From WRS:
The search for the sixth victim from the doomed ski trip from last weekend has been suspended.
The still missing person is a 28-year-old woman from Fribourg. She was the girlfriend of one of the others and the only person who wasn’t part of the family. The other five were all related.
Valais police say that she remains untraceable after a week of looking. They say they will occasionally visit the scene of the tragedy until she is found.
Coverage from RTS on the weather, interview to a mountain guide and a rescuer. At 3m30s they show a webcam pointing at Matterhorn and Tête Blanche, between around 12h00 visibility went to zero between clouds and snow lifted by the wind. The interview to the rescue guys is heartbreaking. RTS video, only French but it has subtitles in FR if it helps.
I guess the only thing left think about is: back luck or is something “systemic” happening? Hope the rescue people is not yet affected by burnout.
On ski tours in particular, so-called blockages have more than doubled compared to previous years, according to the Swiss German-language newspaper SonntagsBlick, which cited mountain emergency statistics of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) from 2022.
Blocked persons were in a situation where they could not continue their tour but also could not turn back. In 2022, the SAC recorded a total of 1,008 emergencies. The ten-year average was 607 missions. In a survey conducted by the Swiss Alpine Rescue Association (SAS), 70% of mountain rescue workers also stated that they had had at least one traumatic mission. This was reported in the Swiss newspaper, SonntagsZeitung.
