The Mother's Necklace

by Matthew Horan

The descent is a long, hard slog. The air is progressively thicker, which is awesome – you feel like you can almost chew it – but I’m also progressively more tired. I get into a zone, ticking off the landmarks as I descend past them for the last time – through the massive blocks of Mordor below Camp 1, past ABC, past the cairn at the top of the ridge below ABC, down the ridge, up a little bit. Locking in the memories, but seriously glad I never have to come through here again. Another cairn, down to the stream, the last tiny hill, the yak paddock – Base Camp.

  It’s dark when I arrive about 7.30pm after almost 12 hours of solid descent. There’s congratulations all around. Roland’s looking a lot better than me. He was back to Camp 2 not long after Pete, moving with his years of experience and fuelled by the adrenaline rush of having achieved his goal. I certainly think it would have taken me much longer to descend if I hadn’t made the summit. Pete is there and I congratulate him too. Only two of us made the top, but I think Pete made the best decision of the day and I tell him that. It’s not much – I think there’s disappointment when he can see I made the summit despite moving slower than him, but I think he also knows I pushed the envelope a lot further than he was prepared to do.

  Adam’s not here – he was helicoptered out to Kathmandu yesterday afternoon after Jon and Laurent and the Sherpa team got him down. He’s ok, sucking in the thicker air with a brain no longer dangerously swollen.

  Tim also congratulates me. “I think you made the right decision staying at 2.9,” he says. “You were in good company, safe and it would have been a very tough descent in the dark.”

  I fill him in on the Marine, who’s safely ensconced at Camp 1. I can tell Tim is concerned – the Marine pushed it out there too and there was very little margin left. It may be a “led, not guided” expedition but that doesn’t mean Tim doesn’t feel, and make himself, responsible for all of us, even if we’re the ones making the sometimes sketchy decisions.

  In the mess tent, I mechanically eat and try to hydrate. It’s just fuel now. After about 30 minutes I retreat to my tent, zip up and sleep. Still not as good a sleep as Camp 2.9.

  November 27 - Base Camp

  We try to catch a glimpse of Dan in the telescope in the morning. He left Camp 2 about 2am with Thundu Sherpa, who accompanied the second team in with Tim. Thundu has offered to lead Dan and Richard, allowing him to check out the conditions, ready for the push with Team Two. Richard, though, never made it out of his tent this morning. His flu has finally got the better of him and he’s gone as high as he can.

  Dan is pushing hard. We try to catch a glimpse of him in the telescope to no avail. About 9am or so we hear him on the radio. The wind, which was insane when we were on our summit push, hasn’t gone away, and if anything it’s stronger. At Camp 3, Dan makes the same decision as Pete. With the knowledge of what happened on our summit push, he does the math and realises he’ll struggle to get down before dark. He and Thundu retreat to Camp 2, and he starts descending back to Base Camp. Thundu stays – he’ll be going for the summit tomorrow with Ciaran, from Team Two, who’s acclimatised very fast.

  The wind kicks up a snow plume from the summit on the morning of November 27.

  My day is languid. I relax in the mess tent, snacking on goodies. I wander down to the lodge and post to Facebook. My mum’s already let everyone know I made it – Tim put it on his Everest Expedition page – but I fill everyone else in on the bare details, including my unplanned night out without a sleeping bag.

  I sip lemon and ginger tea at the Lodge and pass the time in the sun by the window.

  Jon is getting himself ready for another push up the mountain. He’s going to leave at about midnight on a 14-hour round trip to the summit and back to try to break the speed record. You have to really motor to do that. Two hours to ABC, three to Camp 2, five hour summit push, descend in four hours. If anyone can do it, it’s Jon – who has come close to under 14 hours before. I reflect that my summit day from Camp 2 took 13-and-a-half hours just to reach the summit. It shows the benefit of bags of fitness, experience, local knowledge, acclimatisation and sheer determination.

  November 28 – Base Camp

  I wake at 5.26am when someone shakes my tent. Actually it’s not a someone shaking my tent. The whole ground is shaking, like someone has grabbed the end of your bed and is violently pushing it back and forth, a metre each way.

  Earthquake.

  I’m out of the tent trying to work out what’s happened. Head torches are going on across the camp.

  “Was that an earthquake?” I ask the night, having no idea what they're supposed to feel like.

  “Yes,” says Dave, who was in the big one on Everest last year.

  “Oh right then,” I say, and head back inside.

  I stop. “Hang on,” I ask. “Did Jon go last night?”

  “I think so,” says Laurent.

  I can hear commotions by the mess tent and kitchen. Well I’m not going back to sleep, so I wander over. Tim is up.

  “Any news?”

  Jon’s ok – he’s above Camp 2 now and moving fast. Tim’s trying to call Ciaran, who’s also going for the summit with Thundu. At this time they could be around 2.9, which is in a bit of a radio shadow.

  It wasn’t a massive earthquake (turns out to be about 5.6 on the Richter scale) and Tim was on Everest as well last year in a far worse one. Because Ama’s so steep, there’s less stuff to calve off than the bigger mountains, but I can tell he’s still concerned.

  Around 7am there’s a garbled call on the radio. It’s Ciaran, who’s clearly distressed and it takes Tim a few minutes to make sense of what’s going on. There’s been an avalanche at Camp 3, and Thundu and Ciaran are badly injured.

  Tim springs into action. He manages to get Jon on the radio. Jon’s maybe an hour below Camp 3 at normal speed. At Jon speed, and with the knowledge that his summit bid is now off, Jon starts to move even faster upwards. I head back to the tents. “Guys, there’s been an avalanche up high – looks like a couple of injuries,” I announce. “Let’s see what we can do to help.” I drag on my mountain gear again. Start throwing water into my pack. I’m still exhausted, but with a full day at Base Camp I’m acclimatised and can go back up if I’m needed. I really hope I’m not.

  I get out of the tent – Laurent and Pete are already dressed. We go and offer our services to Tim, should he need them. He’s got Jon on the way up, with another Sherpa, Lakpa Onju, from a different expedition heading up now from Camp 2 as well. There’s also about half the second team (the less acclimatised half) still at Camp 1 and we’re not sure yet if they’re ok as they haven’t switched on their radios for the morning sked. Laurent, who’s fresher than he has any right to be, heads for Camp 1 with some of our Sherpa team to help them down. Tim thanks the rest of us and asks us to wait around. We make ourselves busy by filling water bottles in the kitchen. No matter what happens, people will need water.

  I go out to see if there’s anything else we can do when I hear him talking to Jon. Jon’s arrived at Camp 3 and it’s unrecognisable from what we saw a couple of days ago. The avalanche, small as it was, remained big enough to knock off a couple of metres of the corner of the five-storey dablam. This roared down the slope, fragmenting and bouncing and kicking up more debris. This wasn’t the classic alpine avalanche of gently sliding and surfing snow. This was an evil, lethal melange of rock and ice moving at high speed.

  Thundu and Ciaran were right in its path, maybe a metre or so apart on the rope. Ciaran flattened himself against the ice. Thundu, instinctively, looked up at the noise. And was hit in the head, below his helmet. Both of them were ripped off the face, tossed down the slope maybe 100m before coming to rest just short of the immense abyssal drop off at the edge of Camp 3. Photos from the scene later show a wasteland of jumbled rock and ice. Ciaran had his pack ripped from him, gloves buried somewhere in the snow. It took him the better part of 30 minutes to find his pack and radio.

  If you are going to be injured high on a mountain th
ere is probably no better person to be injured with than Ciaran. One of the UK’s top neurosurgeons, a man with experience as a boxing doctor and knowledgeable in the immediacy of treatment. Yet Ciaran couldn’t help Thundu. Ciaran himself was hypothermic and in shock – and he had several small broken bones in his right hand, broken ribs and a fracture at the base of his back.

  When Jon arrives, it becomes fairly clear Thundu was likely killed immediately by the impact of the speeding ice. Jon spends three hours caring for Ciaran and Thundu while waiting for the helicopter to arrive, with the other Sherpa from Camp 2 arriving an hour or so after Jon. Ciaran is probably the luckiest man on the mountain. Had Jon not been on his summit bid already, and been able to move so fast to get to him, there’s no guarantee he would have survived in the cold.

  Tim is sad – so sad. He’s known Thundu for years. I ease back into the mess tent, quietly tell the guys. We know we need to try to support Tim through this, even as we know anything we do or say will be inadequate. Tim is an absolute professional throughout. He gets Pete to transcribe every call, knowing there’ll likely be an inquest. Laurent and a couple of Sherpas are dispatched to Camp 1 to help bring everyone down. I suggest that we put everyone on a social media blackout until this is resolved. We don’t need the mountaineering websites picking this up and Thundu’s wife finding out from someone else. Let alone Ciaran’s family only hearing half a story. One well-known website does eventually pick it up and initially names Steve as the expedition leader. It's understandable - as a former journalist I know that sometimes the first draft of history is just that, a draft, but still. We all donate gloves, water bottles and clothing. Not just for Ciaran, but for the helicopter pilot, who will have to be a lot higher with not as much clothing.

  Peris, who’s a JTAC – a Joint Terminal Attack Controller – with several tours of Afghanistan, helps co-ordinate the air assets. It takes about three hours to get a helicopter up the valley, which is socked in with fog. After a flight to Camp 3, the helicopter returns, and the pilot strips the doors off and throws out anything that even looks heavy, just so he can hover a little better. Eventually Ciaran, then Thundu, are lifted off from Camp 3 by a long line. It’s too high for the helicopter to actually land – it would never be able to get off again in the thin air.

  Thundu leaves behind a wife and two children, the same age as mine, who I saw in a concert before I left Australia with other children from their school, all of them the same age as Thundu’s. Like me, he’d hugged his children before he left home so he could live his dream of sharing his amazing mountain with us. Tim later sets up a fund to put Thundu’s kids through school, which raises thousands of pounds.

  Thundu Sherpa and his family.

  By about 2pm the rescue is over. I message my family to let them know I’m ok. Friends have already started posting comments on Facebook about the quake, which had been reported back home. There’s a comment from a keyboard warrior on my page, about Sherpas paying the price for the dreams of Westerners. Tim makes the point on his Facebook page that Ama Dablam “is a climbers’ mountain and all the people in my team are suitably well qualified by experience to be here. The Climbing Sherpas are not being used and abused in the duties that they perform, they are proud of the work that they do and have worked for my Sirdar for many, many years forming a close knit team.” Thundu, like the other Sherpas in our team, was incredibly generous in sharing his favourite mountain with us. Yes, it was a job for him, but he was one of those people in this world lucky enough to do a job which was also his passion.

  There is a bit of good news today, as Steve, wearing shorts of course, bounds into Base Camp. Not wanting to sit around Base Camp reading books after his summit success, he quickly organised some extra summit permits and nipped off to do first Lobuche, then Island Peak, two 6000m trekking peaks. They normally take about three days to do each, but fully acclimatised, Steve races up each in about half a day. He didn’t feel the quake as he was on the final summit slope of Island this morning, before walking the 12 or 15km back here.

  Late in the afternoon the remnants of Camp 1 come in, followed by Jon, who couldn’t get off the mountain with the helicopter. The helicopter company offered to do it for US$25,000 (they’re normally covered by insurance for these sort of jobs). Jon decides to descend the traditional way.

  It’s an incredibly sad night in the mess tent and soon most of Team 2 retreat to their own. Our team feels awkward – we’re not sure what we can say to console them. They walked in with Thundu, and they had a much closer connection to him. The Sherpas and Base Camp staff, many of whom had worked with Thundu for years, hold their own private wake for him in the kitchen tent with Tim and Jon. Thundu was a close friend to them, a Sherpa who had a towering reputation in the Khumbu and one who was always welcome to join an expedition, not just for his superlative technical skills but for his companionship and good humour.

  I've known death among my mountaineering friends and companions before. Two years after he taught me mountaineering, Paul Scaife was killed with three others in an avalanche on Mt Tasman. Paul Carr, who led our Kwangde expedition, dead from HACE on Cho Oyu. A few years later on the same mountain my friend and Everest summiteer Sue Fear was killed falling into a crevasse while descending from the summit of Manaslu. We all have similar experiences, much the same as divers and motorcyclists reel off lists of those they know. The potential lethality of our sport gives the glorious days in the mountain just a little more colour. But this is the first time for me, and most of us Westerners, when it's happened on one of our expeditions. The immediacy of it is confronting and more personal. Unlike a death which has happened elsewhere, here just two days ago we climbed past the exact spot where the avalanche occurred.

  In the wash-up from the day it's clear that this was no-one's fault. The dablam was incredibly stable this year, conditions superb. It was simply that Ciaran and Thundu were climbing past under it at exactly the same time an avalanche hit. Eighteen months before, Chase and his team were on the mountain when the big quake hit Everest and the dablam didn't even flinch. Just absolute sheer bad luck. Mountaineering is a dangerous pastime, and much of the “safety” we pursue is just minimising the risk. But this – this was the equivalent of a drunk driver jumping the kerb and losing brakes at the same time.

  November 29 - Base Camp

  We pack up in the morning, ready to leave. Bags on yaks, daypacks on. We’re off mid-morning, bidding goodbye to Tim and his team. Their summit bids are over, even if they had the heart to continue, which none of them do. The avalanche ripped away the fixed ropes and anchors for probably 200 or so vertical metres, making the whole thing decidedly unsafe, before you even consider the general instability of an ice cliff that’s already been weakened enough by earthquake to collapse.

  Most will pack up and follow us back tomorrow. A couple of them are extending their trips through the Khumbu but most of them, to be honest, don’t have the emotional strength to keep going.

  We push through the thick air back to Tengboche for lunch where I completely forget my promise to myself not to try the chilli pizza again. We push past Tashi’s Ama Dablam Hotel. They’re full tonight so it’s on to Namche. We’re doing in a day what it took us four days (with one acclimatisation day) going up. It’s fully dark by the time I get there. I’m behind almost everyone else and Namche isn’t exactly the best signposted town. It takes about an hour from when I hit Namche to actually find our hotel.

  Dan gets in even later than me. We celebrate our navigational excellence with a few beers, then a few more. Then we hit the nightspots of Namche, of which there’s only about one open at this time of year. Jon gets chatted up by a female climber he knows and we do our best to try to spoil things for him. As it turns out, he’s rather glad of the spoiling.

  It’s a relief to wind down like this, playing pool in a Nepalese bar. The altitude drains off us, even if the dirt hasn’t. The water, you see, is the same temperature as the beer, so we decide that cold beer is
a better option than a cold shower. There’s a bit of discussion about summit day. Laurent is disappointed he didn’t get a second shot at the summit, thinking he could have made it if he’d been allowed to go up again a couple of days later. He’s probably right, but Jon’s point, well made, was that you really only get one shot at this and it’s your responsibility to manage your time. There’s simply not the time, or the logistics, to allow two shots at the summit. Laurent’s selfless decision to help Adam cost him that one shot. Adam had a better shot at survival with Laurent than without, so it was a decision that worked, at least for Adam. Laurent, along with Jon and the Sherpas, did a superb job helping Adam off the hill and it’s an achievement all of itself, one he should be as proud of as if he’d made the summit. Still, it rankles him that he didn’t get to the top, and that’s completely understandable. (Talking to Adam after the expedition, he is full of praise for Laurent and the herculean effort he, Jon and the Sherpas did to get Adam down safely).

  Amidst this, Roland, Steve and I have a quiet beer together to celebrate our summits. It’s not lost on us that, apart from Dave, the three of us are the only ones in the expedition who had previously summited above 6000m. That experience paid off. We knew how hard it was going to be. We knew that we needed to push ourselves harder than ever before. With the rest of the expedition there was an intellectual knowledge that you were going to have to do that, but we’d actually experienced it. It’s a valuable lesson, and one of the reasons why Tim insists you should have done a 6000m peak before Ama. Alpine experience is great, but Ama shouldn’t be your first 6000er. It’s not to say the rest of the guys couldn’t have made it. Adam got HACE, Laurent sacrificed his summit to help rescue him, Pete and the Marine made good decisions, Dan got smashed by even more horrendous weather than us and Richard got smashed by the flu. As it turns out, Emily, the strong Californian climber who’d paralleled our expedition had also turned back on our summit day, just 50m from the top, cold and tired and worried she wouldn’t make it back in time.