Dutch climber Eric Arnold initially thought that a friend was joking around and shaking his tent. Then, the ground below him started shaking. Lying inside his tent at base camp under Mount Everest, Arnold realised that he was being rattled by an earthquake.
By the time he peered out of his tent, a massive avalanche was already bearing down on base camp.
The wall of snow, rock and ice that hit around noon on April 25 has killed at least 17 people, injured over 60 and left hundreds stranded in camps elsewhere around the mountain. That makes it the deadliest disaster on Mount Everest, exceeding the toll of the avalanche on April 18, 2014 that killed 16 people.
Although most climbers and other support staff at the base camp were running for their lives as the avalanche tore down the slope, a handful of them had video cameras rolling.
German climber Jost Kobusch was among them, and this is what he saw:
“The ground was shaking from the earthquake, and as soon as we saw people running we were running ourselves to save our lives,” he wrote in a short description published with the YouTube video.