Flying Off Everest (11 page)

Waters’s camp was small compared to most. Located on the far north end of Everest Base Camp, essentially and intentionally on the outskirts, nearest to the start of the icefall, it consisted of a single large, bright yellow dome tent; a cook tent (which was really just a series of plastic tarps strung over an aluminum frame); and a few smaller, yellow dome-shaped tents for individuals to sleep in. This was because his climbing team was supposed to be small that year: just Waters,
the French climber Sophie Denis, and his friend and trusted climbing sherpa from numerous past expeditions, Lakpa Dorjee. They also had two cooks: Krishna and his assistant, Mingma. They were an exceedingly small team in comparison to some of the forty-plus member expeditions nearby, including that year’s International Mountain Guides (IMG) group, which consisted of almost thirty trekkers and climbers and over seventy sherpas and cooks.

When Lakpa arrived with Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu, the size of Waters’s camp nearly doubled. Then Waters was told Baloo and Shri Hari would be coming too, as soon as the long-awaited wing arrived in Pokhara. Waters didn’t seem to mind, though. “It was good for us,” he says. “At least for me—I enjoyed hanging out with them. Most nights we just ate Sherpa stew in the cook tent and drank tea.” He enjoyed talking with his guests and fed off of their constant, unyielding enthusiasm. They kept all of their gear, or at least what little there was of it, in Waters’s large expedition dome tent.

It took a few days, but Ang Bhai eventually managed to obtain a helmet and gloves from people leaving Base Camp who either had spares or didn’t want to bother carrying the extra gear out with them. He swapped his brother’s boots, which were a size too large for him and had given him painful blisters on the hike in from Lukla and on the attempt on Island Peak, for a pair that actually fit. There was still the problem of Babu not having a climbing harness, so Lakpa gave him his and donned one of the lightweight paragliding harnesses Niviuk had sent them ahead of the wing. Never intended for climbing, the harness lacked a belay loop—the fail-safe anchor point climbers attach to a rope to keep them, in the simplest terms, from falling to their death. Climbing harnesses are designed to arrest a fall generating a tremendous amount of force, like, say, plummeting off a cliff.

Inversely, the paragliding harness Lakpa had wasn’t designed to stop a fall at all. If you were to fall while paragliding, there would be no rope to catch you anyway. Consequently, the harness is designed only to support the body weight of the pilot wearing it and to keep him
or her attached to the wing above. This is done with two attachment points, one on either hip, rather than one in the middle of the waist, like on a climbing harness. Lacking another option, however, Lakpa took two pieces of 1-inch tubular climbing webbing, attached them to either side of his paragliding harness, and tied them together in a knot in the middle, fashioning a crude belay loop to which he could attach the Jumars (handheld mechanical devices that help climbers use ropes) he would use to ascend the fixed lines up Everest. It would work, he was certain, provided he didn’t actually fall.

Every day, Lakpa called Baloo back in Pokhara on his cellular phone to check on the status of the wing, and on the boat that was supposedly being shipped from England by Babu’s friend, Pete Astles, for the second half of their journey to the ocean. He used his left hand to hold the phone while his right covered his other ear to block the wind. Every day for over a month the answer was the same: Neither the wing nor the kayak was even in the country yet. They told no one at Base Camp except Waters and his team about their plans to fly off the mountain. “Their plan seemed to change day by day,” Waters says. “They weren’t really sure what they were going to do.”

Assuming that both the wing and the kayak would eventually arrive in time to complete the expedition—the wing, meeting them at Everest Base Camp, the kayak, wherever they happened to land along the Sun Kosi River, if they managed to fly off the summit and across the Himalaya—Lakpa started his team of inexperienced climbing rookies up the mountain. He knew it would take them nearly a month to establish their higher camps—four, each approximately 2,000 feet higher than the last—and prepare their bodies for the final summit push,
*
which he and Babu anticipated would happen sometime at the
end of May, during the annual weather window. Whenever it happened to open.

The first step would be to establish a camp above the Khumbu Icefall, the teetering, 2,000-foot wall of continually moving blocks of ice known as seracs, some the size of large buildings, and deep crevasses that inconveniently open and close without warning. The sound of its constant grinding can be heard easily from Base Camp, not far to the south. It is the most technically demanding section of the entire South Col route, which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first used to summit the mountain in 1953: following the Khumbu Glacier up the lower part of the mountain, then cutting up the Lhotse Face to the South Col, to the Southeast Ridgeline and, eventually, the summit. From the
bergschrund
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at 23,000 feet, where the glacier begins, it flows 2.5 miles down a gently sloping valley known as the Western Cwm, where it cracks and splinters in a fairly manageable and navigable way, until it tumbles spectacularly off a sheer cliff, forming the now infamous icefall. It is there that Babu, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu learned to climb. And fast.

Since the unstable seracs that make up the icefall have a tendency to shift, or just plain fall over during the heat of mid- to late afternoon, most climbers find it prudent to avoid dawdling through it. Even though the route navigating this ever-changing ice labyrinth is quite efficiently managed by an accomplished team of six sherpas known as “the Icefall Doctors,” who work day and night to maintain a path through the death trap using an intricate series of fixed ropes and aluminum ladders,
^†
there are never any guarantees of making it through safely. People die in the icefall almost every year—their bodies, if not retrieved, are crushed, dismembered, beaten, and ground by
the unyielding power of the ice and deposited at the bottom, almost unrecognizable a few years later.

Babu and Lakpa were still in the middle of the icefall by late afternoon on their first day climbing in mid-April. Babu could hardly breathe, had a searing headache, and had to stop to rest every few feet. Lakpa wasn’t sure what to do. They would need to travel through the icefall at least eight to ten more times before summiting. And they would need to do it much, much faster if they weren’t going to die, let alone stand a chance of getting to the top. He also knew it was only going to get harder for Babu to function the higher they went, and that they intended to go even higher than the summit with the paraglider. He needed Babu to get over his altitude sickness. Quick.

Babu, likewise, was becoming disheartened. He asked Waters, who had by now become a good friend, after days of drinking tea and discussing climbing together, if he thought he could make it. “No problem, Babu,” Waters always told him. “You can make it.” He liked Babu. “He’s one of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve ever met,” Waters says. He wanted him to succeed.

Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu were left to themselves to shuttle loads up to Camp I, and each succeeding camp. They left the first day at 3:00 a.m., following another group of hired climbing sherpas who were also shuttling loads up the icefall. “The first time I went through the Khumbu Icefall, I was really scared,” Ang Bhai says, recalling the experience. “Really scared. I didn’t know what’s going on. I didn’t know anything. The whole time, I walked behind other people, because I didn’t know the way. I didn’t want to get lost, so I followed them.”

After carrying his first load—a single tent—up the icefall in strong winds, Ang Bhai was completely wrecked. “I spent two days after that in Base Camp with a really big headache,” he says. Of the four members of the climbing team, two were suffering severely from altitude sickness. Only Lakpa and Nima Wang Chu seemed to be able to even mildly function, even at the base of Everest.

After they carried enough gear to the top of the icefall to set up at Camp I, they spent four days shuttling even more gear 1.74 miles and approximately 1,500 vertical feet up the glacier through an area known as the Western Cwm to Camp II, directly below the Lhotse Face. During the day temperatures in the cwm soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the sunlight reflecting off the snow-white faces of Lhotse, Nuptse, and Everest and off the Khumbu Glacier itself. Being caught in the middle in the sun was like being an ant caught beneath a mountain valley–size magnifying glass. Babu and Ang Bhai felt terrible. They were losing weight and having a difficult time sleeping. The weather was also becoming an issue. The jet stream wasn’t moving an inch. The summit was still being blasted by 100-mile-per-hour winds, even with the onset of the monsoon in the Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean, which in the past had always pushed the river of fast-moving air that was still raging at the summit just slightly to the north. There was some speculation in Base Camp of a split in the jet stream, part north and part south, but no one actually knew what was going on, or what was going to happen. According to Alan Arnette—a fifty-four-year-old member of the IMG expedition that year, an experienced mountaineer, and “one of the most respected voices on Everest,” according to
Outside
magazine—“The weather was proving almost impossible to predict using the usual models. Forecasters threw out some models and refined others as the season progressed, but by [then] teams had become skeptical of their usually reliable weather partners.”

Eventually, a tentative break in the weather was announced for May 15. Rodrigo Raineri, the Brazilian who was attempting to paraglide off the top of the mountain, and Squash Falconer, the British woman who was about to attempt the same feat, both mobilized their teams for a summit bid. Babu and Lakpa still didn’t even have their paraglider. And Babu could hardly walk.

Still, Babu and Lakpa decided to push on to Camp III and spend a night, in order to be fully acclimatized for their eventual summit push.
Camp III is perched high on the steep South Face of Lhotse, at about 24,000 feet. To get there one must climb a steep, 20- to 50-degree wall of hard-packed snow and ice with the assistance of several 200-foot-long fixed lines placed, of course, by sherpas. Even with the fixed lines, it’s a difficult, risky proposition. On May 1 a fifty-five-year-old climber on the IMG team named Rick Hitch simply collapsed while ascending to Camp III. He never regained consciousness. The exact cause of his death is still unknown.

Babu was still uncertain whether he could make it. His altitude sickness, which Lakpa had kept telling him would eventually go away, wasn’t going away. Back at Base Camp, he asked Waters again, “Do you think I can make it to Camp III?” Waters, not entirely certain himself but not wanting to upset his friend, told him he thought he could. Babu made it to Camp III, but on the way back to Base Camp he began to hallucinate in the middle of the icefall. He later said he saw “five ropes instead of one.” Other climbers started laughing at him, he says. They allegedly thought he was dancing.
Shit, I’m not dancing,
Babu thought to himself.
I can’t see straight!

He was trying to avoid some invisible threat when he was already standing on a very real one.

On May 8 the specialty ultralight wing from France finally arrived in Pokhara, free of taxes. That same morning, Squash Falconer departed Base Camp for her final summit push and her own attempt at launching a paraglider off the top of Everest. Like most everyone else on the mountain, she wasn’t aware that Babu and Lakpa were actually intending to fly off of it before her.

Back at the Blue Sky Paragliding office, Arrufat used a stencil to spray-paint the logo of his professional paragliding organization, the APPI, onto the white and red fabric of the wing, filling in the parts he missed with a black permanent marker. Baloo then caught a flight to Kathmandu with the wing, where he met Shri Hari, a bespectacled,
smart-looking Nepali with wavy, slicked-back black hair. Shri Hari had grown up in a small mountain village just three hours from Babu and had flown across Nepal from east to west in a tandem paraglider with him in 2010, in twenty-one days, unsupported. He had filmed the journey and intended to make a full documentary about the adventure, which he had yet to complete. At Babu’s prompting, Lakpa hired him as the cameraman for their impromptu Everest expedition. Once in Kathmandu, Baloo and Shri Hari boarded the next available flight to Lukla. It took them four days to reach Everest Base Camp.

Baloo, a handsome young man with gentle eyes and a soft voice, put the wing in a regular trekking backpack along with some of his clothes to disguise it from the police. “There are very strict police checks in some places,” he says. “If they had known, there would have been some trouble.” Babu and Lakpa didn’t have permits for what they were doing.

After arriving at Base Camp, Baloo and Shri Hari both became ill with altitude sickness. They had gained too much altitude too quickly, rushing their approach from Lukla in order to deliver the wing to Babu and Lakpa before Raineri or Falconer could launch off the mountain. According to Baloo, he and Shri Hari had also spent a good deal of time drinking “Sherpa Roxy,” a whiskeylike grain alcohol, during their rush to reach Base Camp. “We were already dehydrated from the altitude,” he recalls. “I think the whiskey only made us more dry.” Baloo developed a wicked headache and a persistent cough. Happy that their wing had actually arrived, even though the other two paragliders were already on their way to the summit, the team spent their last few “rest” nights in camp dancing, drinking, and playing loud Nepali music out of the small Chinese CD player Lakpa had brought from his home in Kathmandu.