“I was really excited to go,” recalls Phu Dorji, a wild-haired, chain-smoking Nepali who prefers to be called by his nickname, Ang Bhai (“small boy”). He was twenty-seven years old when the opportunity arose. “I was at a movie in Kathmandu when Tsering called me and asked, ‘Ang Bhai, are you interested in going to Everest?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ After the movie I went to the Himalayan Trailblazer office, and there’s Lakpa. We discussed what kind of project it is. And I’m shocked—whoa! It was really interesting. I was really happy to go.”
One week later, Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu were on their way to Everest along with Babu and Lakpa. Ang Bhai had had his first climbing experience, working as a porter on 20,305-foot Imja Tse, only six months before. Nima Wang Chu had climbed just once before on Mera Peak, working as an assistant guide. Ang Bhai didn’t have any climbing gear. “I had to get some equipment from my brother, who works as a climber,” Ang Bhai says. “I didn’t have good shoes. My brother gave me his shoes. They were quite big.” He didn’t have gloves, or a helmet either.
The path to Everest Base Camp from Lukla leads north out of town along the banks of the icy, boulder-strewn Dudh Kosi, crossing the glacial meltwater river at regular intervals over high, trembling footbridges. It then zigzags up a steep canyon wall, through a stand of tall pines that punctuates the view of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru’s snowcapped peaks, 2 vertical miles above. Every inch of arable land is terraced and planted with barley, buckwheat, or potatoes. Chortens* and walls of intricately carved mani† stones stand quietly alongside the trail. Hundreds of porters and trekkers pass daily, carrying supplies to and from the mountains and the remote villages that lay beneath them, meandering through glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and rhododendron, past cascading waterfalls, huge boulders, and burbling streams. A few hours’ walk beyond the small village of Pheriche, the path opens onto the vast glacial moraine of the Khumbu Glacier, a 12-mile-long river of ice and grinding rock tumbling down the southern flank of the mountain. At over 16,000 feet there are no trees, the trail often disappearing beneath lingering head-high winter snowpack. Chortens stand sentinel along the trail in memory of deceased climbers, mostly Sherpa. The trek ends at a small, movable city consisting of hundreds of brightly colored tents sprawled amidst the scree at the base of the Khumbu Icefall. Everest Base Camp. A quasi-permanent alpine climbing village tucked in an amphitheater of towering mountains and hanging glaciers, occupied nearly year-round by climbing teams from around the world. Each attempting to climb Everest, or one of its neighboring peaks: Lhotse, Nuptse, and Pumori. Long strings of prayer flags flap violently in the gusts of wind that rage down the mountain and through the Western Cwm.*
A strong hiker, already acclimatized to the altitude, could do the trek from the Lukla airstrip to Everest Base Camp in two or three long days. Those who are not acclimatized, like Babu and Lakpa and their two hired sherpas, generally take over a week to make the journey, in order to avoid the mind-splitting headaches and illness that accompany gaining altitude too quickly.
Lakpa knew this, having worked at altitude for so many years and with so many beginning climbers. So he decided that it would be best if, on their walk to Base Camp, he took Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu off the main path and onto a side trail that leads to nearby 20,305-foot Imja Tse, also known as Island Peak—the same mountain Babu had attempted to climb with Pete Astles in 2006. His idea was for them to further acclimatize themselves to being at altitude before attempting Everest. And to see how the three other members of his expedition, who had no real practical climbing experience to speak of, fared on a relatively short and “easy” mountain. A popular “trekking peak” just over 5 miles from Everest, Imja Tse has fixed lines running to the top and requires no technical climbing. “You just need crampons,” Lakpa says. “No ice axe.” Despite having great weather and making good time, they abandoned their summit attempt on Island Peak after Babu “got a really, really big headache at high camp,” according to Ang Bhai.
Babu was concerned. It was the second time he had been at altitude, and again, he felt like a nail was being driven into his skull. It wasn’t a good feeling. He asked Lakpa if he still thought he could make it to the top of Everest. “Climbing Everest is easy,” Lakpa tried to reassure him. “It is just walking slowly. Up.”
In a way, it was true. Ropes placed by sherpas each season lead all the way to the summit. Technically, and with a lot of luck, all anyone needs to do nowadays to get to the top is follow them. But with a searing migraine, Babu couldn’t seem to even walk at altitude, let alone climb. Despite what he told Babu, Lakpa was starting to worry too. They still didn’t have their paraglider, and after seeing Babu not be able to make it to the top of a relatively easy peak—9,000 feet shorter than Everest—in good weather, he knew it didn’t speak well for his lowland friend’s ability to function at altitude. Let alone fly a paraglider—if they ever did get one—at over 29,000 feet. “I didn’t think to worry about if my pilot could walk,” Lakpa says. Still, he laughed his typical deep-chested laugh and told Babu with a smile that he would get him to the top of Everest, one way or another. “You just have to get us back down,” Lakpa reminded him, still laughing but serious. He meant to keep his promise to return home alive.
Back in Pokhara, Babu’s boss, David Arrufat, waited patiently for his friend Richard Tan to arrive with the paragliding wing Babu and Lakpa were going to use on Everest. It had been made in a rush in France by the company Niviuk, but was being snuck into the country in Tan’s luggage on an international passenger flight from Malaysia in order to avoid Nepal’s nearly 200 percent import tax on the approximately $4,000 wing. It was also exceedingly late. Babu and Lakpa had been gone for over a month, already starting to climb, and the wing still wasn’t even in the right country.
It had been agreed before their departure that Babu and Lakpa’s twenty-nine-year-old friend Balkrishna Basel (Baloo, as his friends and family call him), a fellow Nepali tandem pilot working for another paragliding company in Pokhara, would carry the wing with him to Everest Base Camp and meet them there. The expedition’s cameraman, Shri Hari Shresthra, one of Babu’s childhood friends now living in Kathmandu, would meet Baloo at the capital and accompany him to Lukla and on the trail to Base Camp, carrying the camera equipment Babu and Lakpa would need to make a documentary about the expedition. This included two small, high-definition point-of-view cameras made by the company GoPro and a SPOT GPS locator, which Kimberly Phinney had mailed to Nepal from San Francisco. Lakpa agreed to pay for all of their expenses, including the new $1,000 shoulder-mount camera Shri Hari also bought to film portions of the expedition with. Baloo took up a collection amongst their friends and fellow paragliding pilots in Pokhara to help pay for the expedition’s supplemental oxygen. Babu and Lakpa’s trip would require, at minimum, twelve four-liter bottles (three per person) at a cost of $250 per bottle. They managed to raise nearly $1,250. It still wasn’t enough to cover even half of the team’s oxygen.
Come May—only three weeks before the season’s projected weather window on Everest—the paraglider still hadn’t arrived.
Waters’s camp was small compared to most. Located on the far north end of Everest Base Camp, essentially and intentionally on the outskirts, nearest to the start of the icefall, it consisted of a single large, bright yellow dome tent; a cook tent (which was really just a series of plastic tarps strung over an aluminum frame); and a few smaller, yellow dome-shaped tents for individuals to sleep in. This was because his climbing team was supposed to be small that year: just Waters, the French climber Sophie Denis, and his friend and trusted climbing sherpa from numerous past expeditions, Lakpa Dorjee. They also had two cooks: Krishna and his assistant, Mingma. They were an exceedingly small team in comparison to some of the forty-plus member expeditions nearby, including that year’s International Mountain Guides (IMG) group, which consisted of almost thirty trekkers and climbers and over seventy sherpas and cooks.
When Lakpa arrived with
Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu, the size of Waters’s camp nearly doubled. Then Waters was told Baloo and Shri Hari would be coming too, as soon as the long-awaited wing arrived in Pokhara. Waters didn’t seem to mind, though. “It was good for us,” he says. “At least for me—I enjoyed hanging out with them. Most nights we just ate Sherpa stew in the cook tent and drank tea.” He enjoyed talking with his guests and fed off of their constant, unyielding enthusiasm. They kept all of their gear, or at least what little there was of it, in Waters’s large expedition dome tent.
It took a few days, but Ang Bhai eventually managed to obtain a helmet and gloves from people leaving Base Camp who either had spares or didn’t want to bother carrying the extra gear out with them. He swapped his brother’s boots, which were a size too large for him and had given him painful blisters on the hike in from Lukla and on the attempt on Island Peak, for a pair that actually fit. There was still the problem of Babu not having a climbing harness, so Lakpa gave him his and donned one of the lightweight paragliding harnesses Niviuk had sent them ahead of the wing. Never intended for climbing, the harness lacked a belay loop—the fail-safe anchor point climbers attach to a rope to keep them, in the simplest terms, from falling to their death. Climbing harnesses are designed to arrest a fall generating a tremendous amount of force, like, say, plummeting off a cliff.
Inversely, the paragliding harness Lakpa had wasn’t designed to stop a fall at all. If you were to fall while paragliding, there would be no rope to catch you anyway. Consequently, the harness is designed only to support the body weight of the pilot wearing it and to keep him or her attached to the wing above. This is done with two attachment points, one on either hip, rather than one in the middle of the waist, like on a climbing harness. Lacking another option, however, Lakpa took two pieces of 1-inch tubular climbing webbing, attached them to either side of his paragliding harness, and tied them together in a knot in the middle, fashioning a crude belay loop to which he could attach the Jumars (handheld mechanical devices that help climbers use ropes) he would use to ascend the fixed lines up Everest. It would work, he was certain, provided he didn’t actually fall.
Every day, Lakpa called Baloo back in Pokhara on his cellular phone to check on the status of the wing, and on the boat that was supposedly being shipped from England by Babu’s friend, Pete Astles, for the second half of their journey to the ocean. He used his left hand to hold the phone while his right covered his other ear to block the wind. Every day for over a month the answer was the same: Neither the wing nor the kayak was even in the country yet. They told no one at Base Camp except Waters and his team about their plans to fly off the mountain. “Their plan seemed to change day by day,” Waters says. “They weren’t really sure what they were going to do.”
Assuming that both the wing and the kayak would eventually arrive in time to complete the expedition—the wing, meeting them at Everest Base Camp, the kayak, wherever they happened to land along the Sun Kosi River, if they managed to fly off the summit and across the Himalaya—Lakpa started his team of inexperienced climbing rookies up the mountain. He knew it would take them nearly a month to establish their higher camps—four, each approximately 2,000 feet higher than the last—and prepare their bodies for the final summit push,* which he and Babu anticipated would happen sometime at the end of May, during the annual weather window. Whenever it happened to open.
The first step would be to establish a camp above the Khumbu Icefall, the teetering, 2,000-foot wall of continually moving blocks of ice known as seracs, some the size of large buildings, and deep crevasses that inconveniently open and close without warning. The sound of its constant grinding can be heard easily from Base Camp, not far to the south. It is the most technically demanding section of the entire South Col route, which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first used to summit the mountain in 1953: following the Khumbu Glacier up the lower part of the mountain, then cutting up the Lhotse Face to the South Col, to the Southeast Ridgeline and, eventually, the summit. From the bergschrund* at 23,000 feet, where the glacier begins, it flows 2.5 miles down a gently sloping valley known as the Western Cwm, where it cracks and splinters in a fairly manageable and navigable way, until it tumbles spectacularly off a sheer cliff, forming the now infamous icefall. It is there that Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu learned to climb. And fast.
Since the unstable seracs that make up the icefall have a tendency to shift, or just plain fall over during the heat of mid- to late afternoon, most climbers find it prudent to avoid dawdling through it. Even though the route navigating this ever-changing ice labyrinth is quite efficiently managed by an accomplished team of six sherpas known as “the Icefall Doctors,” who work day and night to maintain a path through the death trap using an intricate series of fixed ropes and aluminum ladders,† there are never any guarantees of making it through safely. People die in the icefall almost every year—their bodies, if not retrieved, are crushed, dismembered, beaten, and ground by the unyielding power of the ice and deposited at the bottom, almost unrecognizable a few years later.
Babu and Lakpa were still in the middle of the icefall by late afternoon on their first day climbing in mid-April. Babu could hardly breathe, had a searing headache, and had to stop to rest every few feet. Lakpa wasn’t sure what to do. They would need to travel through the icefall at least eight to ten more times before summiting. And they would need to do it much, much faster if they weren’t going to die, let alone stand a chance of getting to the top. He also knew it was only going to get harder for Babu to function the higher they went, and that they intended to go even higher than the summit with the paraglider. He needed Babu to get over his altitude sickness. Quick.
Babu, likewise, was becoming disheartened. He asked Waters, who had by now become a good friend, after days of drinking tea and discussing climbing together, if he thought he could make it. “No problem, Babu,” Waters always told him. “You can make it.” He liked Babu. “He’s one of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve ever met,” Waters says. He wanted him to succeed.
Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu were left to themselves to shuttle loads up to Camp I, and each succeeding camp. They left the first day at 3:00 a.m., following another group of hired climbing sherpas who were also shuttling loads up the icefall. “The first time I went through the Khumbu Icefall, I was really scared,” Ang Bhai says, recalling the experience. “Really scared. I didn’t know what’s going on. I didn’t know anything. The whole time, I walked behind other people, because I didn’t know the way. I didn’t want to get lost, so I followed them.”
After carrying his first load—a single tent—up the icefall in strong winds, Ang Bhai was completely wrecked. “I spent two days after that in Base Camp with a really big headache,” he says. Of the four members of the climbing team, two were suffering severely from altitude sickness. Only Lakpa and Nima Wang Chu seemed to be able to even mildly function, even at the base of Everest.
After they carried enough gear to the top of the icefall to set up at Camp I, they spent four days shuttling even more gear 1.74 miles and approximately 1,500 vertical feet up the glacier through an area known as the Western Cwm to Camp II, directly below the Lhotse Face. During the day temperatures in the cwm soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the sunlight reflecting off the snow-white faces of Lhotse, Nuptse, and Everest and off the Khumbu Glacier itself. Being caught in the middle in the sun was like being an ant caught beneath a mountain valley–size magnifying glass. Babu and Ang Bhai felt terrible. They were losing weight and having a difficult time sleeping. The weather was also becoming an issue. The jet stream wasn’t moving an inch. The summit was still being blasted by 100-mile-per-hour winds, even with the onset of the monsoon in the Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean, which in the past had always pushed the river of fast-moving air that was still raging at the summit just slightly to the north. There was some speculation in Base Camp of a split in the jet stream, part north and part south, but no one actually knew what was going on, or what was going t
o happen. According to Alan Arnette—a fifty-four-year-old member of the IMG expedition that year, an experienced mountaineer, and “one of the most respected voices on Everest,” according to Outside magazine—“The weather was proving almost impossible to predict using the usual models. Forecasters threw out some models and refined others as the season progressed, but by [then] teams had become skeptical of their usually reliable weather partners.”
Eventually, a tentative break in the weather was announced for May 15. Rodrigo Raineri, the Brazilian who was attempting to paraglide off the top of the mountain, and Squash Falconer, the British woman who was about to attempt the same feat, both mobilized their teams for a summit bid. Babu and Lakpa still didn’t even have their paraglider. And Babu could hardly walk.
Still, Babu and Lakpa decided to push on to Camp III and spend a night, in order to be fully acclimatized for their eventual summit push. Camp III is perched high on the steep South Face of Lhotse, at about 24,000 feet. To get there one must climb a steep, 20- to 50-degree wall of hard-packed snow and ice with the assistance of several 200-foot-long fixed lines placed, of course, by sherpas. Even with the fixed lines, it’s a difficult, risky proposition. On May 1 a fifty-five-year-old climber on the IMG team named Rick Hitch simply collapsed while ascending to Camp III. He never regained consciousness. The exact cause of his death is still unknown.
Babu was still uncertain whether he could make it. His altitude sickness, which Lakpa had kept telling him would eventually go away, wasn’t going away. Back at Base Camp, he asked Waters again, “Do you think I can make it to Camp III?” Waters, not entirely certain himself but not wanting to upset his friend, told him he thought he could. Babu made it to Camp III, but on the way back to Base Camp he began to hallucinate in the middle of the icefall. He later said he saw “five ropes instead of one.” Other climbers started laughing at him, he says. They allegedly thought he was dancing. Shit, I’m not dancing, Babu thought to himself. I can’t see straight!
Flying Off Everest Page 9