew them to a hospital in Kathmandu.
The rescue team also returned to the mountain to retrieve Johannesen’s body.
“She wasn’t stuck on the mountain. She could have gotten buried in the snow, or she could have frozen to the snow, so I’m so grateful that they did that,” Ashley said.
It was May 11, and the group spent more than 14 hours at 23,400 feet without protection, risking severe frostbite, altitude sickness and exposure in their efforts to rescue Johannesen and Tawa.
Sonom was unscathed and able to go home immediately, but Tawa and Ashley were checked into the intensive care unit, and Ashley discovered he also had frostbite on his fingers and toes — some of which had turned black.
“I think that’s from holding the sleeping bag because I was holding it with my right foot and my right hand, and just that little bit of pressure is enough to keep the blood from flowing as well as it should have in that digit,” Ashley said.
Once he had a moment to himself in the hospital, Ashley started writing his account of the avalanche and sent it to Johannesen’s ex-husband and children. He wanted to make sure they heard the details from him instead of the news outlets that had already picked up the story.
Then he called Johannesen’s family to explain the situation over the phone and began coordinating with the U.S. embassy, which has a specific process it follows when an American dies in a foreign country.
“I was able to get out of the ICU the next day,” Ashley said. “They had a couple of IVs in me because I was really dehydrated. I stayed locally in Nepal for over a week, dealing with all of the things you have to do when somebody passes in a foreign country.”
Ashley also organized a funeral for Johannesen in Nepal, a Buddhist celebration known as a puja. Johannesen wasn’t Buddhist herself, but Ashley said it was a fitting ceremony because she loved Nepalese culture.
“Her wishes were to be cremated,” Ashley said. “I think this is what she would have wanted. It was powerful, a beautiful ceremony that they did for her.”
After the ceremony, Ashley traveled home to Kamas and immediately built what he calls a memory space for Johannesen, a display of her ashes, photos of the couple and other important belongings. It’s a way to keep her with him.
“I keep a candle lit. I burn incense, and I feel like she’s here in this house,” Ashley said.
Ashley also started a fundraiser for Tawa, who is unsure if he’ll ever be able to return to work as a Sherpa. More than $20,000 was raised to help pay his medical bills and cover equipment lost on the upper mountain during the rescue, including Tawa’s personal gear.
“That money’s there to help his family and make amends for that,” Ashley said.
Remembering Shelley
Ashley described Johannesen as someone dedicated to building bonds with people. He said she chased mountain peaks and pushed herself to participate in difficult treks not for glory, but for the connection it created with other adventurers.
“She was like a catalyst to help other people,” Ashley said. “We both said we want to climb mountains and make friends. … We like having fun people around us. They say your vibe attracts your tribe. We’re high altitude trekkers and climbers, and the people that we hang out with are the same. We’ve made some really good friends.”
Johannesen’s friends in Utah have been celebrating her memory, too.
The Wasatch Mountain Club held a memorial campfire and potluck in her honor, as well as a memorial hike on Mount Olympus. The Mount Olympus trail was the last hike Johannesen and Ashley did before they left for Nepal.
“I couldn’t join them because of the frostbite healing on my foot, but I was able to meet them at the bottom and thank them for coming,” Ashley said. “Everywhere I go, someone might recognize Shelley from a newspaper article. They always understand what avalanches do … because they take people’s lives here, and I think we’re fortunate to live in a community that gets it. There’s nothing you can do. That makes the grief that much harder.”
For now, Ashley is trying to take things slow.
He’s committed to not making any big changes for at least six months, and he’s still waiting for his frostbitten toes to recover. But despite the trauma and pain, Ashley said he plans to get back to the mountains soon, with a trip to hike Mount Rainier and Mount Hood scheduled for October.
“The people I’m climbing Rainier with were checking in on me, and someone asked, ‘Hey, Dave, are you ready?’” Ashley said. “I’ll find out when I’m there, but I think I need to. I need to get back in the mountains because if I stay out too long and I think about it too much, it might be too difficult. I think the best thing to do once the frostbite’s healed … is to get the boots back on, grab the ice axe and get after it again.”
