Flying Off Everest

by Dave Costello

  Babu and Lakpa had no tent, no provisions. Nothing but the clothes on their backs, the shoes on their feet, and their paraglider. Babu and Lakpa also had no map, and the goal of landing within the week on a small sandbar on a remote mountain river that was still over 40 miles away. In front of them was a series of deep gorges and canyons no one had ever previously thought to pilot a paraglider through.

  Making exploratory cross-country flights with inexperienced cohorts was not an entirely new challenge to Babu. Just the year before, he had flown a tandem paraglider across Nepal from west to east with Shri Hari, who, like Lakpa, didn’t know how to fly. They had started in the town of Baitadi on Nepal’s western border with India, along with seventeen other pilots—mostly foreign—all looking to become the first to make the crossing. No one had ever done it before. After thirty days, two canopy collapses, and one backward landing, they were the only team to successfully arrive on the eastern border of the country. They had spent eighteen days actually flying. The rest had been spent walking, often not on roads. Up and down remote mountain valleys, looking for the next suitable ridgeline to launch from. Every other team had abandoned their crossing along the way. One got stuck dangling in a tree for twenty-four hours. Babu had used a secondhand tandem wing, which had been given to him by Mukti. With both Babu and Shri Hari and his camera gear attached, they nearly maxed out the 396-pound weight limit, so they couldn’t carry any additional supplies, like a tent, or more than a day’s worth of food.

  “It answered the question, ‘What’s my country like?’” Babu later told a reporter for Action Asia magazine, referring to his trans-Nepal flight. “There are so many things that have to be done, roads, education, political system and so on. It’s the only way to see Nepal and it’s many different cultures and castes.” The experience also made a bit of a politico out of him. After seeing his country Babu wanted to change it. And he recognized that the only reason he got his name in a magazine, and had the opportunity to share his opinions and insights with the rest of the world, was that he had done something construed as crazy by the majority of the population.

  Lakpa, now done with his end of the bargain—getting them to the top of Everest—was happy, singing as he helped Babu unfold their new wing for its second flight into the unknown. Or third, since they had first unwrapped it at Kala Patthar. Babu inflated the 51-foot-wide sheet of red and white nylon into the light breeze that was blowing and launched them over the valley. To anyone below they appeared to be an upside-down bright red crescent drifting slowly through the mountains, a single speck hanging beneath it from string. The flight itself was uneventful, and unremarkable other than the fact that it didn’t last long. In less than twenty minutes, they were on the ground, on the other side of the mountains that ran to the east, in a different river drainage, the Inkhu Kosi. They were nowhere near the only footpath leading anywhere, which was on the other side of the mountains running along the Dudh Kosi.

  Like he had done so many times on his cross-Nepal expedition the year before, Babu packed up the paraglider, put it on his back, and started walking south. Bushwhacking his way through the jungle, he looked for a place to relaunch. Lakpa followed. After six hours they reached the hillside village of Waku, near where the Inkhu Kosi and Dudh Kosi converge in a slight widening of the Dudh Kosi River gorge. They hadn’t eaten all day. Lakpa gave a few rupees to a local farm family in exchange for a place to sleep that night in their home, as well as a meal of dal bhat. Exhausted and grateful for shelter, the two men slept in the company of the family’s chickens.

  The next morning, it was determined that there were no suitable places to launch a paraglider nearby, the surrounding hillsides too steep and forested to provide a proper, or even remotely safe, takeoff. So Babu and Lakpa thanked their host family and continued walking along the only footpath south, four hours to the similarly picturesque mountaintop village of Deurali—a small collection of gray stone buildings hugging the steep, rolling, perpetually terraced hillsides. White clouds floated above and below.

  It was here that their SPOT locator stopped working. Back in Pokhara and in San Francisco, the little yellow dot on both the Arrufats’ and Phinney’s computer screens wasn’t moving again. And it didn’t move for four days. Neither Lakpa nor Babu had thought to change the GPS batteries.

  A few days earlier, Phinney had posted on the blog again:

  22/5/2011- 28/5/2011 2050m Ultimate Descent Team

  Posted on May 28, 2011 by ruppy.kp

  Hike and Fly to Koshi river, see our Gps log for tracking..

  Now there was no way to track them or their progress, or lack thereof. Phinney had absolutely no idea what was going on with the expedition anymore and was afraid for her friends’ lives. David Arrufat, meanwhile, had posted a blog of his own on APPIfly.org, his paragliding organization’s website, which a few days later would feature screen grabs and photos from the two memory cards Babu had given him, with the APPI logo and website URL embedded as a watermark.

  APPI Tandem Pilot Sano Babu Sunuwar took off from the summit of Everest with Sherpa Lapka flying over the world’s highest mountain!!!

  Babu, a twenty-eight years old APPI Tandem Pilot, has successfully flown with a paraglider over the summit of Everest today, May 21st 2011. He had the most incredible flight ever done and broken the record of height and distance. Babu gained altitude over the take off, at the summit of Mt. Everest, and had a 31km cross-country flight over the biggest mountains of the world.

  Landing at the airport of Namche Bazaar, the Sherpa town and mountain capital of the Everest region, at an altitude of 3,750m, Babu now is getting ready to continue his adventure, by kayak Topolino/duo, from Nepal, crossing to India, and to a final arrival in the ocean, in Bangladesh.

  Babu has flown on tandem with his passenger Lakpa Tshering Sherpa, 35-year-old, an experienced Everest man, who had reached the summit several times on the past years—and is going to continue the adventure on the river, as well—even if he doesn’t know how to swim. Lakpa Sherpa does not stop his challenges there, trusting Babu with his river guide experience.

  Babu and Lakpa, with a camera man and a cooker man, climbed together Everest from the Nepal side along the classic South Col route. They took off from the north-west side of Everest, following the ridge down to the other side to the Western Ridge and into the Everest basin.

  From there to the south-west, crossing the massive Nuptse of 7,861m, continuing in a straight line, crossing the summit of Pokalde Peak at 5,806m, popular trekking route, to Ama Dablam, and finally arriving—nothing better to land than a simple mountain airport, if we can say so—at the airstrip of Syangboche.

  Babu, full name Sano babu Sunuwar, is an APPI tandem pilot, certified at an APPI paragliding school in Nepal. He has been trained by David Arrufat and sponsored by APPI for his challenging character, optimism and inner determination.

  What we could say about Babu is that he is a lucky man and beloved one who always have something positive to say, if not an smile to give. Here is Babu full power smile at the Base Camp, before the ascent to the flight which would make him a legend.

  On March 2010, Babu completed his previous challenge of crossing his home country in tandem bivouac, in a 850km 30-day adventure from east to west of Nepal. Where Babu has seen incredible contrasts of his country on beauty, simplicity and lots of adrenaline, with thermals more than 18m/s, and having Shree Shestra as his passenger and camera man.

  Having so much love for nature, rivers and mountains, Babu named his second son of four months old, nothing less than “Himalaya”, as soon as the baby was born – on the time that he had no plan yet to fly from Everest, even if it was an old dream since he started to fly. The idea came just little after, when once again he met his friend Lakpa and decided that he had found the right person as a passenger, partner and brother for a life story.

  The day after they had flown off the mountain, Cross Country also posted a short story on its website, titled “Babu Sunuwar Flies Off Ev
erest,” based on information Arrufat supplied them. The news of Lakpa and Babu’s Everest flight was getting out. And Lakpa, unknowingly, was turning into a footnote.

  With no way to communicate with Arrufat, Phinney, or anyone else in the outside world, Babu and Lakpa continued their journey south toward the Sun Kosi River. They launched from a rice paddy in Deurali and flew over the ridgeline village of Aiselukharka, down into the next valley, where they unceremoniously landed in the trees. After untangling their wing, Babu and Lakpa hiked thirty minutes to the nearest village, Rawa Khola, where the two friends jumped in the nearby river to bathe. To celebrate, they drank prodigious amounts of chhaang (“nectar of the gods”), a locally made grain alcohol similar to unfiltered rice wine. They stumbled up the ridge to the south of town, aiming to launch off the top of it that night, but didn’t make it. Instead, they opted to lie down on the ground on the hillside in the forest and sleep off the chhaang.

  From the ridgeline the next morning, it was a ten-minute flight down to the small hilltop Sherpa city of Lamidanda. With a population of over 2,000, it has an airport but no roads, just heavily worn dirt footpaths. The roofs of the nicer stone buildings are covered in corrugated aluminum, either hiked in from the nearest road, which is nearly 15 miles away, or flown in from Kathmandu. Babu called his friend Nim Magar at Paddle Nepal to see where the kayak, the support crew, and Shri Hari were. They were a day behind, Magar told him. He and Lakpa could expect to meet their kayak and support crew at the rendezvous point just to the south of the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and Sun Kosi in three days.

  Lakpa bought batteries for their SPOT locator but didn’t turn it on. He then called his sister, Ang Maya in Kathmandu, from a payphone and asked her to wire him some money. “I brought 50,000 rupees [about $500] from Lukla,” Lakpa says. “And that was not enough.” Without Babu being able to pay for any of their expenses, Lakpa had already managed to burn through his trip cash, paying for their room and board, as well as all the chhaang at the villages they had stopped at along the way. Ang Maya agreed to wire him 5,000 rupees for the rest of the trip, about $50.

  After getting the cash from the local bank, they continued walking on the footpath south to Halesi Mahadev, a sacred cave and Buddhist temple tucked into the hills five hours away. The cave itself is a quiet, dimly lit sanctuary with trees growing up straight out of the sides of the rock-wall entrance and steps carved right into the bedrock, leading down into the cave. They spent two nights talking and praying with the red-robed monks, flying off a nearby ridge for fun during the day. They flew off the same ridge again the third morning, covering only a few miles before crash landing in a cluster of rhododendron trees. When they finally managed to untangle themselves from the branches, Lakpa felt a sharp pain in his right knee. It hurt to walk. Their $4,000 wing also looked worse for wear. A series of holes was now clearly visible in the fabric—some of them quite large. They decided between them that, in spite of the damage, it would probably be “fine” to fly it one more day.

  Babu and Lakpa hiked up the final ridge before the river and rested, camping out under the stars and a waning moon on a hilltop without having any dal bhat. The next morning came without breakfast, and they launched their damaged wing at 10:00 a.m. in the hopes of spotting their support crew floating down the river to meet them with a kayak, and hopefully more food.

  After an hour of riding thermals—upward-flowing columns of air that help keep paragliders aloft in the sky—there was no support raft to be seen. Just green mountains beneath a blue sky and a massive, brown surging river.

  VIII

  River of Gold

  Sidi, Nepal,

  June 2011—Approximately 2,900 Feet

  Hamilton Pevec sat alone on a futon in a small room just north of Pokhara in the small village of Sidi, surrounded by four short walls made of stacked whitewashed fieldstone. The cement floor felt cold against his feet. Light filtered through a single paneless window and an open, doorless doorway, illuminating the white smoke rising from the lit joint in his hand. Outside, Arrufat’s chickens clucked and a lone rooster named Coco crowed. David and Mukti’s three-year-old daughter, Yada, ran after him, laughing. The bird was as tall as she was, the guest observed, looking out the empty window.

  Pevec, a twenty-eight-year-old documentary filmmaker from Carbondale, Colorado, stood up from the old personal computer the Arrufats had bought and subsequently brought into their home for him to work on, walked over to the doorway, and chased a curious hen that had wandered into the room back into the yard. He was busy and stressed, preoccupied with reviewing the hours of video footage the Arrufats had just given him from Babu and Lakpa’s recent flight off Everest, but he wasn’t about to let chickens start crapping on the floor of his new editing suite. He had a movie to make, and not much time to make it.

  A slow talker with a short, well-kept beard and a neck-length black ponytail, Pevec had been coming to Nepal since 2007, when he had fallen in love with a thirty-year-old Nepali yoga instructor named Devika Gurumg. He had moved from his home in Colorado to Dharamsala, India, where he spent several months instructing the Dalai Lama’s monks on modern video production techniques, working as a volunteer for the Namgyal Monastery Audio Visual Archive Center.*

  “I was living at the monastery,” Pevec says. “Devika and I had a mutual friend, and she invited me to Devika’s yoga studio in Pokhara. I fell in love with her. We had this on-again, off-again relationship over a couple of years. Then I promised I would be back in 2011. So I went back to see if our relationship was still alive and well, and sure enough, it was. And I fell in love with her all over again.”

  Gurumg, a beautiful, brown-eyed woman with long, dark hair, was one of six children. She had spent her childhood picking fruit in orchards, making carpets, and housekeeping, until two Australian women took it upon themselves to teach her Hatha Yoga twice a day, every day, for three months. She was eighteen. By the time Pevec met her, she was running her own yoga studio in Pokhara. By 2011, when her and Pevec’s love was rekindled, she had become good friends with the Arrufats. She introduced Hamilton to David and Mukti, who had just started their new for-profit paragliding organization, the Association of Paragliding Pilots and Instructors, the year before, in 2010.

  “They offered me a proposition,” Pevec says. “They said, ‘We’ll teach Devika to fly if you make us some promo stuff for APPI, because we want to launch APPI.’” Pevec thought it was a fair trade, so he agreed. “I started shooting this promotional video for APPI,” he says, “and Devika started learning how to fly, and about a week into shooting these interviews with pilots and stuff, Babu and Lakpa launched their paraglider off the summit.” He had no idea who Babu and Lakpa even were at the time. “That changed everything,” he says. “Immediately, David and Mukti went up there to meet them. A few days later they came back with the footage, handed it to me, and said, ‘Stop what you are doing and turn this into a movie.’” Awestruck by the opportunity to make a movie about someone flying off the top of Everest, rather than a low-budget promo video, Pevec agreed, in spite of the fact that it would require significantly more work on his part.

  “Using it as a promotional device to launch APPI was part of the plan,” Pevec says. He didn’t know about Lakpa, Babu, and Shri Hari’s plan to make their own movie of the expedition.

  David and Mukti bought a computer that was several years old, carried it up the narrow, rocky creek drainage that served as their driveway, and placed it in the back room of the single-story stone house they were renting in Sidi, just a few miles north of Lakeside. Pevec downloaded pirated editing software onto the computer’s hard drive and started reviewing Babu and Lakpa’s footage from the mountain, whenever the electricity was working. “We only had electricity for a few hours a day,” Pevec says. “We never knew when it was coming on or going off.” They purchased a large battery that had enough juice to keep the computer running just long enough after the power went out for Pevec to save his edits before the computer w
ould shut off completely. “It was a technical nightmare,” he says. David loaned Pevec his bicycle, which he used to ride to and from Devika’s place in Pokhara to the Arrufats’ each day. “He handed me this big jar of weed,” Pevec recalls. “Said, ‘This will help you get through it.’ And sure enough, that was the fuel for the film.” He started working twelve-hour days, every day, in order to make the July 15 deadline for the Coupe Icare festival, less than two months away.

  The footage itself was rough at best. “Mukti shot the interviews when they were both really drunk,” Pevec says. “Babu and Lakpa were pretty wasted.” The rest was shaky, handheld GoPro footage. “I didn’t get anything that the other filmmaker got,” Pevec says, referring to Shri Hari, not realizing the reason why he didn’t have any of the footage.

  He didn’t have permission to use it.

  Krishna Sunuwar looked up between the green hills rising from the Sun Kosi River at a clear blue sky, scanning the elevated horizon line for his older brother. The sandy beach where Babu and Lakpa were supposed to be waiting to meet them was empty. He knew they must still be in flight, or still walking to the river, which was now swollen and orange-brown with the recent heavy monsoon rains. Paddling a red 8-foot Riot brand whitewater kayak built in the early 2000s, which was loaned to him by his boss, Charley Gaillard, owner of the Ganesh Kayak Shop, Krishna kept his neck craned upward, squinting into the sun. He also kept a paddle blade poised over the fast-moving water beside him, wrist cocked forward, ready to brace himself in the case of an unexpected surge of the current.