Flying Off Everest

by Dave Costello

  Posted on March 31, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  Welcome to our Blog

  01/04/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on April 4, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  Climbing team departs Kathmandu, headed towards Everest Base Camp

  10/04/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on April 10, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  Babu flying at Namche Bazar. Last village on the way to Base Camp

  03/05/2011 Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 3, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  Gps arrives at Base Camp.. Gps profile and live tracking, with link for whole trip log.

  http://www.spotadventures.com/user/profile?user_id=69398

  18/5/2011 5400m Ultimate Descent

  Posted on May 18, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  5:31:15am Everest Base Camp 5400m

  Depart EBC for final rotation to summit …

  18/5/2011 6500m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 18, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  5:16:50pm Camp 2 6500m

  19/5/2011 7100m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 19, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  07:00:35 PM Camp 3 7100m

  20/5/2011 7850m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 20, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  01:40:34 PM Camp 4

  depart for summit at 09:24:56 PM

  21/5/2011 8850m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 21, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  09:24:32 AM EVEREST SUMMIT, BEAUTIFUL BLUE SKY, VERY SPECIAL DAY NAMASTE

  21/5/2011 8850m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 21, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  09:44:57 AM TAKE OFF FROM EVEREST SUMMIT IN TANDEM PARAGLIDER

  SANO BABU SUNUWAR AND LAKPA CHHIRI SHERPA WILL ATTEMPT TO MAKE HISTORY TODAY

  When the yellow dot finally stopped moving on Phinney’s screen at the Syangboche airstrip, a twelve-hour and forty-five-minute time difference away, at 11:34 p.m. in San Francisco on May 21 she posted:

  21/5/2011 3750m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 21, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  10:49:52 AM Landed Namche Bazar, Syangboche Airstrip

  After successful flying off the worlds highest mountain. Completing a 5000m descent 30k? XC PARAGLIDING FLIGHT OFF THE SUMMIT OF EVEREST

  That was it. The entire adventure summed up in 271 words.

  Back on the summit, Babu and Lakpa’s loyal but inexperienced sherpas, Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu, were left to walk back down the mountain on their own. Each had less than one full bottle of oxygen remaining. It was barely enough to make it down to Camp III, if they hurried. After watching their two friends get shot into the sky and then fly off to the south, they knew they couldn’t loiter long on the summit. Nima quickly dug into his pack and began preparing his last bottle of oxygen. Ang Bhai, standing about 20 feet away from him on a cornice of snow overhanging the Kangshung Face where he had helped launch the wing, took a step forward and fell up to his waist into a narrow crevasse. The hole at his feet opened at the bottom to a clean 11,000-foot drop. He was afraid to move for fear of dislodging the thin layer of snow that was now the only thing keeping him from plummeting to his death.

  “Nima!” he yelled. “NIMA!” But Nima, whose thick down hood was now cinched tight around his head to protect him from the ever-increasing icy wind, couldn’t hear him. After about a minute, when he was done preparing his oxygen for the descent, he turned around and saw Ang Bhai stuck halfway into the crevasse. “Hold on!” Nima yelled, and without any hesitation he walked out onto the fractured cornice with his friend—unroped—grabbed his hand, and pulled him up.

  Looking up, Ang Bhai saw that Babu and Lakpa were now nothing more than a small speck flying close to Nuptse. “I was feeling really lazy,” Ang Bhai says. “I didn’t think I could walk all the way down.” Without another option, however, he and Nima both silently began their descent. It took three hours for them to reach Camp IV, where Nima, completely exhausted, collapsed into their tent and declared he couldn’t go down any farther.

  Without much discussion Ang Bhai left him half of the remaining food, asked him to bring the tent down with him the next day, and then continued down the mountain until he reached Camp II, carrying all six of the team’s empty oxygen bottles, which had been left at Camp III. It was after 9:00 p.m., and at this point Ang Bhai had either been climbing or descending the mountain for nearly twenty-three hours straight. Unfortunately, Waters’s team had already taken the tent Babu and Lakpa had borrowed from them back down to Base Camp earlier that day. “It was not so good for me,” Ang Bhai points out. Fortunately, two other sherpas whom he had met earlier on the trip took pity on him and invited him to spend the night with them, sleeping head-to-toe, three of them wedged together in a two-person tent.

  Nima spent the night alone at Camp IV, at 25,755 feet, without supplemental oxygen. A remarkable and decidedly dangerous accomplishment. He descended the next day and met Ang Bhai and Shri Hari in Base Camp. They then departed for Ang Bhai’s parents’ house just north of Namche Bazaar, where they hoped to reunite with Babu and Lakpa, assuming nothing horrible had happened to them during the flight.

  After realizing that Babu and Lakpa had landed safely, David Arrufat, Wildes, Susmita, and Yanjee hopped on the first available flight to Lukla, in order to meet them before they continued their journey south to the sea. But not before David and Kimberly Phinney both sent e-mails to Cross Country, the world’s largest paragliding and hang gliding magazine, based in Brighton, England, informing the editorial staff of Babu and Lakpa’s achievement. Both promised photos soon.

  Babu and Lakpa spent their first night celebrating their success with one of their friends, thirty-nine-year-old Ang Gyalgen Sherpa—the first Sherpa, coincidentally, to have started paragliding in the Khumbu a few years earlier—at a small bar just north of Namche Bazaar. Babu and Lakpa slept soundly that night, filled with beer, at Ang Bhai’s parents’ house nearby.

  The next morning, they were promptly arrested by a Sagarmatha National Park ranger and taken to the park’s main office in Namche Bazaar, where the army was waiting for them. The ranger had overheard Ang Bhai’s father talking proudly about the expedition his son had just helped with at a public meeting the night before—while Babu, Lakpa, and Ang Gyalgen had been out drinking. And the ranger wasn’t pleased.

  “He asked us why we didn’t have permits,” Lakpa says. So Lakpa reminded him they didn’t need a permit to climb Everest, because they were Sherpas, which was, at least for him, technically true. He didn’t tell the ranger that Babu wasn’t a Sherpa. The question of whether they needed a permit to actually fly off the mountain was a different matter. Was it an “obscene” record they had tried to set? Was it actually disrespectful to the mountain? There were no official, explicit rules written down saying they couldn’t fly off of the summit of Everest, but the rangers apparently thought, in hindsight, that there probably should have been.

  After thirty minutes of heated discussion, their friend Ang Gyalgen showed up. A wealthy, well-respected member of the community, he demanded their immediate release. Ang Gyalgen told them that Babu and Lakpa were trying to “open a new sport” in the region. “Trekking and climbing are too old-fashioned now,” he told the army, perhaps referencing Lakpa’s interest in one day taking his clients paragliding from other nearby summits, along with Everest. “So they did something new, so more people are going to come someday.” It sounded like a noble cause, if not a realistic one. Word about their flight off of Everest was quickly spreading through the community, Ang Gyalgen also pointed out—Babu and Lakpa were on the fast track to becoming local celebrities. Perhaps the local people, he theorized, undoubtedly proud of their fellow Nepalis’ accomplishment, might not like them being so hastily arrested after achieving it. This observation had a more profound effect. A few hours later, Babu and Lakpa were tentatively released, the park ranger and army major still confused as to what, exactly, Babu and Lakpa had done, why they had done it, or if they should actually
be punished for it. They called their superiors in Kathmandu to ask their opinion.

  Babu and Lakpa didn’t wait around to find out the answer. They walked back toward Ang Bhai’s parents’ lodge laughing about their good fortune and met their friend Ryan Waters along the trail. He and Denis were just returning now from Base Camp, after summiting Lhotse. By flying down Babu and Lakpa had beat them back to Namche Bazaar by a full day.

  “They were just happy, but not different,” Waters says, recalling seeing them for the first time since their summit bid. “They were just their normal selves. It was like they pulled something off—like they got away with something, laughing about it.” Waters joined Babu and Lakpa for a few Carlsburg beers at the teahouse back at the lodge, along with Lakpa’s friend Tsering Nima, the owner of Himalayan Trailblazer, who had helped set up the logistics for their climb, as well as Shri Hari Shresthra, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu, who had all finally made it back down from Base Camp. “Everyone was successful,” Waters says. “So everyone was in a good mood, having beers.” They decided to walk to Lukla that night, all of them, together.

  Before they left, Lakpa and Babu hired a porter to trek with the paraglider and meet them in Lukla a full day after they left. “If anyone asks you about it,” Lakpa said, “tell them it’s a foreign trekker’s.” They weren’t sure if they would have any more trouble with the military, so they decided it would be for the best if they didn’t actually have any evidence of their flight off the mountain with them. It would be hard to explain away a paraglider if they were carrying one.

  Babu and Lakpa walked to the south with the sun setting behind the mountains. The air was cool but not yet cold. They reached a high ridge in a canyon on the outskirts of the village where a wire suspension bridge crosses the Dudh Kosi. A group of soldiers was waiting for them. “They had guns,” Lakpa says. The park ranger’s superiors in Kathmandu weren’t pleased with Babu and Lakpa’s flight off Everest either and wanted them arrested again.

  None of the soldiers assigned to bring them in had ever seen Babu or Lakpa before, however. Without the paraglider as evidence, and with every person in the Khumbu Valley being named after the day of the week on which they were born, the army had no way to be sure which Lakpa they were dealing with.

  Lakpa told Babu, “Let’s go. Let’s go. This is my place. We didn’t kill any people, you know? We are not like robbers, you know? We keep going. This is my village. Let’s go. Don’t talk with them.”

  When they reached the bridge and the soldiers standing in front of it, they were asked to stop. “Why?” Lakpa asked. “What’s the reason? Who gave you the authority to stop us?” The soldier was slow to respond and looked confused, as if the answer were obvious, and perhaps it was. “Give me a reason,” Lakpa demanded again. “Any reason. We have to go farther. We have to be in India, not Nepal.” At this, they kept walking. Leaving the soldiers befuddled behind them—and Shri Hari filming the whole exchange with his camera.

  By the time Babu and Lakpa reached Lukla, almost everyone in the valley had heard about the two Nepalis who had flown off Everest. And they wanted to meet them. “When we got there, all the people started gathering because they had heard what Babu and Lakpa did,” Waters said. “We had some beers and then those guys disappeared, because everyone wanted to talk with them.” That was the last time Waters saw either Babu or Lakpa. He caught his flight back to Kathmandu early in the morning the next day, not knowing what would happen to them next.

  That night, Babu and Lakpa reunited with their wives, as well as David and Wildes, all of whom were ecstatic to see them. Conversation was lively. The house was full and warm, everyone laughing, proud of what had just been accomplished.

  The Coupe Icare (Icarus Cup) is the world’s largest paragliding and hang gliding festival, held each September in Saint-Hilaire, France; it includes the Free Flight International Film Festival. David and Wildes—who prefers to be called by her spiritual name, Mukti (meaning “one who brings liberation”)—had plans to make a movie of the expedition, but it was going to be different than the movie Babu, Lakpa, and Shri Hari were working on. Unlike Babu and Lakpa’s all-Nepali-made movie, David and Mukti’s movie would be made by Westerners, for a Western audience, in time for the film festival.

  “I pushed to do the movie, because I know if we do it in Nepal, it will never go out,” David says, making the observation that most media produced within Nepal never leaves the country. “I made the movie for the festival, because I know they will not get it done in time. It would not fit with the standard of doing outside of Nepal. Shri Hari would make a good film, but it would not be what people want to see. We know what people want to see—people doing sport.”

  Babu and Lakpa still had to paraglide across the Himalaya and paddle to the ocean before Shri Hari would even begin working on editing the footage from their journey. And the Coupe Icare film submission deadline was only two months away.

  So the morning after Babu and Lakpa’s celebratory night, Mukti and David unpacked their own video cameras, gave Babu and Lakpa some more beer, and started recording. Mukti had a handwritten series of statements she had prepared the day before, which she now wanted Babu to say in front of the camera. “A script,” she called it. “I am going to read for you. You tell me if you agree with what I am saying. If you agree, we speak about this. Then I turn on the camera, then you speak about this if you agree.” Babu agreed.

  “David and I are close to Babu,” she explains. “I know Babu like a brother. And we share these feelings, and I know what is inside this story, and I try to put this in the movie, because the movie is giving emotion.”

  David pulled Babu aside while they were at Lakpa’s parents’ house. He told him that he wanted the photos from their cameras so he could get them to newspapers and magazines, to help promote their expedition. He also asked Babu to give him the memory cards from the GoPros they had used to film with while on the mountain, convincing him that submitting a short film to the Coupe Icare about just the climbing and flying portion of their expedition would be a good teaser for the full expedition film whenever it did come out.

  “Babu came and stole two tapes from my home—of the flight,” Lakpa says. “And used it without my permission, with his boss, David.” Lakpa and Babu had both agreed before starting out that Lakpa would have all the film rights to the expedition and that Babu would have the rights to the still photos, which they hoped could eventually be sold to magazines.

  In the yard, beneath a partly cloudy sky, Mukti helped Babu recite his lines before recording them with the camera. “Our goal is not only making summit,” Babu repeated as best he could in his halting English, his face sunburned and peeling, his demeanor a little buzzed from the beer. “It is to see what’s possible. Nobody has done it before. We want to show this.”

  Babu and Lakpa continued to evade national park authorities in Lukla for four more days, recovering from their climb and subsequent flight off Everest. On the fifth day they once again said good-bye to their family and friends. Their wives, along with David (carrying the memory cards containing the footage from their climb and flight), Mukti, and Shri Hari, boarded a plane at the Lukla airstrip back to Kathmandu. Later, Shri Hari would join the three-man Paddle Nepal support crew, who had driven nine hours to the capital from Pokhara and, at this point, supposedly had the team’s kayak. The four men would then travel four hours north to Dolalghat, put in on the Sun Kosi River with Babu and Lakpa’s kayak strapped to the back of the support raft, and paddle downstream approximately 20 miles of Class II-IV whitewater. If everything went according to plan, Babu and Lakpa would be waiting for them on the riverbank somewhere near the confluence of the Dudh Kosi.

  The fact that the Paddle Nepal support crew actually had a shiny new 12-foot, 1-inch orange tandem whitewater kayak in their possession was a bit of a miracle. Babu’s friend Pete Astles, back in the United Kingdom, had ordered the kayak directly from the Jackson Kayak factory in Tennessee. It was then flown, via a sta
ndard commercial passenger jet, to Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, under someone else’s name. It had been the only even remotely feasible way to get the $1,500 boat, which was barely within the length restrictions for the plane, into the country on such short notice. It was also the most difficult way to get such a large, obvious, big-ticket item through Nepali customs.

  “If you bring any foreign goods into Nepal, the customs department is very difficult to deal with,” Mahendra Singh Thapa, Babu and Astles’s mutual friend and owner of the Kathmandu-based outfitter Equator Expeditions, says. “Importing anything in Nepal is very tricky. Taxes and customs for foreign goods cost almost 200 percent. I know how to deal with customs, because I’m importing goods all the time. So I told Pete, ‘OK, you send the kayak in my name, and I will deal with the customs.’” Thapa, a strong, deep-chested man whose outfitter is one of the largest and oldest in the country, walked out of the airport with the kayak (as well as all of the additional paddling gear Astles had stuffed inside of it), having paid some money, but not in taxes. And it wasn’t nearly 200 percent of the retail price of the boat.

  From there, Thapa put the bright yellow kayak on a truck along with the Paddle Nepal support raft and wished good luck to the three-man crew, which consisted of two of Babu’s good raft-guiding friends, Madhukar Pahari and Resham Bahadur Thapa, and his younger brother, Krishna. All of whom had volunteered their time, without pay, to help Babu and Lakpa down the river portion of their journey. The trio picked up cameraman Shri Hari and headed north, into the mountains. Four hours later, as they put on the river at Dolalghat, they still had no idea whether Babu and Lakpa would actually show up at their designated rendezvous point just south of the Dudh Kosi confluence 20 miles downstream. There was no Plan B if they didn’t. They strapped the tandem kayak onto the back of their raft anyway and shoved off the riverbank.

  Babu and Lakpa walked together south, back toward Lakpa’s parents’ home in Chaurikharka, where they spent the night. The next morning they picked up their paraglider, still hidden in its black backpack, and continued walking the trail south along the Dudh Kosi, just under two hours to the small mountain village of Kharte, climbing to the top of a western-facing ridge just to the north of town. The two men stopped on a small, grassy clearing overlooking the river several hundred feet below and unpacked their wing. They looked south. The mountains were no longer white and black, covered in ice, snow, and rock, but a dense green now, covered in either rice terraces or dark, leafy jungle. Smaller in scale, less jagged, but more remote and isolated. According to their GPS track log, they were at an elevation of approximately 10,100 feet, nearly 19,000 feet lower than they had been just a week earlier.