We had no idea how the expedition was going to turn out, whether we were going to be able to attempt the summit, but life went on as best it could at Everest Base Camp.
Life goes on – but the expedition?
It had been a couple of days now since the earthquake, and although our surroundings still resembled something from a war zone, an element of normality had returned.
People were going about their business, getting stuff done – tents were being repaired, lost items were being collected, thoughts were beginning to turn back to Everest.
Over the past few days, we’d all seen tragedies few contemporary Westerners can claim to have seen. Each one of us would be affected differently. Some would never get over the shock of what they’d seen.
I thought of Katherine, waking in the white pod each night, screaming uncontrollably.
I thought of Lincoln, packing his bags and abandoning ship, his face ashen, all the humour in this big, cuddly Texan’s eyes extinguished.
I wondered how all this was going to affect me. Would I suffer from some sort of post-traumatic stress? My brain had a good way of rationalising things that happened, but had this perhaps pushed my brain too far? Was it going to scramble my wires? Was my mind tough enough to cope?
People react to events in different ways, and here at Base Camp there was a wide range of emotional reactions. Some people couldn’t cope, and were drinking heavily every afternoon, others had outbursts of great rage and anger, some smoked lots of joints (goodness knows where the stuff comes from – climbers always seem to have a stash). And some kept quiet, bottling up their feelings.
My grandfather was a butcher, and when I was a kid, my brother and I used to watch him kill cows and sheep in his abattoir. The sheep would be put in a cradle, and he would stun them before slitting their throats to bleed them quickly. This made the meat more tender. With the cattle, he would herd them one by one into a pen, poke their heads through a slot with a metal bar that kept them still. He would shoot a bolt straight into their brains to kill them and then remove the pen. The cow would slump over onto its side and my grandfather would then slit them up the middle, right there and then on the floor. He’d remove all the organs while they were still hot and steamy.
I was three years old when he first took me up to the abattoir to watch the slaughter. We’d watch him cut out the heart, the liver, the lungs, the intestines, everything. We’d watch him hang them all on S-shaped hooks and then hang the hooks on the metal rails that ran around the wall of the slaughter shed.
We used to grab the butcher’s steel, a knife-sharpening rod with a handle, and whack the hearts. They were so fresh, the nerve endings would twitch and the heart would make a quiet buzzing sound. It was as if the heart were still alive, and we found it fascinating.
“Go on Rick, hit it again.”
“It’s your turn Ju. Whack it, whack it harder.”
To us, it was just part of our family business, and we thought it quite normal.
The amount of blood that poured out of the sheep was incredible. Blood would come pumping out, gushing out; it was extraordinary.
After he was done, my grandfather would shout to us, “Go on lads, get the buckets. Wash the blood down.”
We’d be running around – aged three, four or five – filling buckets with water from the sink and swilling down the yard, washing away the blood. And it was great fun; we laughed the whole time. It was just how things were done, how they had been done for hundreds of years. It was a way of life that I had become used to at a very young age.
Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t broken down, why I was able to hold it all together so far. I’d seen things I’d never forget, things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but perhaps I was able to dissociate myself from the smell of the blood, the pain, the destruction in a way that others would struggle to do.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not…
At night, Base Camp was now eerily silent, punctuated only by the howling wind and the petrified screams of Katherine, the physio. As I walked back to my tent in the darkness, the only thing I could see was the orange glow of a head torch, from somebody unable to sleep, reading a book. Everything else was pure blackness, my path lit only by the light of my head torch. I found myself wondering about the spirits of those who had died.
Were they floating about us now?
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I’m not superstitious, but I wondered about these spirits – whether they would have gone by now, or whether they would still be floating around Base Camp with unfinished business, wondering why they had been chosen and not us. It really was like a lottery.
The official number of dead at that time was 19, though some people had not been accounted for. That figure would rise to 22 as time went by and more bodies were found under the debris.
* * * * *
The next day, I decided to go to check out the Icefall for myself. I’d heard rumours that it was impassable, unclimbable, and that there was no hope for anyone attempting to summit this year. It had been stated that the ladders that spanned the crevasses throughout the Icefall had apparently all collapsed. But how did anybody know? No one had tried to climb it.
I wanted to have a look at it, to see what condition it was really in. I doubted anyone had actually tried to climb it; most people seemed to be content to believe the products of the rumour mill, which was now in overdrive.
I had no idea at this point whether we were going to carry on, or if the expedition would be called off. At least, I thought, we could have all the facts before making a decision.
More and more expeditions were leaving. Our hopes of summiting were dribbling away with them, as we needed a fair bit of Sherpa manpower to get the ropes in place, which meant a combined effort by the Sherpas from several expeditions.
To reach the base of the Khumbu Icefall, I walked through Base Camp and then headed up through the forest of jagged ice pillars to the bottom of the Fall. These pillars of ice were between 20 and 30 metres high, creating a labyrinth in which it would be very easy to get lost.
After the earthquake, many pillars had become unstable; some had collapsed altogether. I walked through slowly, carefully, always on the alert for the jarring sound of breaking ice. The sound of the snow crunching under my feet echoed through the near-silence.
As the warm midday sun beat down, I could see the ice melting, drips of water running down the side of the glistening ice pillars. Maybe I’d chosen a foolish time to go wandering off on my own… Oh well, too late now. I pressed on.
Soon, and with no small amount of relief, I arrived at the blue tent at the bottom of the Icefall. SPCC – Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee – was printed on the side in large, white lettering. This tent was essentially border control for the mountain, where government officials checked the permits of everyone attempting to climb.
In the recorded history of Everest, only one person has managed to sneak past and climb the mountain without the proper paperwork. The officials run a pretty tight ship, as Everest alone generates a third of the government’s tourist income each year. Yes I did say that, a third!
Of course, the tent was empty. The SPCC team had all gone down the mountain immediately after the earthquake hit, to check on their families. All other governmental officials had also disappeared pretty quickly.
Near the tent, I saw something glistening in the sunshine. I walked over to it.
At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was. A large, metallic object, twisted and buckled into a peculiar shape.
When Bill boiled water for tea, he would store it in large tea urns. These were heavy-duty containers, built out of double-walled stainless steel to keep them insulated.
This was the wrecked remains of a huge tea urn. It had been thrown at least 300 metres from Base Camp by the force of the avalanche, and had almost smashed t
o pieces on impact. If anybody had been unlucky enough to find themselves in that tea urn’s path, it would have been certain death.
A pair of salopettes lay neatly near the tea urn, as if somebody had decided to take them off, put them down carefully and then run on up the Icefall. They looked so out of place there, hundreds of metres away from any of the tents in Base Camp. I left them where they lay.
As I stood at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall, the first real step of the mountain on the route to the summit, I realised how much I wanted to get up there.
I knew that I shouldn’t, that no one would think less of me if I turned around, packed up my belongings and left Everest Base Camp for good. But I also knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything in my power to have a crack at the top.
I’d survived the earthquake, the avalanche; I’d hopefully helped save some lives. I was here, I was alive, I had suffered -15°C for many nights, I was acclimatised, I had taken two months out – and I still wanted to try for the summit. I did not want to have to come back again.
I knew it would be difficult to explain to those who had never stood at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall. They would struggle to understand my reasoning, my rationale. But it was clear to me. I just knew I had to give my all to get up that mountain. I didn’t want to have to spend weeks getting to Base Camp and acclimatising all over again. I was ready and willing, I wanted to get up that mountain, get it over and done with…
I walked back from the Icefall in a bit of a daze, navigating the potentially treacherous forest of ice towers with only faint interest.
As I followed the stream that flowed along the path of the glacier, and came within sight of Base Camp; the now-familiar sight of destroyed tents flapping in the wind greeted me.
I spent the rest of the day keeping myself mostly to myself. I felt that the expedition was in jeopardy, but no one was really talking about it. Here we were, at Everest Base Camp, with no one wanting to talk about Everest. Yet the mountain still towered over us all day, a colossal elephant in the living room.
Bill excelled himself with dinner. He’d somehow managed to get some frozen duck, which he cooked with dauphinoise potatoes, sautéed carrots and a hoi sin sauce. I talk a lot about mealtimes but these really were the peak of each day, when everyone came together to talk. Other than this, unless it was a climbing day, there was really absolutely nothing to do.
We crammed into the mess tent and tucked in. It felt bizarre; there we were, eating duck and dauphinoise potatoes, when 22 people had just died and over 100 had been injured, in the very place where we were dining.
Everybody just got on with it – we were either going to laugh or cry.
As I ate, unusually quiet, I thought about Mark. I thought about the 12 hours that I nursed him, kept him alive, comforted him and told him he was going to be all right. The reality was that I had no idea if he was going to be all right. I now had no idea if he was even still alive.
He had been helicoptered off with the rest of the seriously injured, down to Lukla, and then presumably to Kathmandu. The hospitals there weren’t exactly world-class at the best of times, but after an earthquake of that magnitude…
Someone squeezed into the space next to me on the bench. Hoi sin sauce spilled onto the table as he dumped his plate down.
“Huw’s it?” said a gruff voice.
I looked up into the bright eyes of Iwan.
“The Icefall,” he continued, his Polish accent somehow more pronounced. “Can ve go?”
“It didn’t look that bad,” I said. “But I only went to the bottom; I didn’t go up.”
“Ve go then,” he said simply. “Have proper look.”
He seemed deadly serious, as he tucked into his duck.
“OK then,” I replied.
“Tumorrow. Early – before sunrise.”
Iwan looked up from his dinner just long enough for me to catch a wry smile on his face.
I spent the evening in the white pod with Iwan, discussing the plan for the following morning. Eventually, the guides started to realise what we were planning, and the rumour spread around our expedition group like wildfire.
I could see the irritation in some of the guides’ eyes. I couldn’t really understand why – we were here to climb a mountain. That was what we had come all this way to do, what we’d all paid through the nose for, so why were we all now just sitting around, waiting, not even trying to find out if our objective was still achievable?
The guides kept telling us that the Icefall was impassable, that the force of the earthquake had destroyed all the aluminium ladders that crossed the deep crevasses, that the ice had shifted and that there was no way through.
They might be right, but they had no way of knowing for sure without someone going to take a look. I had been to the base of the Icefall, and it didn’t seem too bad to me.
Sure, the earthquake may have dislodged ice and opened crevasses, but it could just as easily have shaken all the loose ice off the mountain, making the route safer. Someone needed to go up and have a look. Boots on the ground, to coin a management/army phrase.
The Khumbu Icefall is never safe – it is the single most dangerous section on the route to the summit. If you’re climbing up it and a large piece of ice – some are the size of skyscrapers – dislodges at that very moment and comes down, the chances are, you are pretty much toast. This is how, very sadly, 16 Sherpas had died the previous year.
So everybody goes up at night or in the early morning, before the sun comes up and starts to melt the ice.
Everything we did at Base Camp was a risk; the whole expedition was a calculated risk, but the adrenalin and sense of achievement was why we did it, why we huddled into a freezing tent, drawing thin air into our lungs, 5,400m above sea level.
Iwan and I even offered to go and survey the route to Camp 1 for the guides, but that only seemed to aggravate them further. Actually, many of them had already left EBC in spirit; I’d overheard them openly discussing holiday plans. While they sat in their downing jackets, crammed into the mess tent like the rest of us, they were dreaming about chilling out in Thailand on the beach with a hot Thai girl for the remaining three weeks of their assignment.
In the cold light of day, they had no real incentive to push on. They would get paid for the full two months, even though we’d only been there for five weeks.
Most expedition companies are run by climbers, who are not natural business people, so their business model is not a good one – especially for such a high-risk business. You want your staff incentives to help your “clients” achieve their goals. If you tell your staff they will receive full pay even if they didn’t achieve the clients’ goals, there is no incentive for the guides and Sherpas employed to help us get to the top of the mountain – to carry on past halfway.
You should incentivise them at each step of the way. For example, give them a bonus for getting EBC set up and getting everybody safely to EBC, then another bonus for Camp 1, Camp 2 etc. It could be argued that this encourages them to take unnecessary risks, but Everest is, by its nature, a very risky operation. At least this way, the guides and Sherpas are incentivised to achieve the overall goal.
Iwan and I had far from given up, and we continued to plan. If we could prove the Icefall was passable, and that Camp 1 was still in a reasonable condition, we would be in a much stronger position to persuade the expedition to continue.
As we sat in the corner, discussing our “treasonous” plot, we were approached by a couple of people I hadn’t seen before. They spoke in Polish to Iwan.
Iwan introduced me and we shook hands. They were a Polish father and son, Petar and Andrzej, whose dream had been to climb Everest together, but who did not possess the funds to join one of the Western expeditions. They had paid just to have a tent pitched with one of the cheap Nepalese expeditions at BC. They had no guides and no She
rpas. The father was in his 60s, the son around 45. And they’d already heard about our plan.
They had already taken a lot of their own expensive equipment up to Camp 1 in preparation for their summit attempt. Of course, the earthquake and avalanche had hit, and Camp 1 had been abandoned.
They’d been down at Base Camp at the time, so their equipment had been stranded at Camp 1.
Andrzej spoke to us in English.
“You go?”
“Maybe,” said Iwan.
Petar said something in Polish to his son, looking at him angrily. Andrzej snapped back.
“He does not vant him to go,” Iwan translated for me. “Thinks too dangerous.”
I felt terribly sorry for the pair of them. Iwan told me they could not afford to pay a helicopter to fly up to Camp 1 to pick up their equipment, and Petar felt it was very risky to climb up to Camp 1 to get it. He told Iwan his wife would never forgive him if anything happened to his son.
It was very dark now, and the tent was clearing as people made their way to bed. I decided to let Iwan continue his conversation with his compatriots, and said my goodnights.
“Six am,” whispered Iwan as I got up to leave.
I nodded, filled my Nalgene bottle with warm water, zipped up my downing jacket, pulled my beanie hat down over my head, turned on my head torch and stepped out into the freezing darkness.
Up the Icefall with rising hopes
My watch alarm went off at 5am.
I groaned in the darkness, I was very, very tired, extremely cold (-15˚C really is cold), and I was unsure if this was really a good idea. But I’d agreed to go, and actually felt quite honoured that Iwan thought me a worthy climbing companion. I was not going to let him down, and my rucksack was packed ready.
Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest Page 16