He was trying to avoid some invisible threat when he was already standing on a very real one.
On May 8 the specialty ultralight wing from France finally arrived in Pokhara, free of taxes. That same morning, Squash Falconer departed Base Camp for her final summit push and her own attempt at launching a paraglider off the top of Everest. Like most everyone else on the mountain, she wasn’t aware that Babu and Lakpa were actually intending to fly off of it before her.
Back at the Blue Sky Paragliding office, Arrufat used a stencil to spray-paint the logo of his professional paragliding organization, the APPI, onto the white and red fabric of the wing, filling in the parts he missed with a black permanent marker. Baloo then caught a flight to Kathmandu with the wing, where he met Shri Hari, a bespectacled, smart-looking Nepali with wavy, slicked-back black hair. Shri Hari had grown up in a small mountain village just three hours from Babu and had flown across Nepal from east to west in a tandem paraglider with him in 2010, in twenty-one days, unsupported. He had filmed the journey and intended to make a full documentary about the adventure, which he had yet to complete. At Babu’s prompting, Lakpa hired him as the cameraman for their impromptu Everest expedition. Once in Kathmandu, Baloo and Shri Hari boarded the next available flight to Lukla. It took them four days to reach Everest Base Camp.
Baloo, a handsome young man with gentle eyes and a soft voice, put the wing in a regular trekking backpack along with some of his clothes to disguise it from the police. “There are very strict police checks in some places,” he says. “If they had known, there would have been some trouble.” Babu and Lakpa didn’t have permits for what they were doing.
After arriving at Base Camp, Baloo and Shri Hari both became ill with altitude sickness. They had gained too much altitude too quickly, rushing their approach from Lukla in order to deliver the wing to Babu and Lakpa before Raineri or Falconer could launch off the mountain. According to Baloo, he and Shri Hari had also spent a good deal of time drinking “Sherpa Roxy,” a whiskeylike grain alcohol, during their rush to reach Base Camp. “We were already dehydrated from the altitude,” he recalls. “I think the whiskey only made us more dry.” Baloo developed a wicked headache and a persistent cough. Happy that their wing had actually arrived, even though the other two paragliders were already on their way to the summit, the team spent their last few “rest” nights in camp dancing, drinking, and playing loud Nepali music out of the small Chinese CD player Lakpa had brought from his home in Kathmandu.
According to Ang Bhai, whose patience was beginning to run thin with Babu and Lakpa’s lack of planning and what he viewed as their complete lack of regard for his safety, “They were always laughing and singing. They were not serious. I work with French people. I know how if a foreigner is doing a project like this, they are really serious. But Lakpa and Babu are not serious. All the time, they’re laughing.” Ang Bhai asked them, frustrated, scared, and a bit desperate, “Be serious, please. This is not game.” Babu and Lakpa told him to relax. That everything would be fine.
The urge to be the “first” to do something on Everest is by no means new, although it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Since Hillary and Norgay summited via the South Col in 1953, nearly eighteen new routes have been established to the top. Somewhere around 3,668 people have reached the summit, many more than once. Rein-hold Messner and Peter Habeler became the first to climb to the top without supplemental oxygen in 1978, a feat long thought simply impossible. Since then, dozens of people have done it. As Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver point out in Fallen Giants, a definitive history of mountaineering in the Himalaya:
Himalayan mountaineers required new measures of achievement … the most common form of record making was that based on identity: becoming the first female or first climber of this or that nationality to reach the summit of this or that peak. Everest, as always, was the most desired destination. Thus Bachendri Pal became the first Indian woman to climb Everest in 1984, Stacy Allison the first American woman to do so in 1988, and Rebecca Stephens the first British woman to do so in 1993. In 1989 Ricardo Torres became the first Mexican (and the first Latin American) to reach Everest’s summit, and in 1995 Nasuh Mahruki the first Turk (and the first Muslim) to do so. There were also family firsts: in 1990 Marija and Andrej Stremfelj were the first married couple to reach Everest’s summit together, followed two years later by the first pair of brothers to climb the mountain together, Alberto and Felix Inurrategui.
After someone from every possible variation of national and personal identity had managed to reach the summit, age suddenly became a notable factor, creating a race for both the youngest and oldest person to reach the summit.* The youngest currently to have done it was thirteen years old when he made it to the top. The oldest: eighty.
An eighty-two-year-old Nepali named Shailendra Kumar Upadhyay was actually attempting to break the record again in 2011. He died on May 9, shortly after sharing tea with Babu and Lakpa, collapsing suddenly in the snow on his way from Camp I back to Base Camp.
As more firsts were accomplished, more people kept dying. From 1924 to 2013, a total of 249 people lost their lives on Everest (162 Westerners and 87 sherpas). Within that time span activities outside of traditional mountaineering—that is to say, trying to just get to the top of a peak and then back down again, safely—started showing up on Everest. In 1970 Japan’s Yuichiro Miura attempted to ski down the Lhotse Face from below the South Col, using a small parachute to help control his descent. He crashed spectacularly and tumbled completely out of control the final 600 feet before coming to rest on the glacier below. Miura survived. Six of his expedition’s sherpas, who were swept away in an avalanche, did not. The documentary film made about the expedition, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, won an Academy Award and was eventually turned into a book. Since then, multiple people have skied, snowboarded, paraglided, and even BASE jumped off the slopes and from the summit of the mountain; of course those feats include Jean-Marc Boivin’s solo paragliding descent from the top in 1988 and Claire and Zebulon Roche’s tandem descent in 2001. In 2007 the Nepal Mountaineering Association actually found it prudent to call for a ban on “nudity and attempts to set obscene records” on the mountain after a Nepali climber stood stark naked on the summit for several minutes the year before and a Dutch man attempted to climb the peak wearing shorts.
Babu and Lakpa weren’t aware of most of these firsts, however. They were still convinced that they were going to be the first to paraglide from the summit, and that they were going to claim that first for Nepal—if they could only beat Falconer and Raineri to it.
Squash Falconer found herself standing on the summit of Everest at 8:30 a.m. on May 12, completely surrounded by white. The air temperature was -50 degrees Fahrenheit, the wind gusting up to 35 miles per hour. She had been climbing for over eleven hours. The Brazilian paraglider Rodrigo Raineri had already decided to call off his summit attempt and descend from Camp IV, after suffering frostbite on his toes.
“I knew that there would be no flight from the top of the world,” Falconer would write later on her blog. “I was feeling wrecked. I took out my GoPro camera and filmed for a few seconds, my hand got so cold that was all I could manage. Then I was just desperate to get back down. I’d had so many plans for the summit; so many poses to do for the camera, so much I was going to say, flags I was going to get out, small dances I was going to do to celebrate… I’d even half planned how I would feel—so elated, amazing, wonderful…. but there was none of that. I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it back down and after just a few short minutes at the top I was out of there.” She spent the next five hours descending in blizzard conditions to Camp IV, where she crawled into her tent and passed out for twelve hours. At the same time, an experienced fifty-nine-year-old climber from Japan named Takashi Ozaki died 835 feet from the summit after suffering from a severe case of altitude sickness.
The next day, Falconer unpacked the paraglider her sherpas had carried for her and att
empted to take off from the South Col in strong winds. “I thought I could give it a go,” she later wrote. “I soon decided after being dragged about the mountain that it was definitely better to just get back down alive.”
With Raineri and Falconer out of the running, Babu, Lakpa, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu prepared for their own summit attempt. Recognizing the fact that he had never actually flown at anywhere even near the altitude of Everest’s summit, though, Babu figured it might be a good idea to take the new wing for a test flight first. They took the backpack they had stashed in the corner of Waters’s dome tent, which had been hiding the paraglider along with some of Baloo’s dirty clothes, and walked two hours south out of Base Camp. Here, they climbed a small, 33-foot promontory called Kala Patthar (meaning “black rock”) to the south of Pumori, a sharp, dangerous-looking mountain. A long, lingering plume of snow could be seen blowing off the summit of Everest in the distance. The sun was high and hot in the sky. Babu unfolded the new wing and instructed Nima Wang Chu on how to help him launch it, which he had never done before, by first holding it tight to the ground and then lifting it so the wind could catch it once Babu was ready to take off. This, he was told, would be his job on summit day. Ang Bhai would be responsible for holding the camera, which Shri Hari was holding now.
The wing inflated easily in the gentle breeze blowing through the valley that morning, making a large red crescent shape against the stark white, black, and blue jagged landscape. Babu flew solo in a single wide, sweeping arc, landing back at the top of the promontory where he had taken off. The flight lasted about thirty seconds. After landing he immediately repacked the wing in Baloo’s backpack. They didn’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. The brief inaugural flight of the new wing felt different than flying in Pokhara, or anywhere else Babu had ever flown in Nepal. “It was fast,” Babu recalls, noting the increased rate of descent resultant from the wing struggling to catch loft in the thin air found at over 18,500 feet. “Really fast.”
Suddenly and unexpectedly, at 9:00 a.m. on May 15, another brief weather window was projected for the morning of May 21. Base Camp was buzzing with renewed excitement. Unfortunately, the winds were expected to increase again significantly in the afternoon that same day. Not a good thing when attempting to launch a paraglider from the top of Everest. Still, Lakpa and Babu decided this would be the window they would shoot for. They just needed to get to the top and then fly back down to the bottom before the wind started up, they determined. “No problem,” Lakpa said.
The gear for their final summit push was sprawled out on the floor of Waters’s dome tent. Seeing that Babu and Lakpa had packed only rice and beans for themselves, Waters gave them a few of his freeze-dried meals along with a handful of Snickers candy bars before they set out from Base Camp. He also gave Lakpa one of his extra pairs of goggles, noticing the experienced guide didn’t have any. After climbing for what would hopefully be their final time through the icefall, with Ang Bhai carrying the few bottles of oxygen that were left to be shuttled up the mountain and Nima Wang Chu carrying the new wing, they spent a night at Camp II. Lakpa and Babu were together in one tent, Nima Wang Chu and Ang Bhai in another. At Camp III the next night, both Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu had to stay in the tents of sherpas working for other teams, as their own team had only one tent set up at both Camp III and Camp IV.
For an entire day gale-force winds blasted the Lhotse Face, causing the four of them to lean against the tent poles in order to support them so they wouldn’t snap. Snow piled up, drifting on the tents, causing the walls to sag precariously inward. With the wind, it was determined to be too dangerous to go outside and attempt to shovel it off. A constant howling and flapping of fabric berated them. They didn’t sleep at all and began using their bottled oxygen to help alleviate their altitude sickness, which both Babu and Ang Bhai were still feeling significantly. Lakpa, meanwhile, was still smoking cigarettes.
The climb from Camp III to Camp IV on the South Col is only 0.8 miles, but it takes anywhere from three to six hours and reaches an elevation of 26,300 feet, an elevation affectionately known amongst climbers as the Death Zone, where human beings can’t survive more than two or three days, no matter how well they’ve managed to acclimatize beforehand. After an hour or so of steep but easy climbing up the rest of the Lhotse Face, there is a band of rock accurately, if not creatively, coined the Yellow Band: a large yellow-colored strip of limestone running through the Himalaya, created millions of years earlier at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Here, the route to the South Col leaves the snow and ice of the Lhotse Face and climbs around 300 feet of smooth rock sitting at a 20- to 30-degree angle. Here, too, there are fixed lines conveniently set up by sherpas, to keep people from tripping and falling to their death. Once clear of the band, the mountain actually flattens out somewhat until the bottom of the ridge defining the South Col, which is placed rather breathtakingly between the summits of Everest and Lhotse. Before reaching the col, however, climbers must first navigate an area known as the Geneva Spur: 150 feet of slanting, 40-degree rock, ice, and snow. Topping the ridge, a narrow, rocky path leads to the South Col proper, an area the size of approximately two football fields. At the far west end, thirty bright yellow and orange tents sit huddled together, clinging to the mountain.
Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu ran multiple loads up to Camp IV without Lakpa or Babu, preparing camp for them, escorted by other sherpas working on that part of the mountain that day. Miraculously, both Babu and Ang Bhai started to get somewhat over their altitude sickness. On May 20 Ang Bhai, who had spent the night at Camp II after running loads to the higher camps for Lakpa and Babu, climbed all the way to Camp IV in order to meet the rest of the team in time for their summit push, which was scheduled to begin that night. “There was a lot of people,” he says. “I just followed them.”
Once all of them were in Camp IV, they huddled together in one tent, not sleeping but trying to rest, drinking as much water and eating as much food as they could as they waited for dark. They knew it would take them all night, and well into the next morning, to make the summit. They wanted to leave in the middle of the night, like most teams do, so they could arrive early enough to miss the strong winds and storms that generally rear up on top of Everest later in the day, especially since they were anticipated to be particularly bad the next day.
“There was too much wind,” Ang Bhai says. “We only had one tent. Four people.” They were low on food and had forgotten about the Snickers bars, which were now frozen solid at the bottom of one of their bags. They made black tea with no sugar. As the wind howled around them, crows circled overhead, looking for scraps to eat in the otherwise desolate and sterile white wasteland of the South Col. By the time the wind died at around 10:30 p.m., they were more than ready to leave. Before departing, however, Lakpa made an extra-strong batch of coffee, as he typically did before every summit push. It was the first time Babu had ever tried coffee. “It was great,” Babu remembers. His altitude sickness seemed to almost immediately disappear. “I couldn’t keep up with him,” Ang Bhai says. Babu practically ran up the rest of the mountain.
The summit itself is about 1.07 miles from the South Col and Camp IV. It usually takes climbers about eight to ten hours to make the journey, which first ascends a steep triangular face to a small platform at 27,600 feet known simply as the Balcony. Continuing up the ridge is a series of slippery rock slabs. In “good” snow years—that is to say, in years when there is enough snow to cover the slabs, but not so much as to be overly cumbersome—this section is fairly straightforward and safe, particularly with the use of the fixed lines. However, 2011 was not a good snow year. “It was dangerous,” Lakpa says. After the rock slabs the route gets even steeper for about 100 feet, nearing an angle of almost 60 degrees, depositing finally on the South Summit.
From here, climbers descend about 50 feet to a particularly dicey-looking knife-edge ridge. On one side is an 11,000-foot sheer drop down the Kangshung Face. On the other,
an 8,000-foot void falling down the mountain’s Southwest Face. The path itself is compacted snow loosely adhered to, likewise, loose rock. After the Cornice Traverse, as this ridge is called, there is a noticeable and unavoidable wall of rock, ice, and snow. This, Hillary described in 1953, when he and Norgay became the first to summit, as “the most formidable-looking problem on the ridge—a rock step some 40 feet high…. The rock itself, smooth and almost holdless, might have been an interesting Sunday afternoon problem to a group of expert climbers in the Lake District, but here it was a barrier beyond our feeble strength to overcome.” Still roped to Norgay, Hillary wedged himself between a crack in the rock and a vertical wall of snow and began slowly, strenuously, wiggling his way up. The climbing was sketchy at best. He and Norgay made it to the top, though, of course, and from then on the wall has been known as the Hillary Step.
Nowadays, ropes set annually by sherpas run from the top to bottom, and climbers use mechanical ascenders to aid themselves in overcoming the obstacle. At the top of the Hillary Step, sitting on a ledge, rests a large chockstone blocking the path to the summit. It’s easy to scoot around, but there’s a 1,000-foot drop if you fall. A series of small, permanently snow-covered bumps leads to and blocks the view of the summit. To the right, snow cornices formed by the prevailing winds cling tenuously to the mountainside, waiting for someone to step on them and set them tumbling. The summit itself is no more than 30 square feet, marked with strings of continually flapping bright red, blue, and yellow prayer flags and, in 2011, a dug-out snow bench on which the victorious could sit and pose for pictures. Then, aside from the magnificent view, there’s nothing—just sky and the vast expanse of the Himalaya stretching off into the distance, disappearing over a curved horizon.
Flying Off Everest Page 10