Flying Off Everest (14 page)

No one was there to greet them when they landed. Shri Hari Shresthra, their cameraman, was still at Base Camp, a full day’s walk away,
waiting for them to arrive there. Babu and Lakpa had not bothered to discuss with Shri Hari where, exactly, they were going to land. He had assumed they were just going to fly back down to Base Camp; he wasn’t expecting them to land over 12 miles away from his lens. But in hindsight, Lakpa says, “We didn’t know where we were going to land.”

Few climbers on the mountain even noticed what had just happened over their heads. Those who did notice, like Damian Benegas, the Argentinian expedition leader who was standing on the summit along with two of his clients, could do little more than watch. Greg Vernouvage, a guide working with IMG, simply wrote on the team’s blog later that he saw “the parapont guy fly off the summit of Everest, over the top of Nuptse, and apparently he went all the way to Syangboche (above Namche)!” He assumed it was Raineri flying solo, not knowing Babu and Lakpa were even on the mountain, let alone that they had intended to fly off of it. Ryan Waters and Sophie Denis, meanwhile, cheered Babu and Lakpa on from Camp II, descending after their successful summit of Lhotse. “I don’t think they heard us, though,” Waters says.

Babu’s friend and expedition sponsor Kimberly Phinney watched a glowing yellow dot—representing their location—on her computer screen, live from her home in San Francisco. She hadn’t heard anything from either Babu or Lakpa since they had departed from Kathmandu (in fact, she hadn’t actually talked to Lakpa yet), but had stayed in contact with Arrufat, who had been talking to both Babu and Lakpa on the phone while they were in Base Camp waiting for the wing to arrive. He didn’t have much information for her, though. She attempted to update the expedition website’s blog for Babu as he and Lakpa went up the mountain, but the information she provided was sparse at best, based almost solely only the location of the little yellow dot on her screen that represented them. She wrote her blog posts in broken, misspelled English, as if Babu or Lakpa had been writing them.

The entirety of the expedition blog she posted on theultimatedescent.com, relating the team’s two-month long ascent of Everest, read:

When the yellow dot finally stopped moving on Phinney’s screen at the Syangboche airstrip, a twelve-hour and forty-five-minute time difference away, at 11:34 p.m. in San Francisco on May 21 she posted:

That was it. The entire adventure summed up in 271 words.

Back on the summit, Babu and Lakpa’s loyal but inexperienced sherpas, Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu, were left to walk back down the mountain on their own. Each had less than one full bottle of oxygen remaining. It was barely enough to make it down to Camp III, if they hurried. After watching their two friends get shot into the sky and then fly off to the south, they knew they couldn’t loiter long on the
summit. Nima quickly dug into his pack and began preparing his last bottle of oxygen. Ang Bhai, standing about 20 feet away from him on a cornice of snow overhanging the Kangshung Face where he had helped launch the wing, took a step forward and fell up to his waist into a narrow crevasse. The hole at his feet opened at the bottom to a clean 11,000-foot drop. He was afraid to move for fear of dislodging the thin layer of snow that was now the only thing keeping him from plummeting to his death.

“Nima!” he yelled. “NIMA!” But Nima, whose thick down hood was now cinched tight around his head to protect him from the ever-increasing icy wind, couldn’t hear him. After about a minute, when he was done preparing his oxygen for the descent, he turned around and saw Ang Bhai stuck halfway into the crevasse. “Hold on!” Nima yelled, and without any hesitation he walked out onto the fractured cornice with his friend—unroped—grabbed his hand, and pulled him up.

Looking up, Ang Bhai saw that Babu and Lakpa were now nothing more than a small speck flying close to Nuptse. “I was feeling really lazy,” Ang Bhai says. “I didn’t think I could walk all the way down.” Without another option, however, he and Nima both silently began their descent. It took three hours for them to reach Camp IV, where Nima, completely exhausted, collapsed into their tent and declared he couldn’t go down any farther.

Without much discussion Ang Bhai left him half of the remaining food, asked him to bring the tent down with him the next day, and then continued down the mountain until he reached Camp II, carrying all six of the team’s empty oxygen bottles, which had been left at Camp III. It was after 9:00 p.m., and at this point Ang Bhai had either been climbing or descending the mountain for nearly twenty-three hours straight. Unfortunately, Waters’s team had already taken the tent Babu and Lakpa had borrowed from them back down to Base Camp earlier that day. “It was not so good for me,” Ang Bhai points out. Fortunately, two other sherpas whom he had met earlier on the trip took pity on him and invited him to spend the night with
them, sleeping head-to-toe, three of them wedged together in a two-person tent.

Nima spent the night alone at Camp IV, at 25,755 feet, without supplemental oxygen. A remarkable and decidedly dangerous accomplishment. He descended the next day and met Ang Bhai and Shri Hari in Base Camp. They then departed for Ang Bhai’s parents’ house just north of Namche Bazaar, where they hoped to reunite with Babu and Lakpa, assuming nothing horrible had happened to them during the flight.

After realizing that Babu and Lakpa had landed safely, David Arrufat, Wildes, Susmita, and Yanjee hopped on the first available flight to Lukla, in order to meet them before they continued their journey south to the sea. But not before David and Kimberly Phinney both sent e-mails to
Cross Country,
the world’s largest paragliding and hang gliding magazine, based in Brighton, England, informing the editorial staff of Babu and Lakpa’s achievement. Both promised photos soon.

Babu and Lakpa spent their first night celebrating their success with one of their friends, thirty-nine-year-old Ang Gyalgen Sherpa—the first Sherpa, coincidentally, to have started paragliding in the Khumbu a few years earlier—at a small bar just north of Namche Bazaar. Babu and Lakpa slept soundly that night, filled with beer, at Ang Bhai’s parents’ house nearby.

The next morning, they were promptly arrested by a Sagarmatha National Park ranger and taken to the park’s main office in Namche Bazaar, where the army was waiting for them. The ranger had overheard Ang Bhai’s father talking proudly about the expedition his son had just helped with at a public meeting the night before—while Babu, Lakpa, and Ang Gyalgen had been out drinking. And the ranger wasn’t pleased.

“He asked us why we didn’t have permits,” Lakpa says. So Lakpa reminded him they didn’t need a permit to climb Everest, because they
were Sherpas, which was, at least for him, technically true. He didn’t tell the ranger that Babu wasn’t a Sherpa. The question of whether they needed a permit to actually fly off the mountain was a different matter. Was it an “obscene” record they had tried to set? Was it actually disrespectful to the mountain? There were no official, explicit rules written down saying they couldn’t fly off of the summit of Everest, but the rangers apparently thought, in hindsight, that there probably should have been.

After thirty minutes of heated discussion, their friend Ang Gyalgen showed up. A wealthy, well-respected member of the community, he demanded their immediate release. Ang Gyalgen told them that Babu and Lakpa were trying to “open a new sport” in the region. “Trekking and climbing are too old-fashioned now,” he told the army, perhaps referencing Lakpa’s interest in one day taking his clients paragliding from other nearby summits, along with Everest. “So they did something new, so more people are going to come someday.” It sounded like a noble cause, if not a realistic one. Word about their flight off of Everest was quickly spreading through the community, Ang Gyalgen also pointed out—Babu and Lakpa were on the fast track to becoming local celebrities. Perhaps the local people, he theorized, undoubtedly proud of their fellow Nepalis’ accomplishment, might not like them being so hastily arrested after achieving it. This observation had a more profound effect. A few hours later, Babu and Lakpa were tentatively released, the park ranger and army major still confused as to what, exactly, Babu and Lakpa had done, why they had done it, or if they should actually be punished for it. They called their superiors in Kathmandu to ask their opinion.

Babu and Lakpa didn’t wait around to find out the answer. They walked back toward Ang Bhai’s parents’ lodge laughing about their good fortune and met their friend Ryan Waters along the trail. He and Denis were just returning now from Base Camp, after summiting Lhotse. By flying down Babu and Lakpa had beat them back to Namche Bazaar by a full day.

“They were just happy, but not different,” Waters says, recalling seeing them for the first time since their summit bid. “They were just their normal selves. It was like they pulled something off—like they got away with something, laughing about it.” Waters joined Babu and Lakpa for a few Carlsburg beers at the teahouse back at the lodge, along with Lakpa’s friend Tsering Nima, the owner of Himalayan Trailblazer, who had helped set up the logistics for their climb, as well as Shri Hari Shresthra, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu, who had all finally made it back down from Base Camp. “Everyone was successful,” Waters says. “So everyone was in a good mood, having beers.” They decided to walk to Lukla that night, all of them, together.