American missing for four days in Mexican wilderness

WASHINGTON - An American has been missing in rugged mountains in central Mexico for four days after going on a hike with only a T-shirt, shorts, and little food and water, according to his wife and a Mexican official.

The search for Hari Simran Singh Khalsa, 25, began Tuesday after he went missing in Tepoztlan - about an hour south of Mexico City - and has included about 250 searchers and three helicopters, said Carlos Mandujano, the civil defense coordinator for the central Mexican state of Morelos.

"Our orders are to do everything humanly possible" to find him, Mandujano said Friday.

Mandujano said that on Friday, a helicopter with an infrared camera had captured an image of an area of heat in the mountains and that 80 rescuers had been dispatched to try to reach the area. One member of the search force was injured when he hit a rock while rappelling down from a helicopter; his injury wasn't considered serious.

Khalsa's wife, Ad Purkh Kaur, said Friday from Tepoztlan that her husband is a yoga instructor born and raised in Brooklyn. The couple now live in Leesburg, Virginia, and were planning to move back to Brooklyn at the end of the month.

Kaur, whose legal name is Emily Smith, said she and her husband arrived to Tepoztlan for a yoga retreat Dec. 26.

She said her husband decided to go for a day hike in the nearby mountains Tuesday, and left with only a T-shirt, shorts, a liter of water, a handful of trail mix and a knife. Temperatures in the area where Khalsa went missing can fall into the 40s this time of year.

Tepoztlan, a frequent weekend getaway for Mexico City residents, is known for the towering, whimsically-shaped cliffs and mountain peaks that tower over the colonial town on the valley floor.

Kaur said she heard from her husband at 12:30 p.m. CST Tuesday, when he sent a picture of himself on a mountain top, pointing to the site of the yoga retreat, with the message: "Looking down on you!"

She last heard from him about two hours later, when he sent a text message.

"I accidentally summited another mountain," he wrote, Kaur said. "Looks like I'll be a little later coming back. Save me some lunch if you can."

Kaur said that searchers have pored over the location they believe Khalsa sent his last text messages with no luck and that helicopters have made many runs overhead, leading her to believe he's injured and may be in a cave or crevasse.

Mandujano, the civil defense coordinator in Morelos, said that the area is crisscrossed by ravines and gullies that lead in different directions, and that Khalsa may have taken one of those.

Kaur said her husband is an experienced hiker who was just getting into backcountry hiking, though she said he doesn't have much survival training that she knows of.

"He hasn't done a lot of overnight hikes, or a lot of backcountry hikes," she said. "He has gone on accidental overnight hikes before and had to come down the next day ... He's very adventurous and strong and smart and capable.

"I believe he has enough resources to keep himself alive until we can find him."

She said the U.S. Embassy became involved Friday and helped obtain cellphone data. She hopes that will help pinpoint his location.

"I don't have any other choice than to believe 100 percent we're going to find him," she said.