Flying Off Everest (23 page)

Along with the apparent lack of interest in their accomplishment, Lakpa suddenly found himself with a bill for $15,000. It was from Himalayan Trailblazer, the guide company that had outfitted the Everest portion of their expedition. The company apparently no longer thought officially sponsoring Lakpa and Babu’s expedition was in its best interest.
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And it wanted its investment back.
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However, the company created and continued to maintain a Facebook profile for “the Ultimate Descent,” as well as another website for the expedition: theultimatedescent.wordpress.com. In response, Phinney updated the homepage of her own website for the expedition, theultimatedescent.com, stating, in all red:

Part of the reason they were having such trouble selling the story was likely because they were expecting a lot of money for it. “Nobody wanted to pay for photos,” David says. Phinney claims that he was asking thousands of dollars for exclusive photo rights to the expedition. “I don’t remember how much I was asking,” Arrufat says. What they didn’t know is that magazines have a set, standard photo rate for the images they run, and that they rarely have any budget to negotiate on those terms. And rarely do they want exclusive photo rights, unless they’re planning to run them as a cover image or a feature in the print edition of the publication.

Phinney sent her own e-mail to
National Geographic Adventure
on August 16:

She followed up again on August 23:

Mary Anne Potts, the editor of
National Geographic Adventure,
wrote back a few hours later. She said that the magazine was considering doing a story that would possibly run in November. “It’s not necessary for us to have the exclusive,” Potts added. “You can share it with other media.”

Meanwhile, Hamilton Pevec, the Coloradan who had been editing the GoPro footage from Babu and Lakpa’s flight from Everest, as well as the interview footage Mukti took shortly after they had landed, had finished a rough cut of the film back in Pokhara. Consulting with the Arrufats, who were the producers, he titled the twenty-eight-minute documentary
Hanuman Airlines,
a nod to the flying Hindu monkey god adorning the storefront of the Blue Sky Paragliding shop. Baloo’s brother, Pradeep Basel, and his friend Kiran Punja wrote and recorded the music for the film in a single afternoon at a small recording studio in Pokhara.

“It was a glorified slideshow,” Pevec says. “My biggest regret is not being able to tell the whole thing. There were so many amazing details
that got left out of the film. Of course the most obvious: the whole kayak portion of the journey.” In the film Babu and Lakpa’s entire thirty-seven-day journey from where they landed their paraglider in Namche Bazaar to the ocean is covered in less than sixty seconds. There’s no video. Just still photos, which Babu gave David to use in the film.

It appeared as if the bulk of the expedition was merely an afterthought.

Still, the film was accepted to the Coupe Icare Free Flight International Film Festival in Saint-Hilaire, France, that year, which had been the Arrufats’ main goal for the project to begin with. According to Pevec, “Using it as a promotional device was part of the big plan to launch APPI,” the Arrufats’ new paragliding instructor certification organization. David procured visas and tickets for both Babu and Lakpa to join him in France September 22–25, so they could attend the premiere of the movie that covered at least the paragliding portion of their expedition.

Shri Hari, the expedition’s cameraman, was annoyed that Babu had gone behind his back to edit another film about their trip without him. After refusing to share his kayak footage with Pevec for use in
Hanuman Airlines,
he and Lakpa proceeded to start making their own feature-length film about the expedition. They decided to focus it almost exclusively on Lakpa, “since
Hanuman Airlines
is Babu’s story,” Shri Hari says, and titled it
The Flying Sherpa.
It would take them over two years to complete it, and likewise, the paddling portion of the video lasts only a few minutes. The film is still only available in Nepal. Babu had nothing to do with its production. “It is Lakpa’s film,” Babu says.

At the same time, Phinney provided the transcript of her initial interview with Babu and Lakpa about the expedition to both
Cross Country
and
Canoe & Kayak
to use in articles for their respective upcoming November/December issues—which would appear in print nearly five months after the expedition had actually finished.
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They
would prove to be the only two media outlets that would actually pay Babu and Lakpa for their photos.
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Phinney also bought herself tickets to Saint-Hilaire to join Babu and Lakpa at the festival, where she struck deals on their behalf with several gear companies, including Niviuk and Sup’Air, for additional photos and blogging content in exchange for some new paragliding gear. At the same time, David Arrufat attempted to negotiate potential sponsorship deals for Babu, often with the same companies Phinney had just talked to. Neither of them had much success, even though
Hanuman Airlines
won two awards at the festival: the Golden Icarus (the top film prize at Coupe Icare), as well as the People’s Choice Award. Arrufat and Phinney did not leave on good terms, either.

After the Coupe Icare festival, Pevec sent
Hanuman Airlines
to America with Phinney so she could transfer the film over from the original PAL format, which he had made it in for the French festival, to high-definition NTSC, for submission to North American film festivals.
^†
Phinney recut the film with the help of another American filmmaker friend and gave herself the title of executive producer in the credits. She then submitted it to the Banff Mountain Film Festival; it was eventually accepted into the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour.

Phinney claims that Pevec “gave” the film to her, and that she was told that Pevec, Davida, and Mukti “had no more time, and [that] none of them want to spend their own money on this.”

Pevec says this isn’t true. “I gave her all the source files, copied the whole project to a separate hard drive and shipped it off to her. So in that sense, yes, I did give it to her—but under the expectation that she was only going to export it onto full HD in a professional-quality
studio, because we were in Nepal and didn’t have that.” Regardless, somewhere amidst the growing miscommunication, Phinney thought the film was now hers to start pitching to film festivals.

“I was told I stole the movie,” Phinney says. “How can I steal something that was given to me?”

“I had this long, dreaded conversation with her over the phone, which I recorded for legal purposes,” Pevec says. “Because she had threatened to sue me multiple times, and threatened to sue APPI. She took out a credit card in APPI’s name, without permission. Using the APPI name to do shit with regards to the film. That was really early on too. It was one of those things, like, ‘Whoa, whoa, wait. Who said you could do this?’ She just took a lot of liberties like that. She acted like she was the lead on the project, but that clearly was not the case.”

A long string of strongly worded e-mails was exchanged among Phinney, Pevec, Davida, and Mukti. Tensions rose. Babu and Lakpa distanced themselves from the situation as much as they could. They eventually asked Phinney not to return to Nepal and requested that she and David and Mukti stop selling
Hanuman Airlines
altogether. Everyone agreed. Pevec, meanwhile, continued to sell the film on his personal website and filled out a bulk order to
Cross Country
for 500 copies.
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It wasn’t until November 11, 2011, that Babu and Lakpa were nominated for National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year Award. Phinney told them the news via Skype. They had no idea what she was talking about. They learned that they had actually won the award on February 10, 2012, during their interview at Sarangkot, still not really knowing what they had won. On February 28
National Geographic
officially announced them as the people’s choice for the award in a blog post on the website. The news was posted along with a series of ten photos and the edited two-and-a-half-minute video of the interview
Alex Treadway had shot with them at Sarangkot eighteen days earlier. The post read:

It was only after this announcement that the
Nepali Times
actually ran a short article about their trip—eight months after they had completed it. Babu and Lakpa, though, were still confused as to what, exactly, they had won. They still didn’t have anything to show for what they had done besides a short, bad movie and a few even shorter magazine pieces with their names in them. And, in Lakpa’s case, a large bill.

“To be honest, we are disappointed,” Babu says. “We have this saying in my village: ‘You can hunt all day for deer but only get a monkey. You don’t even want to eat a monkey, but you must eat it, because you have worked so hard for it.’ We have killed a monkey, I think.”

The two friends went on to start their own paragliding company in Pokhara together later that same year. They called it Flying Himalayan Paragliding. It’s doing well and making a small amount of money for them. Babu is in the process of teaching his wife, Susmita, and his brother, Krishna, how to fly. They each also had a new son in 2012.
Lakpa named his Sanga Dorjee Sherpa. Babu named his youngest Himalaya. Life goes on.

Standing on a hillside on his family’s farm in the Khumbu, Lakpa plants kiwi vines beneath the shadow of the mountains, waiting for the climbing season to start up again. The vines will grow on a wooden trellis he has constructed out of sticks, which he has dug into the ground along the length of a narrow terrace his ancestors carved out of the hillside long ago. The sky is cobalt blue and bright. The forest around him is dark and green, even in the sunlight. Below him, the valley seems to drop off into nothingness just past the edge of the kiwi terrace he’s planting. The surrounding hills are steep, blocking his view of the icy ramparts of the higher Himalaya just to the north. He knows he will be walking slowly up them again soon. The climbing season on Everest isn’t far away.

He plans on selling the fruit he is planting to tourists in Lukla, once it grows. He will call them “Sherpa Kiwis,” he says, and will walk with the produce on his back a half hour into town each week to sell it.