The Everest Politics Show

by Mark Horrell

  THE EVEREST POLITICS SHOW

  Sorrow and strife on the world’s highest mountain

  By Mark Horrell

  Published by Mountain Footsteps Press

  Copyright © Mark Horrell, 2016

  www.markhorrell.com

  All rights reserved

  First published as an ebook 2016

  Except where indicated, all photographs copyright © Mark Horrell

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  ISBN (paperback): 978-0-9934130-6-3

  ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9934130-5-6

  Front cover photo: Mark Horrell

  THE EVEREST POLITICS SHOW

  About this book

  In April 2014 Mark Horrell went on a mountaineering expedition to Nepal, hoping to climb Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world, which shares a base camp and climbing route with Mount Everest.

  He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, by climbing through the infamous ice maze of the Khumbu Icefall, and he yearned to sleep in the grand amphitheatre of Everest Base Camp, surrounded by towering peaks.

  He was also intrigued by the media publicity surrounding commercial expeditions to Everest. He wanted to discover for himself whether it had become the circus that everybody described.

  But when a devastating avalanche swept across the Khumbu Icefall, he got more than he bargained for. Suddenly he found himself witnessing the greatest natural disaster Everest had ever seen.

  And that was just the start. Everest Sherpas came out in protest, issuing a list of demands to the Government of Nepal. What happened next left his team shocked, bewildered and fearing for their safety.

  About this series

  The Footsteps on the Mountain Travel Diaries are Mark’s expedition journals. Quick reads, they are lightly edited versions of what he scribbles in his tent each evening after a day in the mountains.

  Mark’s first full-length book, Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest, about his journey to becoming an Everest climber, was published in November 2015.

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  “Mark always puts together a good mountaineering story which is underpinned with humour.”

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  THE EVEREST POLITICS SHOW

  Sorrow and strife on the world’s highest mountain

  Expedition Dispatch: A briefing at the Ministry

  Footsteps on the Mountain blog – Wednesday, 2 April 2014

  A new joke is doing the rounds in Kathmandu.

  How many Nepalese Ministry of Tourism officials does it take to change a light bulb?

  Two. One to change the bulb and the other to issue a press release to the media.

  There has been a flurry of strange announcements by the government in the last few months about rule changes on Everest. Climbers have to carry eight kilograms of garbage down with them. We have to attend a briefing to promote peace and harmony on the mountain; a ladder will be installed on the Hillary Step; everyone must climb with a Nepali guide; police will be stationed at Base Camp; permit fees have been ‘reduced’ (in fact, they’ve been increased slightly, but never let the truth get in the way of marketing).

  Nobody knows how many of these statements are serious or whether any will be enforced. Some have been mooted before. But the sheer number leaves the impression that if you string all the garbage coming out of the Ministry together, there will be enough to make a rope ladder all the way up the Hillary Step to the summit and down the other side into Tibet.

  We’re not sure why all these statements have been coming, but the feeling is that the government believes that Everest’s image has been tarnished by all the negative media coverage that accompanied last year’s fight between Ueli Steck and a team of Sherpas. They’re keen to let people know they’re in control of the situation.

  In fact, these announcements have had precisely the opposite effect. The press have tucked in to a feast of negative stories. If you threw Rupert Murdoch’s bloated carcass into a paddling pool full of sharks there wouldn’t be a bigger feeding frenzy. Right or wrong, the government appears to be in as much control as Peter O’Toole with a crate of Mount Everest Whiskey.

  Yesterday we attended our much-publicised briefing at the Ministry of Tourism. I would love to say things are now much clearer, but if anything, they’re muddier.

  A briefing to ‘promote peace and harmony’?

  ‘They’re going to tell us not to fight the Sherpas. It’s just a formality,’ our expedition leader Phil Crampton quipped beforehand.

  We assumed the fight had prompted the rule changes, but in fact an entirely different incident seems to have annoyed them just as much, if not more. Last year, a commercial client called Dan Hughes, climbing with the British mountaineering operator Jagged Globe, did a live television broadcast for the BBC on the summit. Apparently this requires a special permit that he didn’t have.

  Although Phil is leader of the Altitude Junkies’ joint expedition to Everest and Lhotse, he won’t be climbing Lhotse, so my name is listed as leader on our Lhotse climbing permit. At one point during yesterday’s briefing one of the officials looked at me and said:

  ‘So, Mr Mark, you are British? No BBC broadcasts like last year.’

  ‘Yes, I’m British, so obviously I must work for the BBC,’ I didn’t say (it didn’t seem the right moment for sarcasm).

  The briefing threw up a confusing mass of rules, some of which seemed fine, and others which seemed extraordinary. I don’t know which ones I need to take seriously, and many were lost in translation. The first official spoke to us in English so heavily accented we could understand little of what he was saying. We nodded politely. The second official spoke better English but rushed through a series of PowerPoint slides full of long paragraphs of text, and we had no hope of keeping up with all of them.

  All news we broadcast from camp has to be passed to the Ministry first. Really? How about all the blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and emails we have no control over? We’re not allowed to unfurl commercial banners on the summit, but how about all the climbers who are part funded by sponsorship and expected to produce a summit photo with their sponsor’s logo?

  ‘They tell us that stuff every year,’ Phil said to me afterwards.

  There are two rules that are definitely new, but neither seems to be well thought through. When we leave Base Camp to climb through the Khumbu Icefall we’re supposed to sign out at the new Base Camp police check post. It sounds like a good idea in theory – if a major incident occurs, somebody knows who’s in camp and who’s on the mountain – but in reality most people climb through the Icefall at night. Is there really going to be a police officer with a logbook at 2am flagging down every head torch that passes by?

  The second rule concerns the new requirement to carry eight kilograms of trash off the mountain. This announcement received unusually positive media coverage, but nobody’s sure how it’s going to work. We’ll all be carrying our own trash back down with us, but am I really going to be spending my time in
the Western Cwm combing the glacier for other people’s litter to take back with me, or will I be resting? It would be nice to think I’d do the former, but I can think of half a dozen reasons why I might not. Eight kilograms is a huge amount of extra weight to be carrying at high altitude.

  After presenting us with khata scarves, the officials insisted we pose for a team photo. The many hangers-on in the room produced a flurry of cameras and we smiled politely as they posed alongside us.

  Were they confusing us with Reinhold Messner or Ed Veisturs? I don’t know. None of us took any team photos of our own.

  I know the government officials are only doing their job, however strange it might have seemed to us. It was all very amiable in the end, but I definitely left the briefing more confused than when it started. Tomorrow I’m looking forward to hitting the Base Camp trail and enjoying the simple life again for the next few weeks.

  Day 1 – The start of the Everest trail

  Thursday, 3 April 2014 – Phakding, Nepal

  It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I’m standing on the tarmac at Kathmandu Airport with Ian, Margaret and Edita, waiting to board a helicopter to Lukla.

  We can’t believe our luck. My previous visits to Kathmandu’s domestic terminal have involved long waits in a packed and dirty waiting room. Flights have often been delayed or cancelled due to the weather, and on one occasion I waited seven hours, only to be told to return the following day.

  But flying by private helicopter is a different story to using one of the commercial aircraft. We arrived at 6.30am and were promptly ushered through security. We took a ride in a pickup truck to the opposite side of the runway where our helicopter was waiting.

  Dorje Sherpa is with us. He is sirdar (or Sherpa leader) of the Altitude Junkies’ joint expedition to Everest and Lhotse. He is a bit of a legend in the Sherpa heartland of Nepal’s Khumbu region. We have all climbed with him on Manaslu and Everest, and he will be helping the clients on the Everest team this time.

  Ian, Margaret, Edita and I have all climbed Everest before, and we don’t intend to climb it again. This time we’ll be attempting Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. It’s linked to Everest by the South Col, and the climbing route is the same for much of the way. For a long time I’ve dreamed of following in the footsteps of Tenzing, Hillary and the early pioneers. I have longed to climb through the towering ice of the Khumbu Icefall and into the Western Cwm. I yearn to climb higher, and see the features I have read about in so many books. Lhotse offers me that possibility.

  We’re ushered into the helicopter, and Dorje sits in the front while the four of us sit in a line on the back seat. Ian and I are sandwiched in the middle. Before we depart, Margaret and Edita spend five minutes waving iPads and smartphones around, taking selfies. Margaret has a video camera, and Edita hands her iPhone to a man standing outside to take a picture. He closes the door and takes a few steps back to get us all in the shot. For a moment Edita thinks he’s going to do a runner with her phone, but all is well as he takes the photo and hands the device back to her.

  The rotors crank into motion. At 7.15 we ease forward so gently that I barely notice we’ve left the ground. Within seconds we are flying high above the colourful concrete buildings of Kathmandu.

  The rest of the forty-minute flight is not so enjoyable for me. I had only two hours’ sleep last night, and I’m feeling hungover (it’s the same old story when I’m in Kathmandu with Ian). The air is hazy, and a faint smell of fuel wafts through the open window as we cruise at altitude.

  I’m relieved when we turn towards Lukla airstrip, visible through the haze on a jungle hillside above rice terraces. It’s famous for its scary landing. The pilot must brake with all his might up a steep runway before his aircraft hits the mountain at the far end.

  As we drop from the sky Edita lets out a gasp and grips the edge of the seat next to me, as though in terror. But she too has done this flight a few times before, and I’m pretty sure she’s joking.

  Today our landing is straightforward. We pass across the runway before coming to rest on the helipad alongside it. My discomfort on the flight is forgotten when we see a man lying on a stretcher, waiting to be lifted onto the chopper for the flight back to Kathmandu. Yesterday we heard that a Sherpa broke his leg fixing ropes on the route through the Khumbu Icefall.

  It’s been a very bad start to the season. Another Sherpa from the Peak Freaks team suffered a pulmonary edema at Everest Base Camp. He died in hospital in Kathmandu yesterday. Several more helicopters have been diverted this morning to help with a rescue on Ama Dablam – a small but dramatic mountain rising above the Imja Khola Valley on the route to Base Camp. The diversions mean we must wait three hours for the rest of our team to arrive on separate flights.

  We are a large team this year, with seven clients on Everest and five on Lhotse. Two of the clients have friends and wives trekking up to Base Camp with them. Then we have Dorje and Phil Crampton, our expedition leader. In all, sixteen of us will arrive by chopper this morning.

  Dorje leads us up to a teahouse above the runway, and we spend the next few hours drinking black tea and coffee as we watch the flights come in to land. It’s a dramatic setting. There is a steep drop into the Dudh Khosi Gorge, and forested hillsides rise on either side. Upstream to our right the pointed snow-capped peak of Nupla towers over the valley.

  Helicopters come and go. Some fly in the direction of Kathmandu; others head up the valley to help with rescues. Some arrive to evacuate trekkers and climbers who have been taken ill.

  By 11.30 all members of our team have arrived and we are ready to leave on the Everest Base Camp trail. We amble through the narrow, paved main street of Lukla and down the hillside beyond. The trail is busy. Several Everest teams are heading out today, including Peak Freaks, a large team from Alpine Ascents, and our Altitude Junkies team. Porters carry enormous loads to stock the many teahouses along the trail. It’s not a wilderness experience – this part of the trail is a sprawl of villages. We pass in and out of pine forest, and don’t have to walk far before we reach another teahouse.

  The people are an annoyance, but the dzos pose a real menace. These yak-cow cross-breeds are used as beasts of burden. They show no consideration for other trail users as they trudge along, and they are difficult to overtake, even on the safer sections. Much of the trail contours around hillsides, with a precarious drop to the left into the Dudh Khosi Gorge. Passing dzos on an exposed section is a little dangerous. I get halfway through overtaking a train of them when I sense a giant horn prodding my rucksack from behind. I grab a tree trunk to prevent myself being shoved over a cliff, and a porter who is watching lets out a gasp.

  It’s a close shave. It would have been a stupid way to start (or end) my expedition when I have much greater perils ahead. But I am safe, and I respond with a nervous giggle to let him know I’m OK.

  On another occasion I have to cross a narrow suspension bridge over a chasm. Some porters amuse themselves by setting the structure rolling from left to right. They walk with their feet wide apart and stamp the edges roughly as they cross. Behind them I feel my stomach lurch and I nervously grasp the handrails as I complete the crossing, while muttering you fuckers repeatedly under my breath. But it’s all in good spirit and I reach the other side with the insides of my stomach still in place.

  I’m not in good form this morning, thanks to last night’s intemperance. I walk slowly, stopping often to take a drink and keep myself hydrated. But it’s a short day, and at one o’clock I see Phil, our expedition leader, standing outside a teahouse in the curiously named village of Phakding. The teahouse, The Buddha Lodge, belongs to Dorje, and we’ll be staying here tonight.

  I’ve timed it well; it starts raining almost immediately. My teammates are sitting around an L-shaped table, drinking milk tea and peering at their phones. Many of them bought new handsets in Kathmandu, hoping to take advantage of the 3G connectivity promised by Nepalese telecoms company NCell. I find my
self a seat between Jay and Kevin. My stomach rumbles uncharacteristically, and I try to persuade them they can hear the sound of thunder.

  ‘Mark, do you know how to crack the password for the Wi-Fi?’ Margaret asks me as she fumbles with her phone.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask Dorje?’ I reply.

  Ricardo roars with laughter. ‘Mark knows how to crack the Wi-Fi. It involves shouting “Dorje, what’s the password?”’

  Ricardo is a Mexican-American part-time mountain guide and part-time musician. He funded his Everest climb by starting up a page on the crowdsourcing website GoFundMe, and received generous donations from previous clients and fans of his music.

  ‘I raised over $30,000, and it blew my mind,’ he says.

  This fascinates Robert, an American businessman with his own motorcycle dealership.

  ‘What, people just give you money to go climb Everest? What do they get out of it?’

  ‘They get to read my dispatches, but mostly they are doing it out of kindness. I’m so touched by it all.’

  Mountain guides and musicians are two professions which capture the imagination. Ricardo happens to be both. Somehow I don’t think it’s a method that will work for Robert.

  ‘You should try it, Robert,’ I urge him. ‘Why not get in touch with all those people you sold motorbikes to? Perhaps they will remember you and give generously!’

  Robert is posting his own Everest dispatches to a blog called The World’s Top Motorcycle Dealer.

  In the afternoon I snooze in my room. There is a forty-inch TV in Dorje’s dining room, and other team members enjoy a screening of the IMAX Everest movie. I’ve seen it once before, and I know it’s a better experience to watch it in a special IMAX cinema. I skip this showing, though it does have special significance: Dorje helped to carry the nineteen-kilogram camera used to make the film to the summit of Everest.