Venus Rajnikant Patel, a 45-year-old software engineer from Cincinnati, awoke on Aug. 26 from a restful night’s sleep eager to share in a family group chat the breathtaking scenery surrounding him on his trip to Nepal.
Patel was on Day 2 of a journey he had planned for months: a holy pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, one of the most sacred peaks in the Himalayas. He was about to set off on a trek that would involve arduous hiking and camping at a mile above sea level.
At 6:47 a.m., he dropped in the chat a video of the view from his hotel room: the Trishuli River, some 50 feet below, snaked and rumbled through a lush valley as layers of mist covered the snowy mountaintops in the background.
Unbeknownst to Patel — or anyone else — a mountain glacier was less than two hours from collapsing and triggering a massive flood wave. As the water barreled though the Trishuli River and its surrounding valley, it would consume nearly everything in its path, including entire villages that were wiped out in minutes.
As of Monday, at least 900 people had been killed and more than 4,200 remained missing, according to Chinese and Nepalese authorities. Patel is among at least 85 Americans that the State Department said Sunday are missing. The department said nine Americans had been evacuated and that no U.S. citizen deaths had been confirmed at the time.
Patel was traveling with the Himalayan Glacier tour company, which said 40 of its pilgrims, including eight Americans, remain unaccounted for.
A separate group, the Tennessee-based spiritual organization Isha Foundation, has said 77 of its pilgrims are missing, including 22 Americans. On Saturday, the group issued a sobering message, saying the floods had buried the area under up to 50 feet of silt and debris.
“Everything our teams have seen, and everything those closest to the site have shared with us, has led us to expect the worst,” the group said.
‘Center of the universe’
Like tens of thousands of travelers each year, Patel had flown to Nepal as a starting point for a yatra, or holy pilgrimage, to Mount Kailash, a jagged, snow-capped peak in the Himalayas that is sacred to many faiths. Dozens of the Americans still missing in Nepal were there with private operators to complete the Kailash trek. Late August was still peak pilgrimage season, and a record number of travelers were expected to participate in 2026.
Tibetan Buddhists believe Mount Kailash is the center of the universe and that the trek, known as a kora, brings one closer to enlightenment. Hindus revere the mountain as the home of Shiva, the god of destruction and transformation. Jains believe a prophet climbed Kailash to attain salvation, and the Tibetan Bon tradition considers the peak a source of spiritual power.
Anil Goel, of Centreville, Virginia, felt a deep connection to Kailash and the surrounding region, and he had visited several times before. He planned his return trip after retiring earlier this year.
“It’s his favorite place in the world,” Goel’s son, Anurag, said. “What he loved about it was just the sheer beauty of the Himalayas, that whole mountain range, and the connectedness he felt spiritually with God.”
Goel was part of a group of friends with ties to Northern Virginia who had trained together for months leading up to the trip, and they had been assigned to Isha’s S3 hiking group. Other Americans in the same group included Mary Sorensen, a 60-year-old Atlanta resident who traveled frequently and doted on her four grandchildren; Prabhath Sajeepa, a 48-year-old father of two from California who was seeking a blessing for his ailing father; and V.S. “Bali” Balasubramanyam, an ardent devotee of Lord Shiva who had relocated from New Jersey to India.
The S3 group had arrived in Nepal about two weeks earlier to acclimate to the elevation, and train. The journey to Mount Kailash involves crossing the border from Nepal into Tibet — stopping at an imposing Chinese border facility for immigration processing first — then driving at least nine hours to the turquoise waters of Lake Manasarovar. The pilgrims would then hike to Kailash and walk about 33 miles around the base of the mountain.
In a video posted on Aug. 20, Balasubramanyam can be seen in the back of the crowd nodding in deep prayer as Sadhguru, a prominent Indian guru with the Isha group, explains in an orientation session how pilgrims must walk once they arrive at the peak.
“When you go to Kailash, from the time you start walking, you must see you are walking on the body of Shiva,” the guru said, demonstrating quiet, respectful steps. “It’s not a picnic, all right?”
“Kailash,” he added, “is a phenomena.”
The S3 group reached Mount Kailash on Aug. 22. It was a surreal experience, difficult to put into words, Balasubramanyam told his sister in a video call from the base of the mountain. His family said their last conversation with “Bali” had been matter-of-fact. There would be plenty of time to catch up upon his return, they thought.
Mary Sorensen sent her son some pictures of brightly colored prayer flags at the base of Kailash but also went into little detail about the experience over text. She told her family she was looking forward to having the long flights home so she could gather all of her thoughts to share how “truly enlightening” the trip had been, he said.
On Wednesday morning, the group departed Kailash. They would need to stop at the Chinese immigration facility in Gyirong again before crossing the border back into Tibet. The last photo Anil Goel sent his family was of him posing with several members of his group in front of the border facility. It was about 8:30 a.m. local time Wednesday — less than 10 minutes before the flooding hit.
Half an hour later, the Gyirong immigration facility would be gone, obliterated in an instant by a dark tsunami of water, mud, ice and debris. Rescue teams that arrived on Friday to the once-bustling border crossing checkpoint found “nothing but ruins.” Most of the pilgrims had been set to fly back to their home countries the next day.
‘We hope and pray’
Five days later, families of those who remain missing say they are desperate for any information about their loved ones. Some have been poring through satellite images of post-flood damage, scouring survivor lists in Nepali, scrutinizing timestamps and check marks on WhatsApp messages. A few have also looked through the online database where Nepalese authorities have uploaded pictures of recovered bodies to see if they can be identified.
The tragedy has shaken close-knit communities across the United States. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Virginia), whose office has been assisting families, said he has personally known some of the missing men for close to a decade.
“We should be grieving for everyone when a tragedy like this happens, but it’s harder when you know people personally and you feel saddened and frustrated,” he said.
Hema Shankar told The Post she determined the last-known location of three members of her extended family — Anitha Radhakrishnan, Balaji Venkatachalam and Deepa Balaji — was on a bridge on Aug. 26, around 8:15 or 8:30 a.m. Nepali time. She knows this because she spotted them in the background of a photo from that morning.
“And then after that, we lost contact with them completely,” Shankar said.
Riley Wilderson is aware that his mother, Mary Sorensen, was almost certainly inside the Gyirong immigration building that was hardest hit. But he has tried to focus on stories of miraculous rescues because the alternative is too much to bear.
“We hope and pray and believe in a God of miracles,” he said earlier this week. “If people are being saved, there’s always hope that she can be as well.”
Jolene Gosha, one of Venus Patel’s closest friends, has been losing sleep trying to piece together any potential paths to safety her friend could have had. Patel’s tour company, Himalayan Glacier, had confirmed that about two-thirds of their group were eating breakfast, while the rest were loading gear into the vans for the start of their trek. Had Patel been in the hotel or had he been on the dirt road, she wondered.
On Friday night, she stayed up until 4 a.m. studying drone footage and comparing them to where Venus’s hotel had stood. There appeared to be untouched ground about 200 meters from the hotel. If Patel had still been eating breakfast on the patio, he could have had a chance to run to safety, she reasoned.
In an interview Saturday, Anurag Goel said he feared too much time has gone by to find his father alive, and that his main concern now was whether local authorities were doing enough to treat with dignity the remains recovered from the areas affected by the flood.
“That’s the number one priority now for me, is understanding how they’re managing this sheer — this large volume of recovered bodies,” he said.
Goel also said he thought the U.S. government should do more to search for or recover missing Americans in the disaster.
“Distance,” he said, “shouldn’t diminish the value of American lives.”
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