by Sue Williams
But even as Alyssa was celebrating her own personal triumph, disaster wasn’t far away. On the slopes below, on the popular hiking route the Annapurna trail, thirty-nine trekkers were killed in snowstorms and avalanches, and 384 others had to be rescued in Nepal’s worst-ever trekking disaster. ‘I had no idea about it until I was back down in Kathmandu,’ Alyssa says. ‘Then I heard people talking about it. When you’re in among mountains, you just never know what will happen. You’re at their mercy. It makes you realise, yet again, how dangerous they can be. But that will never put me off. Never!’
And just to show how seriously she takes the whole thing, she continued to put pen to paper to write her own final words – if the worst should happen. If she didn’t survive her attempt, she planned for her letter to be published posthumously as part of this book.
I want my family to know that regardless of what anyone else says, the right decision was made and there is no reason to be sad about my passing. I died on the mountain I have wholeheartedly dedicated myself to for most of my life and I have no regrets. I don’t fear Death and I am prepared for anything on Everest.
Climbing Everest is something I’ve thought about constantly, trained for since I was a little girl, and prepared for in every single way I knew how. Plenty of people tried to talk me out of it; they all failed. I’d done everything I could to ensure it would be a safe climb, but there are some things you can never control on Everest. As this book says so often, the great dangers of Everest are exactly those things that are impossible to foresee – avalanches, the weather, accidents.
I knew all the risks and made my decision to climb in 2015 with my eyes wide open, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. If the worst does happen while I’m up there, and I don’t make it back, I also still really want this book about my life to be published. I’d like what I have to say and how I’ve led my life to live on beyond me.
I have always believed there is no such thing as a victim on Everest. Any climber who chooses to set foot on the mountain accepts the risks, and I was one of them. The truth is, if there were no risks, no pain and no possibility of my Death then I wouldn’t have been that interested. All of these things make up the challenge that is Everest and I wouldn’t have wanted, nor accepted, any less.
I’ve also been proud to be called a role model for young people from a very early age, right from when I first walked Kokoda at the age of eight, to show them that anything is possible if you want it enough. I’d love it if people could still learn from what I’ve experienced.
If I had my time all over again, I’d live it exactly the same way: pursuing my dream to the end, to climb Everest.
CHAPTER 28
The Deadliest Year
‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’
– ANON
It’s been a cold, crisp night in Everest Base Camp and at 2 a.m., in the pitch black, Alyssa is gathering together her gear in her tent by torchlight, ready for her first climb up Everest. It’s Saturday, 25 April 2015 and Alyssa, now eighteen, can’t wait to get going on the Khumbu Icefall. This is the moment she’s been waiting for her whole life.
‘I felt huge excitement that here it was,’ she says. ‘I was about to start climbing on the mountain. My first day climbing on Everest was about to begin. This marked the true beginning of the expedition. Finally I was about to get my chance.’
Her group are set to leave at 4 a.m. but, it seems, not today. The team’s head Sherpa, Ang Kami, calls softly outside the tent that the conditions aren’t great and that they should delay their departure for a day. Alyssa instantly feels the weight of crushing disappointment, but the Sherpas know this mountain, and know its moods too well to be argued with. She knows she’ll be just as ready tomorrow for the trip of her life.
She pushes her gear to one side, climbs back into her sleeping bag and waits for daybreak. Tomorrow morning isn’t so far off. She can wait one more day. She’ll have to.
That morning, everything is as normal. She goes over to the mess tent for breakfast, stays there to write a few lines in her diary and reads. Then, at 11.40 a.m., she leaves the mess tent and walks back to her own tent, where she sits and reads quietly. She’s half-dozing inside when she feels the earth suddenly shudder.
She’s confused. Maybe she was dreaming. It doesn’t feel real. Then she hears a distant crash. That’s nothing unusual; she’s used to the sound of the small avalanches that occur all the time around Everest. But there’s something different about this one. She can hear everything shaking in her tent and in the tents nearby and outside around her. For a split second, she wonders if she’s suffering from altitude sickness. That can change your perception of everything. But then she realises. No, this is something real, and far more serious.
Alyssa scrambles to the front of her tent, facing Everest, and opens it up. She can see her team members outside standing still and looking up at the side of the mountain. Donna, who did the trek to Base Camp with her last year, is among them. Then she hears a deafening rushing noise from behind. Almost by instinct, she crawls back inside the tent and clambers to the back. Whatever’s happening, she knows her tent will offer her some protection, however minor. Then, she swiftly unzips it to see what’s actually going on behind. The rumbling is getting louder and, as she looks, the peak of Pumori, a mountain popularly known as Everest’s Daughter, shivers before her eyes and then a wall of white heads straight towards her. With trembling fingers, she rips the zip back up and dives now to the front of the tent, curling up in a crash position and covering her face with her arms to try to create an air pocket in case she gets buried by what she now realises is an oncoming avalanche, and the biggest she’s ever seen.
Exactly three seconds later, it smashes into her tent. ‘I didn’t really even have time to be scared,’ she says. ‘It all happened so quickly. I knew I just had to react quickly if I was going to survive. I couldn’t get out of the way. As the avalanche hit, I could feel the weight getting heavier and heavier on my tent. I just had to crouch there and wait it out. It felt like an eternity. I didn’t even know if it was going to stop.’
Every serious mountaineer faces the possibility of one day being buried alive. Alyssa just hopes that, this time, she’ll be lucky. After a few minutes, the pounding on her tent stops and there’s a terrible silence. Realising that whatever is going on has just stopped – if only for a short time – she reaches for the front zipper of her tent. This is the moment of truth. She may open it to find a wall of ice, rocks and snow that she might not be able to dig her way out of. But there’s light at the top of the tent, and she’s able to scramble out to safety.
Once clear of the tent, she looks around for the others. She sees Donna, completely covered in snow and ice, and races over. She helps dig her out and Donna tells her she’s fine, except her hands are stinging from the cold. Alyssa grabs her own down mittens and puts them on Donna’s hands to try to warm her up. All the other members of the team seem fine; around them, the camp is gradually coming back to life, with the injured being treated and people running to collect others with stretches. There has been an earthquake – the deadliest one in Nepal’s history.
The earthquake had hit at 11.56 a.m., and was later measured to be of a magnitude of 7.8 – the biggest quake to hit Nepal since 1934. Its epicentre was in Lamjung, just over 100 km north-west of Kathmandu, and 220 km west of the Everest Base Camp. The ground at Base Camp had shaken, and surviving climbers later talked about how the mighty Everest had also shuddered. But while everyone had been staring up at Everest, the quake had triggered a massive avalanche too on the nearby Pumori – used by Alyssa several times for her acclimatisation treks – which had sent down a mass of snow, ice and rocks that engulfed most of Base Camp from the other direction. The force of that avalanche had also swept up the Khumbu Icefall and killed and injured some of the climbers already there. Around 100 others higher up at Camp I and Camp II were trapped, with all routes down sealed off by the tide of debris.
If Alyssa had gone up that morning as planned, she would have been in the direct line of fire of the falling boulders, crags, rocks, ice and snow. Her letter about death might have fulfilled its grim purpose.
Early that afternoon, as Alyssa rushes around the camp, doing her best to help others caught in the avalanche, she has no idea that twenty-one people have already been killed on the mountain and in the camp. That toll makes it the deadliest day on Everest in history, surpassing the Sherpas’ deaths in 2014. Later, three more Sherpas are to die in an aftershock while they’re on the Khumbu Icefall trying to repair the damaged route. At least sixty-one people have been injured.
‘It had all happened so quickly,’ Alyssa says. ‘There was a complete air of disbelief. The adrenalin had hit by then, but still it was hard to believe something like this had happened. As we stood there, people were being rescued or their bodies being brought out and put on stretchers. We did what we could but then were told we should try to get out as aftershocks were quite likely.
‘So I packed a few things I might need and we trekked down to the nearest tea house at Gorak Shep, and met up with two other women who had been planning to be on our expedition for the season. That tea house felt quite safe as there aren’t any mountains either side. I then texted Dad to tell him I was safe. I’d just assumed something had happened in this area. But then I found out from him that it’d been an earthquake further away, and it had caused massive devastation. It was huge.’
The news is slow to come in, but gradually Alyssa starts realising the extent of the casualties and damage. In total, the earthquake has killed over 8000 people and injured more than 21 000. Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese have lost their homes, entire villages have been destroyed and ancient national monuments and buildings left shattered. The country will never be the same again. Alyssa and her other expedition members stay in their tea house, feeling the constant aftershocks. She goes to bed that night wearing her shoes in case she has to make a quick exit.
The next day, 26 April, Alyssa and three of her teammates decide to trek back to Base Camp to see if they can help any more of the injured or salvage any of their gear. The others stay at Gorak Shep, too nervous to move and far too frightened of what might happen at Base Camp. The four set off but halfway into the two-hour trek, just before 1 p.m., suddenly the ground moves, and this time much more violently than the other aftershocks. Alyssa dives for a big rock nearby and takes cover behind it, in case there’s another avalanche or landslide. The shaking continues for a good sixty seconds and she later finds out that the shock reached a magnitude of 6.7.
‘The ground shook so hard I almost fell over,’ she says. ‘I grabbed on to the rock to steady myself and waited. Eventually it stopped. We got back together, but none of us wanted to turn back. We all wanted to get to Base Camp. But we didn’t know what to expect.’
When they finally arrive, the sight takes their breath away. ‘The camp had been completely wiped out,’ she says. ‘That big mess tent had been pretty much crushed. It was shocking to see something that massive just torn away like that. Then I went to where my tent was, and that was even worse. It had been flattened and ripped and was pretty mangled. The force of the avalanche had even broken the tent poles. Most of it was buried under the weight of the snow.
‘Only a little part of the front section seemed to be okay – that part where I’d gone – and if the snow was a little higher, or I’d have camped a bit higher, I wouldn’t have been able to get out. I could also see that if I’d stayed at the back of the tent, I wouldn’t have survived. I was so lucky that I’d been partly awake when it happened. If I’d been asleep, it would have been too late to do anything.’
To the background noise of helicopters still rescuing the stranded from the mountain, and airlifting the dead and injured from Base Camp, Alyssa starts to dig around her tent to retrieve some of her gear. It’s then that fatigue starts to hit. She realises she feels more tired than she ever has in her life. It’s probably delayed shock. The camp feels strangely deserted but a Sherpa she knows, Lhakpa Rangdu, sees her and invites her to what’s left of his camp. Luckily, he and his party had been off trekking when the earthquake happened. Only one tent is left standing, which Alyssa shares with another female climber. They’d been planning to sleep in their own, but they now know that’s impossible. Once Alyssa drifts off, she sleeps quite soundly. Her tent-mate doesn’t seem to sleep at all, too nervous about what might happen.
The next day, they trek back down to the lower lodges, seeing how many of the homes and tea houses have been damaged in the earthquake and subsequent landslides and aftershocks. Some climbers, it seemed, had been planning to continue up the mountain after the first quake and some icefall doctors had gone back up to fix ropes and ladders. When the aftershock hit them, the climbing season was again closed for the year – now just the second time in history that had happened.
‘I had no idea what was going to happen,’ says Alyssa. ‘Some of my teammates just wanted to go home, but there were rumours continually on the trek about what might be happening. Then we heard it was finished. So we carried on trekking down to Namche Bazaar.’
By now, some members of the expedition are feeling ill, and whether that is also shock or the effects of altitude, no one can tell. Some are also dead tired. They have a few rest days in the town.
Afterwards, most decide they want to catch a helicopter back to Lukla, but Alyssa volunteers to walk, as the choppers are in such high demand from the rescue services. They, she feels, have priority. In the end, she walks all the way from Phakding alone, seeing firsthand the toll the earthquake has taken on the remote valleys. By the time she finally arrives in Lukla, she is exhausted and struggling with a bad cold.
‘But I got a flight the next morning to Kathmandu,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d have to wait a time before I’d get a flight but I was lucky. I knew it was all over for the year. I felt terrible for Nepal. I’d been going there since I was ten years old, and come to love it, so to see it hurting so much was awful. So much was devastated and so many people had their lives changed forever. It was such a shock. Just a few days before, I’d been looking forward to living my dream: climbing to the top of Everest. Now I was on my way home again, knowing I was leaving so much desperation behind. It was a really unsettling time. But I really felt this time that I wanted to go home.’
Alyssa takes an early flight out of Kathmandu and is met at the airport by her dad and a gaggle of media. She does a few interviews, hoping it will bring more attention to the plight of the Nepalese and help the fundraising efforts. She also donates the money she’s been given towards her Everest expedition by Dick Smith to the charities helping Nepal, checking first that he’s okay with that.
Then she goes home. ‘I suppose I was very lucky, but I just didn’t feel so lucky!’ she says. ‘The past two years had been very difficult. Not since Everest was first climbed had there been so much tragedy in the mountains. I didn’t admit it to anyone, but I felt almost kind of angry. I’d put so much into this, and I’d been powerless to change things in the end. I felt incredibly sad for the people of Nepal and the Sherpas and other climbers who’d lost their lives or been injured, it was all just so terrible.
‘But as much as I knew I still wanted to go back and climb Everest, I didn’t think I’d be able to get there again. It was starting to look more and more impossible.’
CHAPTER 29
Touch and Go
‘If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.’
– VINCE LOMBARDI, AMERICAN FOOTBALL PLAYER AND COACH
When Alyssa returns home in May 2015, she sinks into a profound depression. For once, all her determination is sapped from her and even those inspirational sayings she’s been treasuring for years don’t help. She shuts herself away in her bedroom, and whiles away the hours reading and sleeping. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She doesn’t even want to
see her family.
‘I know it might be hard for people to understand, but when you put so much into something, it can be hard to come to terms with not achieving it,’ she says. ‘I felt so sad for the people of Nepal, the earthquake was so tragic and so senseless, and that should have put my goals into perspective, really. But I couldn’t seem to shake myself out of the mood. I didn’t want to do anything. Mum and Dad tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t listen.’
That world-weariness lasts three weeks until, at last, she realises she just can’t continue this way. Either she keeps sliding down – or she makes a concerted effort to pull herself together and drag herself back up. She decides on the latter and one day grabs her training gear and heads off to the gym. As soon as she arrives, she feels marginally better. After a good long run on the treadmill, her head has started to clear. She then makes an effort to start thinking about the future, and allows herself even to imagine a return to Everest the next year.
Over the following days, she trains each morning, and then goes for coffee or lunch with Glenn. Gradually, she feels herself returning to the world. At one point, she goes to stay with her mum, sisters and brother, and for almost the first time, finds herself talking to Therese about Everest. Up until now, it has been a subject the pair have avoided; Alyssa knows her mum isn’t keen on her going. But this time, mother and daughter open up to each other. Alyssa talks about her passion and her dream of summitting the mountain, and Therese says she understands.