PROVO — At 9 p.m. Monday, Cesar Cardoso printed a five-page e-mail from his wife telling him about her most incredible adventure yet.
Leuzi Cardoso was in Katmandu with her best friend, Heather Finch, waiting for a plane to fly them to the base of Mount Everest.
"She said she was having the time of her life," Cesar Cardoso, who is Provo High School's soccer coach, said Tuesday.
When he began to reply to the e-mail, he got a phone call from the travel agency that had booked his wife's trip, informing him that her plane had crashed.
"About five minutes later, I got a call from the U.S. Embassy in Nepal," he tearfully told the Deseret News. "They confirmed there were no survivors."
Leuzi Cardoso, 49, and Heather Finch, 40, both employees of the Provo law firm of Howard, Lewis & Petersen, were among the 14 people on the small passenger plane headed for Lukla, the only landing strip in the Everest region.
About 7:15 a.m. Tuesday, local time, the plane was forced to turn back due to cloud cover and then crashed in heavy rain 50 miles south of Katmandu.
The private Agni Air plane went down near Shikharpur village, area Police Chief Ram Bahadur Shrestha said. The German-built Dornier turboprop was carrying 11 passengers and three crew members. Ram Bahadur Gole, a villager who witnessed the accident, told Avenues Television network that the crash impact broke the plane into several pieces, which scattered on a hillside.
Tri Ratna Manandhar of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said the 14 victims included four Americans, one person from Great Britain and one from Japan, with the other passengers and crew identified as Nepalese.
Finch was married to Doug Finch, a prosecutor for the Utah County Attorney's Office. Members of the Finch family, which includes five children, declined to comment Tuesday on the tragedy. Heather Finch updated her Facebook page Sunday while waiting to fly to Lukla.
"Sitting at the airport in Kathmandu waiting to see if our flight to Lukla will leave. Has to be perfectly clear to take off. I suppose it is a good thing to make sure the pilot can see the mountains! However, doesn't look good to take off today. May have to try again in the morning," she wrote.
Leuzi Cardoso and Heather Finch met at work and became best friends. Helen Anderson, currently the spokeswoman for Provo's mayor, was an attorney at the same law firm and said the women took up outdoor activities as a way to keep fit.
"They started planning camping trips and bike rides together, and they just really became best friends in the process. Their adventures grew from there," Anderson said. "They set high goals."
They had been training together to climb to the base camp on Everest for four years.
The women had hiked, snowshoed, backpacked, climbed King's Peak, Pike's Peak in Colorado and the Grand Canyon rim to rim twice, to name a few, Cesar Cardoso said. Every year, the women would make scrapbooks for each other of their adventures together.
Crammed together on the sofa in the front room of their Provo home, Cardoso and three of his children told of Leuzi Cardoso's excitement about the trip, stopping each time that the reality of the situation sank in.
"It's not real," Cardoso said. "This is somebody's joke. We're talking about 29 years of marriage. We're talking about a family with lots of memories and great things together."
Aside from the e-mail, the last time Cesar Cardoso and his kids heard from Leuzi was Sunday, via Skype. They had talked to her for two hours about her trip, and she had asked them all what they wanted as souvenirs. "She was always thinking about others," Cardoso said.
By midnight Monday, the Cardoso home was full of mourning family members and friends. Everyone left at 5 a.m., so family members at home could sleep, but none of them could. Cesar Cardoso said he pretended to sleep so his children would, but no one got more than an hour or two.
At 6:30 a.m., Cardoso called the couple's fourth child, a son serving an LDS mission in Trenton, N.J., and told him the news.
"That's the hardest thing I've had to do," he said. "You don't want to tell your son his mom died. It's not the proper order."
Tuesday, Cardoso moved from room to room, child to child, comforting others as he tried to comfort himself, too. He met Leuzi when she was in Brazil on vacation with her family. They lost contact for awhile but started writing while he was serving an LDS mission. When he got back from his mission, she was in Brazil waiting for him, he said.
Now, he's waiting for a phone call from officials in Nepal to discuss details about sending her body home to Utah.
"You have to move on," he said as he fought tears, "one day at a time."
The Provo law office where the women worked was also in mourning Tuesday.
"For our firm, it's a major tragedy because we've regarded these two people as very, very critical," said state Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, who is the law firm's managing shareholder.
"Both of these women were amazing leaders. Mrs. Finch was the head of the paralegal organization for the whole state. Mrs. Cardoso has been our office manager and has been very accomplished in a number of areas. We are just so saddened to lose both of them," said Valentine.
The other Americans in the plane crash were identified as Irina Shekhets, 30, and Kendra Fallon, 18. The Japanese passenger was Yuki Hayashi, 19, and the British passenger, Jeremy Taylor, 30.
After an initial delay in reaching the crash site because of poor weather conditions, a rescue helicopter retrieved some of the bodies late Tuesday. Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and American and Japanese diplomats were at the airport.
The rescue coordination office at Katmandu's Tribhuwan International Airport said in a statement that soldiers had initially reached the crash site on foot. The area has no roads and is only accessible by foot. The route from the nearest town was blocked by a river flooded by monsoon rainfall.
Thousands of trekkers and mountaineers fly to Lukla every year, but few travel there during the monsoon season. It is little more than a runway carved into the side of the Himalayas at an altitude of 9,200 feet.
The Dornier 228 twin-turboprop had its first flight in 1981. A total of 270 were built by German planemaker Dornier and India's HAL. About 120 of those remain in service worldwide. According to the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network, 29 have been lost in various accidents, with a total of 122 fatalities.
Contributing: KSL; Associated Press; Los Angeles Times; Marc Haddock, Deseret News
e-mail: ashaha@desnews.com