IV

The Ultimate Descent

Darley Dale, the United Kingdom,
March 2011—327 Feet

Pete Astles was sitting at his desk in his office at the Peak UK building in Darley Dale, England, checking his e-mail, when he received an unexpected phone call from Babu, asking him for a tandem kayak. And quick. “To paddle to the ocean,” Babu explained excitedly over the receiver. He told Astles that he needed the boat within the month; that he had met a climbing Sherpa named Lakpa who was going to take him to the top of the world, and then jump off of it with him, and then paddle to the Bay of Bengal. That their weather window was closing, and that they were leaving for Everest Base Camp within the month. He also told Astles that Lakpa had never kayaked before and didn’t know how to swim. It had been over five years since Astles and Babu had sat by the lake in Pokhara and had their first, and last, talk about Babu flying off of Everest. The idea of paddling to the ocean was completely new to Astles.

Miraculously, Astles not only believed Babu, but also agreed to help him without hesitation. He immediately dropped everything he was doing and began trolling the Internet, trying to find a boat for Babu and his new Sherpa friend who apparently couldn’t swim.

“I’ve got contacts within the industry,” Astles says. “So we quickly found a Perception that wasn’t too long, I thought, and within a few hours we had a boat lined up for him.” The freight company told Astles that he couldn’t get anything into Nepal longer than 4 meters, since only passenger planes fly in and out of Kathmandu. “I had to rethink,” Astles says. The only thing he could find to send that was less than 4 meters but still a tandem was a boat manufactured by Jackson Kayaks: the “Dynamic Duo,” a 12-foot-long, eighty-pound roto-molded polyethylene craft that has an uncanny resemblance to a log and costs $1,450.

“I don’t think it was ideal,” Astles admits, citing the whitewater boat’s exceedingly slow nature on flat water. He knew that the sections of the Ganges that Babu and Lakpa would be paddling were going to be flatter than a chapati. “But with Lakpa not knowing how to paddle or swim, it’s not like they could take two singles,” Astles acknowledges. So he called Babu back in Nepal and told him they’d have their boat by the time they reached the river at the end of May. How it was going to get to the river after arriving in Kathmandu, exactly, Astles wasn’t quite sure.

After five months of flying together around Pokhara, Lakpa and Babu had eventually shared their separate dreams of flying off the top of the world with one another. After a few more weeks of shared daydreaming and several beers at the Pokhara Pizza House, they eventually decided that it would make sense for them to climb Everest together, paraglide from the top, and then paddle to the ocean. It was as simple as that. Babu’s paragliding and paddling experience would make up for Lakpa’s limited paragliding experience and nonexistent paddling experience, they figured; Lakpa’s climbing experience would counterbalance Babu’s noticeable lack of technical climbing experience. Lakpa had led inexperienced Westerners up Everest before, after all. “I trusted Babu’s flying and kayaking abilities,” Lakpa says. “And I trusted Lakpa to keep me safe on the mountain,” Babu confirms. “So why not?” Lakpa asks. It all made sense, in theory.

They initially planned to do the expedition a few years out, giving themselves time to prepare. After all, the narrow, one- to two-week “weather window” for climbing Everest near the end of May each year was fast approaching.

The weather window is only a few days when the fierce westerly jet stream, a river of air that blasts the summit with winds often over 100 miles per hour, is moved off the summit by the oncoming monsoon from the Indian Ocean and its accompanying deluge of precipitation. Attempt to climb Everest before the weather window, and you risk getting blown off the mountain. Too late, and you’re likely to get stuck on top of the world in the middle of a monsoon-scale blizzard. After hearing from some friends that two other foreign teams were going to try to fly from the summit that year, however, Babu and Lakpa decided to scrap preparedness for the chance to do it first.

The two other people attempting to fly off Everest that year were twenty-nine-year-old British adventurer and television personality Louise Falconer, better known as “Squash,” and the Brazilian mountaineer and paragliding pilot Rodrigo Raineri. Squash, a pretty, short blonde with a perky, if not overtly bubbly, personality, had the self-proclaimed goal of becoming the first woman to paraglide off of Everest solo. Raineri, a strong, dark, thoughtful mountaineer, was doing it in an attempt to raise awareness of global warming and alpine water pollution, which has become a growing problem in the world of high-altitude leisure activities. He figured he would get more attention for his cause if he flew off the top of Everest. Each was named in Outside magazine’s 2011 list of “This Year’s Top 10 Everest Expeditions.” And each knew that they weren’t going to be the first person to paraglide off the summit. The French paragliding pilot Jean-Marc Boivin had already taken that prize in 1988. And even he wasn’t the first one to fly off of Everest, or numerous other 8,000-plus-meter peaks around the world. Lakpa and Babu weren’t aware of Everest’s already well-established aerial stunt history, however. And if they were going to plan an Everest summit-to-sea expedition in under a month, which is exactly what they were proposing to do, it’s somewhat understandable that they didn’t have the time to research it extensively, or at all.

For all practical purposes, free flying in the Himalaya started (or at least was first noticed) on September 6, 1979, when twenty-eight-year-old Frenchman Jean-Marc Boivin—a talented mountaineer, skier, BASE jumper, and pilot with a gift for self-promotion—launched a hang glider from 24,934 feet off the Southwest Ridge of Pakistan’s 28,251-foot K2. Known locally as Chogo Ri, “the Great Mountain,” or in climbing circles as “the Savage Mountain,” it’s the second-highest peak in the world behind Everest. And also one of the deadliest: One out of every four climbers who has stood on the summit has died on the mountain, usually on the descent. It’s also considered to be significantly more difficult to climb than Everest to begin with.

Boivin’s four-month-long expedition was the biggest and most expensive in K2’s history at that point. Over 1,400 porters carried more than twenty-five tons of equipment to the expedition’s base camp at roughly 16,400 feet. There were ten filmmakers, press photographers, and journalists. The climbing team eventually turned down 525 feet from the summit, after attempting a new route to the top, but after returning to Camp IV, Boivin decided to descend the rest of the mountain attached to a paraglider, which the team’s porters had, conveniently, carried over 8,530 vertical feet up the mountain for him. The flight back to base camp lasted thirteen minutes, and in the process, Boivin set the record for world’s highest hang glider takeoff and effectively introduced the world to the novel concept of not only climbing, but jumping off 8,000-meter peaks. The K2 flight won Boivin the International Award for Valour in Sport, a prize given to him at an awards ceremony in London in February 1980.

The first person to jump off the actual summit of an 8,000-meter peak, with either a hang glider or paraglider, was French alpinist Pierre Gevaux, who launched a very early-model paraglider from the top of 26,258-foot Gasherbrum II, the world’s thirteenth-highest mountain, on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 11, 1985. Only three days later, Boivin wound up launching his hang glider from the very same spot.

The paraglider design (essentially an outsize parachute) that Gevaux used on Gasherbrum II had only recently been rediscovered and popularized in Europe. It originally had been conceptualized by a NASA consultant named David Barish back in the 1960s. Barish had called his invention, designed to launch from and sail over gradual slopes in the United States, the Sail Wing (the term paraglider originated at NASA). Barish tested the Sail Wing himself by launching it from Mount Hunter, New York. It worked. Then nothing happened. The idea was shelved.

The Sail Wing didn’t catch on until 1978, when French parachutists at Mieussy in Haute-Savoie tried launching their ram-air parachutes by running down nearby mountain slopes. Their experiments soon developed into the rather outlandish sport of parapente, an activity defined best as not quite BASE jumping, in that there was no free fall involved (hopefully), but close, in that you couldn’t really control where you landed all that well. For example, as Lowell Skoog shares in his 2007 article in the Northwest Mountaineering Journal, “On a Wing and a Prayer,” a parapente pilot nicknamed “Downwind Dave” had the misfortune of landing in a Canadian Forces rifle range after a flight from Mount Mercer in the Chilliwack Valley, British Columbia. Standing at the takeoff, his friends watched, horror-struck, as he touched down in the middle of a live-fire military zone. A few minutes later, Dave’s voice crackled to life on the radio. “Downwind Dave here,” he said. “I’m fine, but the soldiers are very angry.” Regardless, by the early 1980s most of the major peaks in the Alps—the Aiguille Verte, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, and Eiger—as well as most of the major peaks in the US Pacific Northwest had all been descended by parapente.

In the same Northwest Mountaineering Journal article, Skoog astutely points out that the media took notice when Climbing magazine published a feature on parapente in April 1987. Around the same time, he also notes, Rock & Ice magazine, Climbing’s main competitor, published another. All of a sudden, people—mainly climbers—outside of the Alps knew what parapente was. And they liked it, he says. Climbing’s description of the activity was decidedly favorable at first: “It packs to the size of a small sleeping bag, weighs about as much as an eight millimeter rope, and is used to effortlessly descend in minutes from climbs which used to require hours or days of painful and sometimes dangerous effort … As skis and ice tools expanded the boundaries of alpinism to snow and ice, the parapente makes the sky the limit!” Rock & Ice published an article that claimed, simply, “It beats a magic carpet!” The only problem was people were getting hurt left and right doing it: crashing into cliffs, breaking both of their legs, or worse. Soon, proponents of the sport, who still considered themselves climbers first, parapente enthusiasts second, also realized that in order to do it safely, they now needed to plan their climbing trips around flying conditions. It was a tricky proposition. You could climb a mountain in a gale, but you’d be smart not to try to fly off of it in one. And it was a notable and frustrating discomfort to haul a wing up a mountain, just to carry it back down. Paragliding, it was generally decided, at least according to Skoog, was something you did as an end in itself, not a part of regular, ideally safety-oriented, mountaineering.

In a 1992 interview in Rock & Ice, Mark Twight, a respected climber and paragliding pilot in the Pacific Northwest, was blunt about it. “It’s useless for climbing,” he said. “It’s the most seductive thing to say, ‘Oh man, I’m so wasted, I’ll just fly down.’ But the conditions are rarely right. I never got over my fear. I’d be on top, and I’d throw up. The most fun for me was packing my parachute after I landed—‘Wow, I lived.’”

Naturally, this didn’t stop people from doing it, and the attention of those looking to fly off the world’s tallest mountains inevitably turned to Everest. In the fall of 1986, US pilots Steve McKinney and Larry Tudor became the first to attempt to launch themselves off the slopes of Everest. And from the outset, flying off of the peak proved to be as much a logistical challenge as a physical one. The idea was to take hang gliders off the West Ridge, on the Tibetan side of the mountain. Chinese customs became suspicious of the odd-looking contraptions, however, and impounded them upon McKinney and Tudor’s arrival into the country. Their friend and expedition mate Craig Colonica, a 6-foot-3, 240-pound rock and ice climber from Tahoe, California, requested their release. “Craig went ballistic,” Tudor later reported to Cross Country magazine. “His eyes turned blood red like a deer in your headlights. He grabbed the customs guy, yanked him over the counter and with his face inches away told the interpreter, ‘You tell this guy these are our gliders, we paid for them, we are here with permission from his government and if he doesn’t give us them to us right now I’m going to twist his head from his skinny little neck.’”

A week later, they were in Base Camp with perfect weather. Unfortunately, the gliders, which were now out of quarantine and in transit, took a month to arrive. “We missed our window,” wrote Tudor. “We had problems with jet stream winds that arrive with winter … The winds forced us off the mountain. I spent three days and four nights in a tent on the west ridge at 22,000 feet waiting for the winds to back off. Bob Carter, another member of the expedition, spent the next night before retreating. You haven’t lived till you have been in a nylon tent in 100 mph winds.” Tudor added, “[Eventually] we got one of the gliders to the top of the West Ridge. But it was too late. The jet stream winds had descended on the mountains and the expedition was out of money and wondering how we were going to get out of the country.” McKinney wound up launching his glider from just over 600 feet up the West Ridge from their camp. “To appease the sponsors,” Tudor explained. “He also made a very spectacular out-of-control flight to a wicked crash on the glacial moraine at base camp.”

After launching off Gasherbrum II and narrowly missing the opportunity to become the first person to fly off the summit of an 8,000-meter peak behind Gevaux, Boivin achieved the first free flight from the top of Mount Everest on September 26, 1988, switching out his trusty hang glider for one of the new, relatively lightweight paragliders. Boivin reached the summit at 2:30 p.m. along with four other European climbers and two sherpas. It took them ninety minutes to prepare Boivin’s wing for takeoff. The wind was reportedly gusty, blowing at up to 40 miles per hour; however, Boivin successfully managed to launch from the summit, after running 60 feet down the 40-degree summit slope. “I was tired when I reached the top,” Boivin said shortly after the flight in an interview with Backpacker magazine. “Because I’d broken much of the trail, and to run at this altitude was quite hard.” It was an understatement, at best. Most climbers on Everest report having a hard time walking, let alone sprinting through knee-deep snow on the top. Boivin safely, if not abruptly, glided down to Camp II at 19,356 feet, descending over 9,840 feet in under twelve minutes, dropping approximately 15 feet per second. With only a quarter of the air pressure there is at sea level, paragliding off the summit of Everest proved to be more like falling, just at a more survivable rate.

Vol bivouac, flying and camping through the mountains at lower altitudes, offered adventurous pilots a way to experience flying in the mountains without adding the dangers and additional costs of technical climbing and launching their wings at altitude. Because of this, vol bivouac soon became significantly more popular than launching off technical peaks, both in Europe and in the Himalaya. Still, occasionally people ventured high into the mountains to fly.

In 1990 seventeen-year-old Bertrand “Zebulon” Roche was a passenger on a successful tandem paragliding flight with his father, Jean-Noël Roche, from Everest’s 8,000-meter South Col, and evidently he got hooked. He went back in 2001 to launch a tandem wing with his wife, Claire, on May 21, bagging the first-ever tandem paragliding descent off Everest’s summit. Before that they had paraglided off five of the other Seven Summits, the tallest points on each continent (intentionally excluding Australia’s 7,310-foot Mount Kosciuszko because it had apparently lost continent status amongst the French).* The pair, without question, had remarkable luck.

About the summit, Claire reported after the flight: “It was 8 am. The view was breathtaking. Not a cloud, the wind was between 30 to 40km/h.” After taking summit photos the pair found a spot about 30 feet below the top. Claire wrote: “We took off our oxygen masks and prepared the wing. These tasks, which were so easy below, were very trying up there. It took an hour to get ready. Then, sat one on top of the other, on the edge of the mountain, Zeb put the sail up and very quickly the wind took us to that mythical place. For a few minutes, we were birds. The countryside flashed by. The conditions weren’t as calm as they seemed, the west wind changed our flight path. Above the North Col, the wing started to flap violently, reminding Zeb of competition flights. We were distancing ourselves from anything which could cause turbulence. At 10:22 a.m. we set down gently on the Rongbuk glacier, just above 6,400 metres.”

The Dutch pair that tried to repeat the feat in 2002 weren’t so lucky. The wing sherpas had carried for them to Camp III disappeared when they were blasted by winds. The camp was “torn apart” and the glider “flew off on its own, still in its bag,” the final report read.

In 1998 Russian climber Elvira Nasonova had also tried to launch a tandem paraglider from above the Khumbu Icefall on the mountain while climbing, but she crashed horribly. Reports from the day read, “The start was unsuccessful. In the moment they took off from the rock a gust got up. The sportsmen were knocked against the rock, the glider soared upward and Elvira and her instructor fell down on the glacier from about 50m.” The instructor escaped unscathed, but Nasonova spent three days lying injured on the glacier before she was eventually rescued by helicopter. She survived. Barely.

In March 2011 Squash Falconer and Rodrigo Raineri were poised to be the next paragliding pilots to fly from the summit of Everest, comfortably backed by corporate sponsorships and the resulting media attention. Lakpa and Babu had just decided to beat Falconer and Raineri to it, though, over several bottles of Carlsburg beer and dal bhat at the Pokhara Pizza House, even though they had no plan, or money for that matter, to do it. They didn’t have any corporate sponsors. They didn’t even have the basic gear they would need to complete the expedition. Neither of them actually owned a tandem wing capable of flying off Everest, and they still had no boat they could paddle together to the ocean, even if they did manage to find an ultralight wing and, somehow, climb and fly off the top of Everest with it.

“Anything is possible,” Babu told Lakpa. They agreed then that Lakpa would handle the logistics of the climbing portion of the trip and that Babu would sort out the particulars for the descent to the sea. Each of them was to be responsible for his own area of expertise: Lakpa, on the mountain, Babu, in the air and on the water. They would leave within the month, in order to make the trek to Everest Base Camp and start acclimatizing to the high altitude before either Falconer or Raineri could fly off the mountain, and, even more likely, before the spring weather window closed. They also decided, offhandedly, that they were going to film the expedition. Neither of them owned a camera.

They needed help, and quick.

Not long after Lakpa and Babu’s impromptu expedition meeting at the Pokhara Pizza House, David Arrufat was woken up by the sound of loud knocking on his front door. It was 1:00 a.m., and Babu was “full of beer,” Arrufat says. “He tells me, ‘Hey! Let’s go drink! Tomorrow, we go to Everest!’” It proved to be not the most effective way to approach a potential expedition sponsor. Arrufat, annoyed at being awoken at such an obtuse hour, told his friend/employee that he couldn’t help pay for their trip, but that he could use his contacts in the paragliding world to help order them a new tandem wing, which would cost nearly $4,000. He also promised to help them in whatever way he could outside of a financial contribution. Babu then asked Gaillard, his old boss at Ganesh Kayak Shop, to help pay for the expedition.

“I gave him a few hundred dollars,” Gaillard recalls. “I don’t remember exactly how much, but it wasn’t much. Babu offered to put the Ganesh Kayak Shop logo on the wing they were going to use, but I told him, ‘No, save that for a bigger sponsor.’”

Babu’s friends Kelly and Nim Magar, co-owners of Paddle Nepal, an outfitter across the street from Gaillard’s shop that also assisted in hosting the annual Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, wound up being one of the most generous sponsors. They agreed to have two members of their staff, who were also friends of Babu, pick up the tandem boat that was due to arrive in Kathmandu and transport it to the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and the Sun Kosi to meet Babu and Lakpa there, after they had flown off Everest and across the mountains. The staff would be unpaid for the trip, but being friends with Babu, they volunteered anyway.

“It must have been at least four years earlier when Babu first told me about his idea to fly off Everest,” recalls Nim, a stocky, compact Nepali with short black hair. “He went up to Island Peak with Pete Astles and got altitude sickness, I remember. He got sick and had to go back. So Kelly and I kind of said, ‘No way, Babu. You don’t do well in the mountains.’ And I always just kind of brushed it off, like, ‘I don’t think this is such a good idea, Babu.’ But he just wanted to go for it. And then he didn’t really talk about it much. The plan kind of fizzled for a few years. Then I was shocked—just a few weeks before they actually went out to start, when he came into the office and was just raring to go. He had just met Lakpa. He was like, ‘Bai, it’s happening. We need your support.’ I couldn’t believe it. After so many years.” The Magars also agreed to send one of their rafts and two of their staff to help set safety on the whitewater portion of the expedition, paddling with Babu and Lakpa from the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and the Sun Kosi down to Chatra, near the Indian border.

“When Babu first approached us to support the river part of the trip for him,” Kelly, Nim’s friendly, petite, blonde, and significantly taller American expat wife, says, “Nim and Sanchos and Song, the three brothers [and owners] of Paddle Nepal, discussed it. As much as we wanted to help them right through to the ocean, Paddle Nepal decided we would do our best to deliver the boat and keep them safe through the big rapids until they got to the Indian border, but it was a little too risky for us to send our crew outside of the country. Not for river reasons, but because of politics and banditry. We couldn’t expect our crew to do that.”

After calling Astles in the United Kingdom, Babu theoretically had a boat lined up, and thanks to his friends in Pokhara, he had a way to get it to the river, but he still had no wing to fly off the mountain with. Both Lakpa and Arrufat claim that they were the ones who purchased the custom-made, ultralight “Everest Wing” eventually used on the expedition. What’s certain is that Arrufat was the one who placed the call that got French paragliding manufacturer Niviuk to hastily make the wing and, miraculously, ship it to Nepal in under a month.

“It is not allowed to ship a glider to Nepal,” Arrufat says, citing the country’s nearly 200 percent import tax. “We needed to get the glider here fast. And it needed to be light. And the company had to make it. Nobody trusted us—they say, ‘No, we cannot give them glider like this.’ They want proof. Everybody wanted proof. Nobody believed. No proof. They have to go by feeling.” It proved to be a lot of feeling to ask. Niviuk eventually shipped the wing to Arrufat for full price. He was then able to avoid Nepali customs by having one of his friends fly over with it on a commercial flight from Malaysia, but by the time it arrived, Lakpa and Babu had already departed for Everest.

Lakpa wasn’t having much luck procuring major support for the last minute-expedition either. When he asked his cousin Kili if HAD would sponsor the trip, he was politely told no, but that he could be excused from work to go if he could get the funds and logistical support put together on his own. “He told me that he wanted to climb Everest with Babu and fly down from the summit,” Kili says. “I didn’t feel comfortable with it at the time. I didn’t tell him he couldn’t do it, because I wasn’t sure how the adventure would go, so I just told him, ‘OK. You can go.’” Lakpa would have to find another way to pay for him and Babu to get to the top of Everest, and he knew that wasn’t going to be cheap.

A typical guided Everest expedition costs—minimum—$30,000 per person. Most Western guiding companies charge $65,000. A private expedition like Babu and Lakpa’s, without the backing of a guide service and the cost break given to large commercial groups, could run as much as $100,000 per person. Fortunately, for Lakpa at least, he didn’t have to pay for his own climbing permit because he was a sherpa. Issued by the Nepalese government, climbing permits for non-sherpas cost $70,000 for a party of seven, or $25,000 for an individual climber. At Base Camp, all the teams combine resources to pay for the camp doctor and to pay sherpas, referred to as “the Icefall Doctors,” to set the fixed ropes, so that the equipment that everyone uses to traverse the Khumbu Icefall at the base of the mountain is in place. Then there’s gear, and getting to Base Camp, which is pretty consistent, price-wise, across the board. For instance, oxygen costs $500 a bottle, and climbers typically bring six bottles each. Yaks to transport gear to Base Camp run around $150 each, per day.

So Lakpa sold some of the land he had purchased after years of working as a high-altitude climbing sherpa to fund the trip. The land was in Bandipur, just to the east of Kathmandu. He had intended to eventually start another farm there, but instead sold it for approximately $20,000. It was going to have to be enough to get him, Babu, and whomever else he could find to help them, to the top of the world. He felt comforted by the fact that his friend Babu would have to worry about getting them back down.

Predictably, Lakpa’s wife, Yanjee, was not pleased. After Lakpa told her that he was selling the land and spending the money to fund an expedition to jump off of Everest with Babu, someone she had never met before, she broke into tears. “I begged him not to go,” she says. “I begged him. But he went anyway.” She was afraid that she would have to raise their then four-year-old son, Mingma Tashi, alone if Lakpa didn’t come back alive. And she knew there was a fairly good chance of that. It was dangerous enough to just climb in the Himalaya. After all, according to the Himalayan Database, 1.2 percent of climbing sherpas had already died while working in the mountains of Nepal. That number may seem small; however, as Grayson Schafer notes in his 2013 article for Outside magazine, “Disposable Man,” “There’s no other service industry in the world that so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefit of paying clients.” Commercial fishermen—the profession the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rates as the most dangerous nonmilitary job in the United States—are ten times less likely to die on the job than a sherpa. And none of them had ever tried to actually fly off one of the mountains they were climbing. After shaky responses from both Kili and his wife, Lakpa dealt with telling the rest of his relatives about the trip by getting them “slightly drunk” first, he says.

San Francisco, California,
March 2011—Approximately 200 Feet

Kimberly Phinney had known Babu for less than a month when he called her unexpectedly at her home, just north of San Francisco, California, asking her if she could help fund his and Lakpa’s upcoming Everest expedition. “We’re going for sure,” Babu told her. “But we have no sponsors. Can you?” Phinney, a short, petite, twenty-eight-year-old West Coast fashion designer and paragliding pilot with long, dark brown hair, ear gauges, and an owl tattoo on her left shoulder, had just returned from Nepal a week earlier after a two-month paragliding trip to Pokhara. She had lost her wallet and all of her trip cash on her third day in the country, after taking it out to leave an offering at a temple and then accidentally leaving it behind. She had spent her first month in Nepal living on a shoestring budget, borrowing money from friends, and trying to find people to fly with.

“I wanted to bivouac,” Phinney says. “Hiking and flying, being free. I wanted to be surrounded by the Nepali people eating in the huts, as I remembered from my previous travels to Nepal. I searched around trying to get one of the many pilots there to be daring enough to venture off and explore some of the more remote hike-up takeoffs I had heard about.” But she found no one willing to go with her, unless she was willing to pay them to take her. Then she met Babu.

“I saw a group clustered around Babu asking questions,” Phinney says, referring the first time she met the young Nepali, instructing a group of European pilots at a remote launch site north of Pokhara, at the base of the Annapurnas, preparing to take off for an hour-long cross-country flight back to Phewa Tal. “The tricky thing in Nepal is there are very few good landing zones,” Phinney says. “If you’re up high, it’s all groovy, but if you do get low, you can be locked in-between two rather large mountains.” Babu, apparently, was having a difficult time communicating this in his second language, English, to a group of Europeans who also didn’t speak English as their primary language. “I heard Babu repeating his words to the group, so I went over and helped out a bit, giving a more detailed English explanation of what he was saying,” Phinney says. “He looked relieved and grateful.”

When the flying was over that day and everyone had landed back at the lake—or had been picked up somewhere between the launch site and the lake, if they hadn’t quite made it—Babu invited Phinney to go flying with him and the rest of the Blue Sky Paragliding crew—for free, he said, if she was willing to continue helping with instructing in English. “My dream finally came true,” Phinney says. “I was hiking, flying, and camping out, helping the guys cook the food, drinking water from the yak huts with the porters as I carried all of my own gear. A strong friendship was formed.”

Babu told Phinney, whom he and the other Nepalis had now taken to calling “Ruppy,” after a local bird that has a tendency to fly straight at the ground (not a good thing if you’re a paraglider), how he wanted to climb and fly off the summit of Mount Everest. “And to make it different and more interesting,” Phinney says, “he told me he would then kayak to the sea. After watching him fly the past few weeks, I believed he could do anything. He told me they had no sponsor, but he didn’t care. They would do it anyway.” Phinney told him he deserved sponsorship if he was going to attempt something as audacious as that. “At least a free glider,” she said, and then told him that she would be happy to help him with the process, if he was interested. Not long after that conversation together in the hills outside of Pokhara, she got the call from Babu, asking for help.

Phinney, who had never actually worked as a publicist before, told him, somewhat accurately, “For big sponsorships, you need a website, GPS tracker, communication equipment, and good media coverage.” Babu told her that they didn’t have time for any of that. They were leaving in less than a month. “So I agreed to help from my own pocket with what I could,” Phinney says. “And that I would supply him with the GPS and technical side of things, and teach him how to set it up proper for a sponsor.” So she wired $6,000 to Babu in Kathmandu and put a SPOT brand GPS tracker* and solar chargers in a box and mailed it to Nepal. She then created a SPOT account on Babu and Lakpa’s behalf, so their movements could be tracked by followers online. “I posted it everywhere,” Phinney says. “I asked him who else was helping him, so I could put their names on the GPS website, but the list was short, only a few friends’ names.” And all of them were just donating equipment. “I had no idea how he would pull this off with so little,” Phinney admits. “But I had faith that if he thought he could do it, he would. The Nepali people are amazingly tough.”

Phinney then hastily built a website with the URL theultimatedescent.com, complete with a blog for Babu and Lakpa, and demanded that they call her at least once a week to give her updates. She conferred with Babu and Lakpa together on Skype and put together a mission statement for them, partly based on what they told her, and partly on what she wanted them to say. She then posted it on the homepage of their new website:

Our vision is not only to be the first, but for us to be the First All NEPALI Expedition of this kind. We wish to support all Nepalese people in setting new records especially here in our home country. We have watched year after year as other nationalists come to Nepal and the Everest Region to set or attempt to set world records, and first ascents. This time we set out with an all Nepali team in hopes of putting the Nepalese people in this record breaking category. We also wish to contribute towards making this years Visit Nepal 2011 a success, we intend to promote adventure activities such as paragliding, river sports, and cycling, through out Nepal.

As a way of giving back, we would also like to setup a scholarship fund and give physical or material support to schools in our more remote regions. It is our understanding that their are many schools here that are in need of educational material and other basic facilities. We intend to facilitate a way to make sure educational materials are made available to the children free of charge and help with the development of drinking water and toilet facilities. Our team feels that helping them physically/ financially just this year will not have the desired impact we are hoping for. We intend to follow up next year to further help develop these schools and perhaps make a small impact on wiping out illiteracy. Please stay turned to for more info as we continue to put this part of the dream into action.

Of course, they had no money, or even potential sponsors with the money to set up a scholarship fund. Then, with their boat and wing, GPS, and most of the other donated equipment they would need for the expedition still in transit, and no actual backing from the Nepali government, they embarked for Everest.