ITV News’ Harry Fawcett reports the remarkable story of a group of tourists who survived an avalanche in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains A British tourist, running for his life, captured the moment his hiking group survived a spectacular avalanche in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Harry Simmin, who had pulled away from the group to take photos minutes before, filmed snow and rock cascading down the edge of the Tian Shan cliff, only running for cover at the last minute. The group escaped largely unscathed, although one woman in the group had “cut her knee really badly”, Mr Shimmin said in an Instagram post. Mr Shimmin said nine Britons and an American were on a guided tour of the Tian Shan mountains when he heard the sound of “deep ice cracking”. He said he knows he “took a big risk” by staying to film the event, but felt safe as there was shelter nearby. “I felt in control, but regardless, when the snow started coming and it got dark/hard to breathe, I was bricking it and thought I might die,” she wrote. Mr Shimmin said the team was five minutes from death. “Only later did we realize how lucky we were. “If we had walked five minutes further on our journey, we would all be dead. “If you look closely in the video, you can see the faint gray path winding through the grass. This was the path. “We then crossed it, walking between huge blocks of ice and rocks that had been thrown much farther than we could have run, even if we had acted at once. “To make matters worse, the trail runs alongside a low ridge, hiding the mountain from view, so we would only have heard the roar before the lights went out.”
