An investigation is underway as authorities are looking to find an award-winning climate journalist after he disappeared during a hike in a Norwegian national park.
Alec Luhn, 38, disappeared July 31 during a four-day solo backpacking trip in Folgefonna National Park. Luhn, an experienced hiker, was first reported missing on Monday when he failed to catch his flight from Bergen to the U.K., prompting his family to call the authorities.
Police told public broadcast company NRK that the search for Luhn was temporarily halted due to bad weather conditions of strong wind and heavy rain.
“Weather conditions started to get really bad around midnight,” said Tatjana Knappen, an operations manager from Vestland police. “It was not reasonable to continue the search up in the mountains.”
According to Oystein Torsnes, a Hardanger police chief, the stormy conditions also prevented the police from using helicopters.
“The weather yesterday and today is tough, and the terrain we search in is quite challenging,” Torsnes told the New York Times.
Instead, a volunteer search team of 30 individuals, a Red Cross rescue team, search dogs, drones, and the police had been looking for the missing man before the operation was suspended Monday night. The search resumed on Tuesday.
His wife, Veronika Silchenko, last heard from him on Thursday afternoon at 3:24 p.m. local time when he texted her his itinerary, according to a phone interview with The New York Times. She is actively posting on social media to raise awareness on finding him, like on Facebook and Instagram stories.
“I just really want him back,” Silchenko said. “I can’t sleep or eat properly. It’s very hard not to know anything.”
This is not Luhn’s first time exploring rocky terrain. As a climate journalist, his work has taken him to exploring glaciers in Alaska, Texas oilfields, Somalian droughts, along with riding a research ship on the North Sea, according to an interview with his alma mater, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Alec is basically obsessed with the Arctic. He loves glaciers and snow, and he loves explorers, and he’s a climate journalist, so for him it is always that story that now because of the climate change they’re all shrinking, and he’s trying his best to go to the coldest countries,” Silchenko told CBS.
A Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow, Luhn has published articles at outlets such as The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New York Times, Scientific American, TIME, CBS News Radio, and VICE News TV.
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