- At least 11 people were killed by the avalanche on Manaslu in Nepal
- The search for survivors resumes after bad weather hampered efforts Sunday
- A French official says four of his countrymen died, three are missing
- A survivor tells a filmmaker he slid nearly a quarter-mile in his tent
Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) -- Search and rescue workers resumed their hunt early Monday for climbers swept up in an avalanche that killed at least 11 people on the Nepalese mountain of Manaslu.
Sunil Kumar Shrestha, operations manager for Simrik Air in Kathmandu, said that rescue aircraft were back in the sky Monday morning, a full day after the avalanche took place on the world's eighth-highest peak. Simrik Air is one of the airlines involved in the operation.
Bad weather had hampered search and rescue efforts Sunday.
Earlier, Steve Bruce Bokan of Fishtail Air -- another airline involved in the search-and-rescue effort -- said that those coordinating the rescue estimated that as many as 38 people were missing.
A French mountaineering official put the number lower, at 15, but said it had been difficult to get exact figures from authorities in Nepal.
Four French citizens are among the dead, with another three missing, said Christian Trommsdorff, vice president of the National Syndicate of High Mountain Guides in Chamonix, France.
He said that rescuers in helicopters focused on evacuating the injured. They also found the bodies of the four Frenchmen.
One of the survivors is Glen Plake, who with two other ski mountaineers had planned to descend from the summit on skis without the aid of oxygen, according to Trey Cook, the editor-in-chief of EpicTV.com, which makes films on skiing, climbing and other adventure sports.
Cook said he spoke to Plake by satellite phone and the skier said: "It was a major, major accident. There are up to 14 people missing. There were 25 tents at Camp 3 and all of them were destroyed; 12 tents at Camp 2 were banged up and moved around."
Plake said he had lost a few front teeth and had an eye injury after being swept 300 meters (985 feet) down the mountain, Cook told CNN.
When he came to a stop, Plake said he was still in his sleeping bag, in his tent and still had on the headlamp he had been using to read his Bible verses before the avalanche struck, according to Cook.
Plake said he went looking for the rest of the people in the camp, all of whom were supposed to be wearing avalanche transceivers -- electronic devices that can signal other similar receivers -- as he was.
Two of his colleagues were missing, including the man with whom he shared a tent, Plake told Cook.
The avalanche, which took place Sunday about 5 a.m., was most likely caused by a huge piece of ice that fell from a glacier above the camp, Trommsdorff said.
Cook said he thought it was a piece of ice the size of six or seven football fields.
Most of the mountaineers had set up tents at 6,600 meters (21,650 feet), said Yograj Kadel of Simrik Air. The other mountaineers were apparently 500 meters (1,640 feet) below the camp that was destroyed, according to the EpicTV.com report.
The mountain is 8,163 meters (26,780 feet) high.
Kenton Cool, a mountain climber from England who reached the summit of Manaslu in 2010, told CNN that the weather during the post-monsoon season can be quite unsettled. His friends on the mountain told him that in the past 10 days or so there had been "quite high levels of snow on the mountain," he said.
Teams normally wait for new snow to settle before leaving camp.
Cool, who said Manaslu had a "fearsome reputation," predicted that searchers will have a hard time locating some of the people still on the mountain. The area where the avalanche happened is the site of some large crevasses.
"It will be hard to know exactly where everyone was," he said. "It will be hard to find the bodies, let alone retrieve them."
According to Nepal tourism officials, 231 foreign mountaineers from 25 teams were attempting to climb the mountain in the current autumn season that ends in November. They said that a Spaniard, a German and a Nepalese sherpa had been killed.
