The Everest Politics Show

by Mark Horrell

  ‘I don’t like the look of this one,’ I say while it is still some way off. ‘This looks like a body.’

  Hundreds of onlookers watch in horror as the helicopter hovers above Base Camp with its macabre burden. Then, at the last moment, the figure tilts onto its feet as the chopper comes into land.

  ‘I think he’s alive,’ Kevin says, and we breathe a collective sigh of relief.

  It’s one of the only moments of hope. For the next hour we watch in disbelief as a single helicopter makes journey after journey into the Icefall. One by one, bodies are brought down on a longline. We lose count of how many. It’s relentless. Crowds gather at the helipads. The living are taken to the medical tent, but many are corpses. Every once in a while the helicopter stops to refuel before rising into the Icefall once again.

  Another casualty is lowered into Base Camp on a longline

  Our Sherpas are listening to the radios. They are better informed than we are about what’s going on. Most of the people helping up in the Icefall are Sherpas, and most of the conversations over the radio are in Nepali. At one point Chongba tells me that as many as thirteen people are dead, all Sherpas. I can’t believe what I am witnessing.

  Towards the end of it all, Edita returns from the Icefall in a sombre mood. She disappears into the equipment tent without saying much to anyone. I think little of it, but when she doesn’t emerge after a few minutes, I look in there to see how she is. I find her slumped on top of a kit bag, totally distraught.

  Her friend Margaret is standing outside, so I grab hold of her and bundle her into the tent. I go to the kitchen tent and fetch tea for both of them as Margaret listens to Edita’s story.

  One of the fallen is Dorje Khatri – not our sirdar Dorje, but the sirdar of another team, Madison Mountaineering. He was a close relation of Ang Gelu from our own team, but Edita also knew him well. When I return with the tea she relates the story to both of us.

  ‘I reached the summit of Cho Oyu with Dorje as my Sherpa,’ Edita says. ‘It was my first high-altitude climbing experience, and Dorje was my teacher and mentor. He gave me lots of confidence and even called me Sherpa, as he thought I was a strong climber.’

  She explains that yesterday she went to say hello to him at the Madison Mountaineering camp. He was busy when she arrived, but he made time for her, sat her down, and offered her tea and coffee with a big smile.

  ‘He said to me: “Edita, I was given a second life.” Last summer he survived an avalanche on Himlung. Four of his friends were killed. I said to him, “Dorje, you’ve got a new life and you have to make the best out of it. Please, look after yourself.” I don’t know why I said this to him yesterday. He laughed, gave me a smile and a big hug. We chatted a bit more, but I knew he had work to do, so we said goodbye.’

  She pauses, fighting back tears. Margaret gives her a hug, and I leave the tent to give them some privacy.

  Later Edita tells us that, on the way down from the summit of Cho Oyu, she asked Dorje if she could help carry empty oxygen bottles. He laughed, but gave her a bottle anyway. After Cho Oyu he became her friend, and she felt like a sister to him. Last year, when she climbed Everest from the north side, Dorje was there with another team. When she was descending from Camp 3 after the summit, she was tired and got lost in the sprawl of Camp 2 on the North Ridge. Dorje spotted her and took her to his tent. He gave her tea and adjusted her oxygen bottle. She left with renewed energy and descended another 1,400m to the safety of Advanced Base Camp.

  Shortly before lunch, Phil returns from the Icefall with our six brave Sherpas. By now most of the work has been done. Phil says Dorje and Ang Gelu supervised the work at the avalanche site, while Pasang Ongchu, Kami, Kusang and Samden helped to dig out many of the bodies. The avalanche swept several Sherpas down a crevasse beneath a ladder section, piling snow on top of them. The injuries were severe. The ladder was close to the serac that fell off the West Shoulder, and many of the dead were encased in ice. It must have been grim work, traumatic, and hard to comprehend.

  Meanwhile Ricardo also made himself useful. He wandered over to the Himalayan Rescue Association tent to see if they needed help. David Hamilton of Jagged Globe put him to work treating injuries. Two were critical, some had broken limbs, and there were many lacerations from shards of ice.

  For most of lunch we sit shell-shocked in total silence. Phil tells us thirteen Sherpas are confirmed dead, but as many as seven are still missing. It’s an unprecedented tragedy, one of the most horrendous days in Everest’s history.

  There have been similar tragedies on the mountains of Asia over the years, but not many. Sixteen members of a German team were buried in their sleep in an avalanche on 8,125m Nanga Parbat in 1937. An avalanche on Kang Guru, a 6,981m peak in the Annapurna region of Nepal, killed eighteen people in 2005. By far the worst, in terms of numbers, occurred on 7,134m Peak Lenin in Kyrgyzstan in 1990. Forty-five climbers were camped on the mountain when a vast serac wiped out their camp. Only two survived.

  As for accidents on Everest, eight westerners died in a storm in 1996, and in both 2006 and 2012 there were around a dozen deaths in separate incidents across the season. In 1922 seven Sherpas died in an avalanche below the North Col. George Mallory and Howard Somervell both survived that avalanche. In his diary Somervell lamented the fact that no ‘sahibs’ died, which would have enabled them to share the loss in the same way they shared the risk.

  I realise that today has been Everest’s worst accident by some margin. It takes me some time to absorb this thought. When I woke up this morning I was anticipating my first climb into the fabled Khumbu Icefall. What I ended up doing was witnessing Everest’s worst ever tragedy. I can’t quite believe it.

  We retire to our tents to contemplate the unimaginable. I assume Phil will cancel happy hour, but at four o’clock he is keen to round us up. We sit in solidarity for what we now call ‘cocktail hour’. There is nothing to be happy about today.

  Still, we are subdued. We speak little and sit in sombre silence for much of the time. There is no talk of leaving the mountain from a single one of us. We all want to stay, but some who have phoned home say their families are pressuring them to leave.

  The gulf in perspective between climbers here on the mountain and those left at home is like an ocean. For non-climbers, it is inconceivable that we should stay. We have seen many people die. Surely we understand that it’s no longer safe, and we must end our expeditions out of respect for the dead?

  They don’t understand that we think about safety all the time, and we have other ways of showing our respect. How can we not think about these things, after seeing what we have today?

  I can only give the climber’s perspective. We accept the risk of death, though none of us wishes it, and we do all we can to avoid it. But accidents are frequent on dangerous Himalayan peaks. There are fatalities on Everest every year. They sometimes cause people to think again, but most of us have thought about those things already. We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t weighed the risk and accepted it.

  As for respect for the dead, why do people assume that the dead would want us to stop climbing? No climber I know would wish for companions to give up after they are gone. Every Sherpa knows that it’s important to continue, because they all have families to feed. While many climbers abandon their expeditions after a fatality, this is a personal decision, and everyone is free to make up their own mind. This unwritten rule of climbing is sometimes difficult for those who are not climbers to understand.

  Even so, we have all seen what the Icefall can do. Is it more dangerous now than it was before? This is my first time here. I don’t know the answer to that, but many here have more experience. The decision about what happens next is in the hands of the Sherpas. None of us will force them to climb if they don’t want to.

  This question hangs in the air, but our team has a past history to draw on. Two years ago, on Manaslu, many of our team survived an avalanche that killed ten westerners and one Sherpa. They were in Camp
2 when a blast of air from the tumbling snow uprooted their tents and threw them several metres. They were boiling water for breakfast when they felt themselves catapulted down the slope, still inside their tents. By a miracle they all survived with only a few bruises. Kevin and Mel chose to go home for different reasons, Kevin because he had lost a boot.

  Phil and Edita were there too. Both stayed, and Edita summited a couple of weeks later. More importantly there were the Sherpas; Dorje was also at Camp 2 when it happened, but most were down at Base Camp. Many of the senior Sherpas, including Dorje, Pasang Ongchu, Tarke, Chongba and Kami, decided to stay. There was no talk of leaving the mountain – they all wanted to reach the summit.

  We have faith in our guys. But at six o’clock, shortly before dinner, an incident makes us realise that darker things are afoot.

  We are sitting in the dining tent when we hear chanting outside. Phil and Robert are sitting near the door and go out to investigate. They see what Robert later describes as a mob of angry Sherpas from other teams passing by our camp.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he says to Phil.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me.’

  They both come inside and sit down, but a moment later Dorje arrives and takes Phil outside again.

  When Phil returns he explains what they’ve witnessed. He says a group of younger Sherpas from the IMG team, including a young ringleader employed by Jagged Globe, have just been through camp. They were agitating for Sherpas from all teams to go on strike.

  We have a few older heads among our Sherpa team, chief among them Dorje. Dorje, Tarke and Chongba are all in their forties and hard as nails. They have many Everest and other 8,000m summits between them. There is no chance they would be influenced by young bucks in other teams. But to avoid an awkward situation, Dorje suggests to Phil that two of our Sherpas join the mob to provide an appearance of solidarity. He sends our young climbing sirdar Pasang Ongchu. Pasang is one of only about twenty Sherpas in Nepal with UIAGM certification, the top international qualification for mountain guides. Only a handful of these Sherpas are working on Everest this year, and this gives Pasang a high status. He is cheerful and helpful, and no militant. It’s a good decision by Dorje.

  I worry about Edita. I sit next to her at dinner, and she is taking her friend Dorje Khatri’s death hard. They stood on the summit of Cho Oyu together. Dorje took her under his wing when other members of the team were flagging. He recognised that she was strong enough to reach the top, despite her inexperience. He was one of the older Sherpas, like our Dorje, and commanded respect from the younger crowd.

  She keeps a blog of her own and I suggest that she posts a tribute to him. Although it’s not much, it’s something, and more than many of those who died today will receive. Memories are one of the best ways of helping a family through difficult times.

  I am one of the last to leave the dining tent after dinner to head for my sleeping bag. As I’m passing the Sherpa dining tent – the place that has been declared out of bounds to inji (foreigners) for the duration of the expedition – Phil and Dorje emerge from inside.

  ‘Hey, Mark, come in,’ Phil says. ‘The Sherpas would like us to join them tonight. Who else has gone back to their tents? Ask them to come and join us.’

  I walk down the stone stairs built out of moraine blocks, linking the dining and storage tents with our sleeping tents, which are lower down in a slight trough. I shout to two figures I see wandering around in the darkness, and tell them that the Sherpas have invited us into their sanctum.

  I return to the Sherpa dining tent and find that most of my teammates are already there. The room is more Spartan than ours, as you would expect. Benches line the perimeter and there are five or six tables to eat at. This is the place where twenty-three climbing Sherpas and seven kitchen staff come to relax and eat.

  I’m embarrassed when half a dozen of them stand up as soon as I enter, offering me their seats.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I say, gesturing for them to sit down.

  I squeeze in beside my old friend Chongba. I am given a shot of rum, and somebody arrives with tins of Tuborg beer. Many of our companions have lost friends and family today, but the evening is good-spirited, and they could not be more welcoming to us. I feel like there is no ‘us and them’. Tonight we are united as a team, and share in the sense of loss.

  ‘Do you still want to climb Lhotse?’ I ask Chongba.

  He will be my climbing Sherpa for the third time on summit day, should we be granted an opportunity. I know this could be a difficult question. When he replies, I study him carefully to see if there is any awkwardness.

  He speaks only a few words of English, but it’s enough.

  ‘No problem,’ he says, raising his glass with a big grin. His answer is immediate and as genuine as could be.

  One of the highlights of the evening is when Ian launches into some impromptu theatre. He is describing the behaviour of a guide from another commercial operator. He decides the best way is by stagecraft. The guide had wandered officiously through the place where we stood at the end of the glacier as events were unfolding. None of our team had seen him before, or knew who he was.

  ‘OK, we have a rescue to carry out here. Who has water?’ Ian says, looking at Jay.

  Jay takes the cue, and passes over a one-litre Nalgene bottle. Ian takes a sip, then strikes the bottle against the table.

  ‘You better not drink that, I have a bug,’ he says, passing the bottle back to Jay.

  Acting is not Ian’s forte, and nor is this behaviour in his character. This makes it all the more entertaining and everyone laughs. The performance makes no sense whatsoever, but several members of the team confirm the incident took place exactly as Ian described. They tell us that a cameraman from the Discovery Channel was following him, and the guide must have been suffering from an unusual case of stage fright as he played to the camera.

  Later on, Phil introduces the four new members of the ‘Junkies Family’. These are Peter, Jay, Caroline and Ricardo, the only members of the team who have not been on an Altitude Junkies expedition before. When he gets to Ricardo he introduces him as a ‘guide’. He pronounces the word like it’s some grand title used as a substitute for something more mundane. He gestures inverted commas in the air with his fingers.

  Phil is quite adamant that his expeditions are unguided. He makes frequent references to mountain guides with expansive egos whose abilities fall short of the Sherpas. Everyone roars with laughter, but Ricardo takes it in good heart.

  Ang Gelu is perhaps the most boisterous. He sits next to Edita. They share in the loss of Dorje Khatri – Edita as friend and Ang Gelu as family – and there is a natural bond between them.

  He is talking about me to the others, and he keeps calling me Mark Dickson, the name of our friend he helped to the summit of Everest two years ago.

  ‘I’m not Mark Dickson,’ I repeat every time he says it.

  The other Sherpas find this funny, but Ang Gelu ignores me and keeps going. After a while, they all catch on, and join in.

  ‘He’s not Mark Dickson!’ they cry in unison.

  I tell them that I don’t mind, because Ang Gelu helped me up the Second Step two years ago by offering me his hand.

  ‘But he still doesn’t remember my name!’ I say, in mock hurt.

  They find this Sherpa-Inji role reversal entertaining. I think back to the discussions we had a few days ago, about whether Ang Gelu should carry loads, and I wonder about his relationship with the rest of them.

  Several drinks later it feels like well past midnight and I should be dragging myself off to bed. When I look at my watch I see that it’s only 9.30.

  It’s been a strange day, a sad day, but it has ended in good spirit.

  But the horrors of the last hours hit me again as I’m walking back to my tent. I wonder whether we should be drowning our sorrows like we did, when so many have lost so much. Maybe we should have paid our respects in silence. We were all a
ffected by what we saw today; it will remain with us for a long time. For those who have lost family or friends it may never go away.

  Then I think of the smiling faces in the tent tonight. Some of those smiles hid a greater loss. But life and loss go hand in hand, and tonight we shared it as a group in a spirit of friendship and solidarity.

  We know that any one of us could have been up in the Icefall when the avalanche fell. We are all grateful that we are still here, and able to continue with our lives.

  Day 17 – A storm brewing

  Saturday, 19 April 2014 – Everest Base Camp, Nepal

  Life at 5,270m has many disadvantages, but hangovers aren’t among them. I don’t know how many Sherpa rums they gave me yesterday, but after more than a week at high altitude we have many more red blood cells than when we arrived. Physically, this morning feels like any other.

  Emotionally, things feel very different. There is a sombre mood in camp this morning. The Sherpas need a period of time to pay their respects to those who have died, and so do we. No one is in any hurry to make the next move, and this is likely to remain the case for a day or two.

  I spend the first two hours of this morning writing a blog post on my iPhone. I describe the sad events we witnessed, paying my respects to those who died and Sherpas in general. Without them none of this would be possible, and they spend much more time exposed to the dangers of the Icefall than we do.

  At eleven o’clock I leave camp and head in the direction of Gorak Shep. I hope to find 3G connectivity somewhere along the route so that I can send my post. The trail is full of trekkers moving like caterpillars. Many are too exhausted to notice someone coming the other way, and I have to divert across boulders to get around them. Every few hundred metres I check my phone, but at no point is there even a sniff of 3G.