Huber flees to the mountains: Despite deadly danger: Why mountaineers don't give up

While the shock following Laura Dahlmeier's death runs deep in the sports world, Thomas Huber and his team are heading back to the mountains. High-altitude mountaineering has a special magic – despite all the known dangers.

Germany's top athletes are honoring Laura Dahlmeier with a moment of silence at the finals in Dresden, and the biathletes are wearing black armbands at the "Blinken Festival" in Norway. Meanwhile, the companions of the tragically deceased Bavarian are heading back to the mountains in Pakistan. He's been thinking about what to do next, "but you, Laura, already gave me the answer," her good friend Thomas Huber wrote on Instagram. That's why he's heading back to the Choktoi Valley on Saturday to continue the path "that Laura would have taken."

This was a kind of escape, a way to process what had been experienced "and finally be allowed to cry," Huber, who was involved in the rescue attempt, explained: "Perhaps in such moments we realize that there are no guarantees in our lives, even if we try and believe we can protect ourselves." Death is part of mountaineering, a fact all high-altitude alpinists are aware of. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, their sport exudes a special fascination that Dahlmeier has never been able to escape.

"Laura lived her dream until the end"

She was "aware that there are alpine dangers and that this carries risks," she once said in a ZDF documentary. However, it was her "inner drive" to continually test her limits. She found her "freedom" in the mountains, and that was "sacred" to Dahlmeier. As tragic as everything was, "Laura lived her dream until the very end," Huber emphasized, "and she was and still is a role model for the fact that life is an incredible gift that should be filled with love, passion, and fire."

Mountaineering is "also about the art of survival," said Jost Kobusch in an interview with "Münchner Merkur/TZ": "We deliberately put ourselves in danger. But precisely in order to survive this danger." You develop "an incredibly deep connection to nature and yourself. Nowhere else do you feel it in this way. This intensity, of course, also arises from the fact that there are real consequences. Otherwise, you might as well just climb stairs somewhere."

"She fell at my feet"

Dahlmeier's mother, Susi, once said she was "really scared at first." However, when she saw her daughter's "joy and enthusiasm," it "freed her emotionally and emotionally." Her father, Andi, had introduced the former biathlete to the magic of the mountains as a child – and witnessed an incident firsthand when a handhold broke off the edge of the mountain. "She fell at my feet," said the head of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen mountain rescue service: "It's not a nice feeling when your own daughter falls in front of you."

Long before her own tragic rockfall accident last Monday, Laura Dahlmeier herself had already suffered painful losses among friends on climbing trips. "When a serious accident happens in your environment, you ask yourself how you're going to continue," she said years ago. Giving up her passion, however, was never her answer; rather, she wanted to learn the right lessons from such incidents.

But everyone knows "very well that there is always a residual risk," explained mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner: "Because nature is much stronger than we can imagine."