Aiexpress – On Mexico’s Pico de Orizaba, the country’s tallest mountain, two people died and one is still missing, officials said Wednesday.
Rescuers found the body of a guide who was leading a climb up the 18,619-foot volcanic peak late Tuesday night in the central state of Puebla. Another climber from the group of 12 had already died on the peak, which is also called Citlaltépetl in Native American languages.
About 15,000 feet above sea level, the guide’s body was found. There were people coming down from the mountain with the body on Wednesday.
The state’s interior department said that they were still looking for one more climber who was still missing from the group.
The group started up the mountain on Saturday but got lost because of bad weather, according to the state’s civil defense office. Seven people made it down by themselves on Sunday, and four more were saved on the mountain.
Ascenters and rescue workers have found at least three frozen bodies in the snow on the peak since 2015. It looks like the bodies belong to hikers who died in an avalanche in 1959.
In the last few years, at least six people have died on Pico de Orizaba.
In 2023, an accident on the mountain killed four Mexican climbers. At the beginning of 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico said that another member of the U.S. foreign mission died while climbing the mountain. The embassy said at the time that relief teams in helicopters flew through bad weather for two days to save two American climbers. One of them made it out alive.
On the mountain in November 2017, another American hiker died. Along with seven other people, they were all saved.
