Flying Off Everest (10 page)

Babu looked down at the map laid out on the short table in front of him. There was a piece of string connecting the points that represented Everest’s summit and the mountain’s Northwest Ridge. “Do you think we can make it?” he asked. Ryan Waters, a lanky thirty-seven-year-old American climber and professional mountain guide, sat beside him, scratching his beard. “It seems like you should be able to do it,” Waters said, his breath rising in the diffused yellow light of their dome-shaped tent on the Khumbu Glacier in Everest Base Camp. Both wore puffy goose-down jackets and tight-fitting wool hats. “The math seems to work.” In his hands were rough calculations for Babu and Lakpa’s anticipated rate of descent from the summit once airborne, scrawled on a sheet of paper. If the math was right, Waters knew, they would be able to clear the Northwest Ridge and fly back into Nepal after launching their paraglider from the Northeast Ridge over into Tibet. If the math was wrong, they’d hit the sheer North Face of the mountain at anywhere between 20 and 50 miles per hour. “But I don’t know anything about paragliding,” Waters added.

“It’s all good,” Babu said. “It will work.”

Since they had arrived at Base Camp a month earlier, Babu and Lakpa had shared Waters’s camp with him and his crew. “I found out I was going to be sharing camp with them once I arrived in Kathmandu,”
recalls the Colorado-based climber and owner of the guide service Mountain Professionals; he was contracting the logistics of his personal expedition to Lhotse through the Kathmandu-based outfitter Himalayan Trailblazer. “I had met Lakpa in 2006 when we were both on K2. He was working as a sherpa on a Canadian expedition at the time, along with Tsering Pasong, the guy who eventually became my partner for my company’s logistics. Tsering was like, ‘Yeah, Lakpa is going to be with us in Base Camp.’ He didn’t even tell me what they were going to be doing. But that’s how this group of Sherpas is. They’re like a tight-knit family, so it was automatic. I was like, ‘Sure, those guys can share our base camp.’ I didn’t even think about it.”

Waters had been on three previous Everest expeditions, summiting twice, and had worked as a guide all over the Himalaya and Andes. He was recovering from a recent breakup by attempting to climb the fourth-highest mountain in the world, Lhotse, Everest’s neighboring 27,940-foot peak to the east, with a thirty-two-year-old New York– based French alpinist and motivational speaker named Sophie Denis. “I was there on kind of a personal journey that spring,” Waters says. “I was like, ‘I just want to go to the Himalaya and go climbing, and be away from people.’” So when Lakpa showed up with Babu, who had no real climbing experience, and told him that they were going to fly off the top of Everest and then paddle to the ocean, Waters decided to just roll with it.

After celebrating the start of their journey with their friends and a few cases of Carlsburg beer at the Pokhara Pizza House, Lakpa and Babu said good-bye to their still-upset wives and children, promised to come home alive, and caught a flight to Kathmandu. They requested permits from the Nepali government to fly off Everest but were promptly denied. They were told it was illegal, despite the fact that two other foreign teams had been issued permits to fly off the summit of Everest that year already—Raineri’s and Falconer’s. Babu and Lakpa then hopped on a small, two-prop plane to Lukla and began the 38.5-mile walk to Everest Base Camp. They still had no paraglider, no
kayak, no permits, no camera to film the movie they were supposedly making, and, in Babu’s case, not even some of the basic equipment he would need to climb—namely, a climbing harness. According to Lakpa, Babu also didn’t have any money.

“Babu borrowed money from friends—$100 here, $200 there—but didn’t use it at all for the expedition,” Lakpa says. “He gave it to his family. He came with no money from his house.” Whatever happened to the $6,000 Kimberly Phinney sent Babu from the United States to help fund the expedition, Lakpa claims he doesn’t know. “It’s not my business,” he states simply. Regardless, the two friends pressed on toward Everest.

Before leaving Kathmandu, they had managed to convince a local outdoor apparel company called Mountain Blackstone to provide them with full-body down suits, so at least they wouldn’t freeze higher up on the mountain. Lakpa also contacted his friend Tsering Nima, owner of the Kathmandu-based outfitter Himalayan Trailblazer (the same one that was outfitting Waters’s Lhotse expedition), at the last minute and asked him if he might be able to help, since his own cousin’s outfitter, HAD, was unwilling. Nima, a longtime friend of Lakpa, told him that Himalayan Trailblazer would be happy to help by providing all of the expedition’s climbing logistics, save the team’s bottled oxygen, which would cost $3,000. Nima offered Lakpa the use of Waters’s base camp and promised to send two climbing sherpas to help shuttle loads up the mountain. Nima then called Phu Dorji Sherpa and Nima Wang Chu, two young, low-altitude trekking guides, both of whom had climbed only once before in their lives, and asked them if they would be willing to join the expedition as climbing sherpas, without pay. Remarkably, both agreed.

“I was really excited to go,” recalls Phu Dorji, a wild-haired, chain-smoking Nepali who prefers to be called by his nickname, Ang Bhai (“small boy”). He was twenty-seven years old when the opportunity arose. “I was at a movie in Kathmandu when Tsering called me and asked, ‘Ang Bhai, are you interested in going to Everest?’ I said, ‘Of
course.’ After the movie I went to the Himalayan Trailblazer office, and there’s Lakpa. We discussed what kind of project it is. And I’m shocked—whoa! It was really interesting. I was really happy to go.”

One week later, Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu were on their way to Everest along with Babu and Lakpa. Ang Bhai had had his first climbing experience, working as a porter on 20,305-foot Imja Tse, only six months before. Nima Wang Chu had climbed just once before on Mera Peak, working as an assistant guide. Ang Bhai didn’t have any climbing gear. “I had to get some equipment from my brother, who works as a climber,” Ang Bhai says. “I didn’t have good shoes. My brother gave me his shoes. They were quite big.” He didn’t have gloves, or a helmet either.

The path to Everest Base Camp from Lukla leads north out of town along the banks of the icy, boulder-strewn Dudh Kosi, crossing the glacial meltwater river at regular intervals over high, trembling footbridges. It then zigzags up a steep canyon wall, through a stand of tall pines that punctuates the view of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru’s snowcapped peaks, 2 vertical miles above. Every inch of arable land is terraced and planted with barley, buckwheat, or potatoes. Chortens
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and walls of intricately carved
mani
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stones stand quietly alongside the trail. Hundreds of porters and trekkers pass daily, carrying supplies to and from the mountains and the remote villages that lay beneath them, meandering through glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and rhododendron, past cascading waterfalls, huge boulders, and burbling streams. A few hours’ walk beyond the small village of Pheriche, the path opens onto the vast glacial moraine of
the Khumbu Glacier, a 12-mile-long river of ice and grinding rock tumbling down the southern flank of the mountain. At over 16,000 feet there are no trees, the trail often disappearing beneath lingering head-high winter snowpack. Chortens stand sentinel along the trail in memory of deceased climbers, mostly Sherpa. The trek ends at a small, movable city consisting of hundreds of brightly colored tents sprawled amidst the scree at the base of the Khumbu Icefall. Everest Base Camp. A quasi-permanent alpine climbing village tucked in an amphitheater of towering mountains and hanging glaciers, occupied nearly year-round by climbing teams from around the world. Each attempting to climb Everest, or one of its neighboring peaks: Lhotse, Nuptse, and Pumori. Long strings of prayer flags flap violently in the gusts of wind that rage down the mountain and through the Western Cwm.
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A strong hiker, already acclimatized to the altitude, could do the trek from the Lukla airstrip to Everest Base Camp in two or three long days. Those who are not acclimatized, like Babu and Lakpa and their two hired sherpas, generally take over a week to make the journey, in order to avoid the mind-splitting headaches and illness that accompany gaining altitude too quickly.

Lakpa knew this, having worked at altitude for so many years and with so many beginning climbers. So he decided that it would be best if, on their walk to Base Camp, he took Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu off the main path and onto a side trail that leads to nearby 20,305-foot Imja Tse, also known as Island Peak—the same mountain Babu had attempted to climb with Pete Astles in 2006. His idea was for them to further acclimatize themselves to being at altitude before attempting Everest. And to see how the three other members of his expedition, who had no real practical climbing experience to speak of, fared on a relatively short and “easy” mountain. A popular “trekking
peak” just over 5 miles from Everest, Imja Tse has fixed lines running to the top and requires no technical climbing. “You just need crampons,” Lakpa says. “No ice axe.” Despite having great weather and making good time, they abandoned their summit attempt on Island Peak after Babu “got a really, really big headache at high camp,” according to Ang Bhai.

Babu was concerned. It was the second time he had been at altitude, and again, he felt like a nail was being driven into his skull. It wasn’t a good feeling. He asked Lakpa if he still thought he could make it to the top of Everest. “Climbing Everest is easy,” Lakpa tried to reassure him. “It is just walking slowly. Up.”

In a way, it was true. Ropes placed by sherpas each season lead all the way to the summit. Technically, and with a lot of luck, all anyone needs to do nowadays to get to the top is follow them. But with a searing migraine, Babu couldn’t seem to even walk at altitude, let alone climb. Despite what he told Babu, Lakpa was starting to worry too. They still didn’t have their paraglider, and after seeing Babu not be able to make it to the top of a relatively easy peak—9,000 feet shorter than Everest—in good weather, he knew it didn’t speak well for his lowland friend’s ability to function at altitude. Let alone fly a paraglider—if they ever did get one—at over 29,000 feet. “I didn’t think to worry about if my pilot could walk,” Lakpa says. Still, he laughed his typical deep-chested laugh and told Babu with a smile that he would get him to the top of Everest, one way or another. “You just have to get us back down,” Lakpa reminded him, still laughing but serious. He meant to keep his promise to return home alive.

Back in Pokhara, Babu’s boss, David Arrufat, waited patiently for his friend Richard Tan to arrive with the paragliding wing Babu and Lakpa were going to use on Everest. It had been made in a rush in France by the company Niviuk, but was being snuck into the country in Tan’s luggage on an international passenger flight from Malaysia in order to avoid Nepal’s nearly 200 percent import tax on the approximately $4,000 wing. It was also exceedingly late. Babu and Lakpa had
been gone for over a month, already starting to climb, and the wing still wasn’t even in the right country.

It had been agreed before their departure that Babu and Lakpa’s twenty-nine-year-old friend Balkrishna Basel (Baloo, as his friends and family call him), a fellow Nepali tandem pilot working for another paragliding company in Pokhara, would carry the wing with him to Everest Base Camp and meet them there. The expedition’s cameraman, Shri Hari Shresthra, one of Babu’s childhood friends now living in Kathmandu, would meet Baloo at the capital and accompany him to Lukla and on the trail to Base Camp, carrying the camera equipment Babu and Lakpa would need to make a documentary about the expedition. This included two small, high-definition point-of-view cameras made by the company GoPro and a SPOT GPS locator, which Kimberly Phinney had mailed to Nepal from San Francisco. Lakpa agreed to pay for all of their expenses, including the new $1,000 shoulder-mount camera Shri Hari also bought to film portions of the expedition with. Baloo took up a collection amongst their friends and fellow paragliding pilots in Pokhara to help pay for the expedition’s supplemental oxygen. Babu and Lakpa’s trip would require, at minimum, twelve four-liter bottles (three per person) at a cost of $250 per bottle. They managed to raise nearly $1,250. It still wasn’t enough to cover even half of the team’s oxygen.

Come May—only three weeks before the season’s projected weather window on Everest—the paraglider still hadn’t arrived.