He Left His Girlfriend to Die 50 Metres From the Summit. An Austrian Court Just Called It a Crime.

In January 2025, Thomas Plamberger and his girlfriend Kerstin Gurtner set out on an overnight winter ascent of the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, via a technical ridge route called the Stüdlgrat. Only one of them came down.

According to testimony at his trial in Innsbruck, Gurtner began struggling badly with the cold and the technical terrain as the pair neared the 3,798-metre summit. Prosecutors said Plamberger, by far the more experienced climber of the two, left her alone on the mountain to go for help rather than staying with her, and did not wrap her in the emergency blanket or bivouac bag the pair were carrying before he went. She was found dead about 50 metres below the summit, having frozen to death alone in conditions her partner survived.

What made this case unusual wasn't the tragedy itself — Alpine winters claim experienced climbers most years — it was the verdict. Judge Norbert Hofer, himself an experienced climber who works with Tyrol's mountain and helicopter rescue teams, didn't dispute that Plamberger was a highly capable alpinist. His finding was narrower, and for the climbing world, more unsettling: that the couple should have turned back long before the summit push, given how far behind Gurtner was in winter climbing experience, and that leaving her alone and unprotected crossed the line from misjudgement into criminal negligence.

Climbing outlets covering the case have called it a possible template for how courts weigh a climbing partner's legal duty of care, not just a moral one, when a rope team's decisions go wrong. That matters well beyond Austria. Most Himalayan trekking peaks and expedition routes, including the ones we run out of Pokhara, are climbed with a professional guide precisely because that duty of care needs to sit with someone whose job, training and legal accountability are built around exactly this scenario, not with a partner, however capable, who is improvising a rescue decision at altitude, in the dark, exhausted.

What this means for trekkers

None of this is a claim that guided climbing eliminates risk — high-altitude mountaineering is never fully safe, in the Alps or the Himalaya. But the Grossglockner case is a sober argument for one specific thing: climbing with someone whose job is to make the hard call to turn around, rather than hoping you'll make it yourself when it matters most. Ama Dablam base camp, Island Peak and Mera Peak are all realistic first steps into serious Himalayan altitude for trekkers with solid fitness, run with exactly that structure.

Source: CNN

Cover photo: Michieliosios via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).