They heard the avalanche before they saw it.
Ziha Yitie, a tour guide, and his group of hikers had spent Wednesday morning climbing to an observation deck in Tibet with a view of snow-capped mountains across the border in Nepal.
Mr. Ziha, 26, said a break in the morning mist uncovered Tsangbu Ri’s dramatic peak and glacier. They pulled out their cameras.
As they filmed, the hikers heard a series of deep rumbles. They dismissed the sounds as thunder. Then, just after 10:50 a.m. in Tibet, a loud crack shot through the valley.
“It sounded like explosives detonating inside the mountains,” Mr. Ziha said. For several minutes after the initial sound, he said, they were hit with a wall of noise from an avalanche.
A comparison of the hikers’ footage before and after the avalanche offers the clearest view yet of the scale of the glacial ice and rock that dropped into a valley below.
Dust from the landslide soon filled their vision, “almost like a massive mushroom cloud,” Mr. Ziha said. In the minutes that followed, his group filmed smaller pieces of ice from the glacier continuing to drop down the mountain’s sheer face.
But it wasn’t until the group descended that they saw blocked roads and heard news reports of the devastation caused by the avalanche and subsequent flood.
Another hiker captured the moments immediately after the glacier collapsed. His video shows dust and debris racing into the valley below.
Additional work by Jorge Mitssunaga.
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