VI
Walking Slowly
Everest Base Camp, April 30, 2011—17,600 Feet
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* and walls of intricately carved mani† 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.*
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.
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* 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.
According to Ang Bhai, whose patience was beginning to run thin with Babu and Lakpa’s lack of planning and what he viewed as their complete lack of regard for his safety, “They were always laughing and singing. They were not serious. I work with French people. I know how if a foreigner is doing a project like this, they are really serious. But Lakpa and Babu are not serious. All the time, they’re laughing.” Ang Bhai asked them, frustrated, scared, and a bit desperate, “Be serious, please. This is not game.” Babu and Lakpa told him to relax. That everything would be fine.
The urge to be the “first” to do something on Everest is by no means new, although it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Since Hillary and Norgay summited via the South Col in 1953, nearly eighteen new routes have been established to the top. Somewhere around 3,668 people have reached the summit, many more than once. Rein-hold Messner and Peter Habeler became the first to climb to the top without supplemental oxygen in 1978, a feat long thought simply impossible. Since then, dozens of people have done it. As Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver point out in Fallen Giants, a definitive history of mountaineering in the Himalaya:
Himalayan mountaineers required new measures of achievement … the most common form of record making was that based on identity: becoming the first female or first climber of this or that nationality to reach the summit of this or that peak. Everest, as always, was the most desired destination. Thus Bachendri Pal became the first Indian woman to climb Everest in 1984, Stacy Allison the first American woman to do so in 1988, and Rebecca Stephens the first British woman to do so in 1993. In 1989 Ricardo Torres became the first Mexican (and the first Latin American) to reach Everest’s summit, and in 1995 Nasuh Mahruki the first Turk (and the first Muslim) to do so. There were also family firsts: in 1990 Marija and Andrej Stremfelj were the first married couple to reach Everest’s summit together, followed two years later by the first pair of brothers to climb the mountain together, Alberto and Felix Inurrategui.
After someone from every possible variation of national and personal identity had managed to reach the summit, age suddenly became a notable factor, creating a race for both the youngest and oldest person to reach the summit.* The youngest currently to have done it was thirteen years old when he made it to the top. The oldest: eighty.
An eighty-two-year-old Nepali named Shailendra Kumar Upadhyay was actually attempting to break the record again in 2011. He died on May 9, shortly after sharing tea with Babu and Lakpa, collapsing suddenly in the snow on his way from Camp I back to Base Camp.
As more firsts were accomplished, more people kept dying. From 1924 to 2013, a total of 249 people lost their lives on Everest (162 Westerners and 87 sherpas). Within that time span activities outside of traditional mountaineering—that is to say, trying to just get to the top of a peak and then back down again, safely—started showing up on Everest. In 1970 Japan’s Yuichiro Miura attempted to ski down the Lhotse Face from below the South Col, using a small parachute to help control his descent. He crashed spectacularly and tumbled completely out of control the final 600 feet before coming to rest on the glacier below. Miura survived. Six of his expedition’s sherpas, who were swept away in an avalanche, did not. The documentary film made about the expedition, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, won an Academy Award and was eventually turned into a book. Since then, multiple people have skied, snowboarded, paraglided, and even BASE jumped off the slopes and from the summit of the mountain; of course those feats include Jean-Marc Boivin’s solo paragliding descent from the top in 1988 and Claire and Zebulon Roche’s tandem descent in 2001. In 2007 the Nepal Mountaineering Association actually found it prudent to call for a ban on “nudity and attempts to set obscene records” on the mountain after a Nepali climber stood stark naked on the summit for several minutes the year before and a Dutch man attempted to climb the peak wearing shorts.
Babu and Lakpa weren’t aware of most of these firsts, however. They were still convinced that they were going to be the first to paraglide from the summit, and that they were going to claim that first for Nepal—if they could only beat Falconer and Raineri to it.
Squash Falconer found herself standing on the summit of Everest at 8:30 a.m. on May 12, completely surrounded by white. The air temperature was -50 degrees Fahrenheit, the wind gusting up to 35 miles per hour. She had been climbing for over eleven hours. The Brazilian paraglider Rodrigo Raineri had already decided to call off his summit attempt and descend from Camp IV, after suffering frostbite on his toes.
“I knew that there would be no flight from the top of the world,” Falconer would write later on her blog. “I was feeling wrecked. I took out my GoPro camera and filmed for a few seconds, my hand got so cold that was all I could manage. Then I was just desperate to get back down. I’d had so many plans for the summit; so many poses to do for the camera, so much I was going to say, flags I was going to get out, small dances I was going to do to celebrate… I’d even half planned how I would feel—so elated, amazing, wonderful…. but there was none of that. I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it back down and after just a few short minutes at the top I was out of there.” She spent the next five hours descending in blizzard conditions to Camp IV, where she crawled into her tent and passed out for twelve hours. At the same time, an experienced fifty-nine-year-old climber from Japan named Takashi Ozaki died 835 feet from the summit after suffering from a severe case of altitude sickness.
The next day, Falconer unpacked the paraglider her sherpas had carried for her and attempted to take off from the South Col in strong winds. “I thought I could give it a go,” she later wrote. “I soon decided after being dragged about the mountain that it was definitely better to just get back down alive.”
With Raineri and Falconer out of the running, Babu, Lakpa, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu prepared for their own summit attempt. Recognizing the fact that he had never actually flown at anywhere even near the altitude of Everest’s summit, though, Babu figured it might be a good idea to take the new wing for a test flight first. They took the backpack they had stashed in the corner of Waters’s dome tent, which had been hiding the paraglider along with some of Baloo’s dirty clothes, and walked two hours south out of Base Camp. Here, they climbed a small, 33-foot promontory called Kala Patthar (meaning “black rock”) to the south of Pumori, a sharp, dangerous-looking mountain. A long, lingering plume of snow could be seen blowing off the summit of Everest in the distance. The sun was high and hot in the sky. Babu unfolded the new wing and instructed Nima Wang Chu on how to help him launch it, which he had never done before, by first holding it tight to the ground and then lifting it so the wind could catch it once Babu was ready to take off. This, he was told, would be his job on summit day. Ang Bhai would be responsible for holding the camera, which Shri Hari was holding now.
The wing inflated easily in the gentle breeze blowing through the valley that morning, making a large red crescent shape against the stark white, black, and blue jagged landscape. Babu flew solo in a single wide, sweeping arc, landing back at the top of the promontory where he had taken off. The flight lasted about thirty seconds. After landing he immediately repacked the wing in Baloo’s backpack. They didn’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. The brief inaugural flight of the new wing felt different than flying in Pokhara, or anywhere else Babu had ever flown in Nepal. “It was fast,” Babu recalls, noting the increased rate of descent resultant from the wing struggling to catch loft in the thin air found at over 18,500 feet. “Really fast.”
Suddenly and unexpectedly, at 9:00 a.m. on May 15, another brief weather window was projected for the morning of May 21. Base Camp was buzzing with renewed excitement. Unfortunately, the winds were expected to increase again significantly in the afternoon that same day. Not a good thing when attempting to launch a paraglider from the top of Everest. Still, Lakpa and Babu decided this would be the window they would shoot for. They just needed to get to the top and then fly back down to the bottom before the wind started up, they determined. “No problem,” Lakpa said.
The gear for their final summit push was sprawled out on the floor of Waters’s dome tent. Seeing that Babu and Lakpa had packed only rice and beans for themselves, Waters gave them a few of his freeze-dried meals along with a handful of Snickers candy bars before they set out from Base Camp. He also gave Lakpa one of his extra pairs of goggles, noticing the experienced guide didn’t have any. After climbing for what would hopefully be their final time through the icefall, with Ang Bhai carrying the few bottles of oxygen that were left to be shuttled up the mountain and Nima Wang Chu carrying the new wing, they spent a night at Camp II. Lakpa and Babu were together in one tent, Nima Wang Chu and Ang Bhai in another. At Camp III the next night, both Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu had to stay in the tents of sherpas working for other teams, as their own team had only one tent set up at both Camp III and Camp IV.
For an entire day gale-force winds blasted the Lhotse Face, causing the four of them to lean against the tent poles in order to support them so they wouldn’t snap. Snow piled up, drifting on the tents, causing the walls to sag precariously inward. With the wind, it was determined to be too dangerous to go outside and attempt to shovel it off. A constant howling and flapping of fabric berated them. They didn’t sleep at all and began using their bottled oxygen to help alleviate their altitude sickness, which both Babu and Ang Bhai were still feeling significantly. Lakpa, meanwhile, was still smoking cigarettes.
The climb from Camp III to Camp IV on the South Col is only 0.8 miles, but it takes anywhere from three to six hours and reaches an elevation of 26,300 feet, an elevation affectionately known amongst climbers as the Death Zone, where human beings can’t survive more than two or three days, no matter how well they’ve managed to acclimatize beforehand. After an hour or so of steep but easy climbing up the rest of the Lhotse Face, there is a band of rock accurately, if not creatively, coined the Yellow Band: a large yellow-colored strip of limestone running through the Himalaya, created millions of years earlier at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Here, the route to the South Col leaves the snow and ice of the Lhotse Face and climbs around 300 feet of smooth rock sitting at a 20- to 30-degree angle. Here, too, there are fixed lines conveniently set up by sherpas, to keep people from tripping and falling to their death. Once clear of the band, the mountain actually flattens out somewhat until the bottom of the ridge defining the South Col, which is placed rather breathtakingly between the summits of Everest and Lhotse. Before reaching the col, however, climbers must first navigate an area known as the Geneva Spur: 150 feet of slanting, 40-degree rock, ice, and snow. Topping the ridge, a narrow, rocky path leads to the South Col proper, an area the size of approximately two football fields. At the far west end, thirty bright yellow and orange tents sit huddled together, clinging to the mountain.
Ang Bhai and Nima Wang Chu ran multiple loads up to Camp IV without Lakpa or Babu, preparing camp for them, escorted by other sherpas working on that part of the mountain that day. Miraculously, both Babu and Ang Bhai started to get somewhat over their altitude sickness. On May 20 Ang Bhai, who had spent the night at Camp II after running loads to the higher camps for Lakpa and Babu, climbed all the way to Camp IV in order to meet the rest of the team in time for their summit push, which was scheduled to begin that night. “There was a lot of people,” he says. “I just followed them.”
Once all of them were in Camp IV, they huddled together in one tent, not sleeping but trying to rest, drinking as much water and eating as much food as they could as they waited for dark. They knew it would take them all night, and well into the next morning, to make the summit. They wanted to leave in the middle of the night, like most teams do, so they could arrive early enough to miss the strong winds and storms that generally rear up on top of Everest later in the day, especially since they were anticipated to be particularly bad the next day.
“There was too much wind,” Ang Bhai says. “We only had one tent. Four people.” They were low on food and had forgotten about the Snickers bars, which were now frozen solid at the bottom of one of their bags. They made black tea with no sugar. As the wind howled around them, crows circled overhead, looking for scraps to eat in the otherwise desolate and sterile white wasteland of the South Col. By the time the wind died at around 10:30 p.m., they were more than ready to leave. Before departing, however, Lakpa made an extra-strong batch of coffee, as he typically did before every summit push. It was the first time Babu had ever tried coffee. “It was great,” Babu remembers. His altitude sickness seemed to almost immediately disappear. “I couldn’t keep up with him,” Ang Bhai says. Babu practically ran up the rest of the mountain.
The summit itself is about 1.07 miles from the South Col and Camp IV. It usually takes climbers about eight to ten hours to make the journey, which first ascends a steep triangular face to a small platform at 27,600 feet known simply as the Balcony. Continuing up the ridge is a series of slippery rock slabs. In “good” snow years—that is to say, in years when there is enough snow to cover the slabs, but not so much as to be overly cumbersome—this section is fairly straightforward and safe, particularly with the use of the fixed lines. However, 2011 was not a good snow year. “It was dangerous,” Lakpa says. After the rock slabs the route gets even steeper for about 100 feet, nearing an angle of almost 60 degrees, depositing finally on the South Summit.
From here, climbers descend about 50 feet to a particularly dicey-looking knife-edge ridge. On one side is an 11,000-foot sheer drop down the Kangshung Face. On the other, an 8,000-foot void falling down the mountain’s Southwest Face. The path itself is compacted snow loosely adhered to, likewise, loose rock. After the Cornice Traverse, as this ridge is called, there is a noticeable and unavoidable wall of rock, ice, and snow. This, Hillary described in 1953, when he and Norgay became the first to summit, as “the most formidable-looking problem on the ridge—a rock step some 40 feet high…. The rock itself, smooth and almost holdless, might have been an interesting Sunday afternoon problem to a group of expert climbers in the Lake District, but here it was a barrier beyond our feeble strength to overcome.” Still roped to Norgay, Hillary wedged himself between a crack in the rock and a vertical wall of snow and began slowly, strenuously, wiggling his way up. The climbing was sketchy at best. He and Norgay made it to the top, though, of course, and from then on the wall has been known as the Hillary Step.
Nowadays, ropes set annually by sherpas run from the top to bottom, and climbers use mechanical ascenders to aid themselves in overcoming the obstacle. At the top of the Hillary Step, sitting on a ledge, rests a large chockstone blocking the path to the summit. It’s easy to scoot around, but there’s a 1,000-foot drop if you fall. A series of small, permanently snow-covered bumps leads to and blocks the view of the summit. To the right, snow cornices formed by the prevailing winds cling tenuously to the mountainside, waiting for someone to step on them and set them tumbling. The summit itself is no more than 30 square feet, marked with strings of continually flapping bright red, blue, and yellow prayer flags and, in 2011, a dug-out snow bench on which the victorious could sit and pose for pictures. Then, aside from the magnificent view, there’s nothing—just sky and the vast expanse of the Himalaya stretching off into the distance, disappearing over a curved horizon.
After nearly ten hours of climbing, Lakpa, Babu, Nima Wang Chu (who was carrying the wing), and Ang Bhai reached the summit at approximately 8:15 a.m. on May 21. Ang Bhai, who didn’t have any expedition mitts for his hands, wore thin fleece gloves, soaked through and now frozen. His hands were spared severe frostbite only by a pair of hand warmers given to him before the expedition by his brother, who had also given him boots and had lost several of his own digits after working for years as a climbing sherpa in the Himalaya.
On their way up, Babu and Lakpa had stopped to talk with another Nepali climber who was on his way down from the summit, a man named Bhakta Kumar Rai. The thirty-year-old had just spent thirty-two hours on the top of the world in a small tent, meditating—the longest anyone has spent on the top and still lived to tell about it. He introduced himself as “Supreme Master God Angel” and allegedly told Babu that he would one day be president of Nepal.
After taking a few pictures of themselves standing at the summit holding pictures of their families, the Nepali flag, and a banner for Arrufat’s APPI, Babu, Lakpa, Ang Bhai, and Nima Wang Chu walked down the opposing Northeast Summit Ridge. They stopped on a small, gently sloping snow platform placed precariously between a 10,000-foot drop into Tibet and an 11,000-foot drop down the Kangshung Face—the same place, coincidentally, the Roches had launched their tandem paraglider in 2001. Here, the Nepalis unpacked their wing, which took nearly an hour, and waited for the wind to die down before they attempted to take flight.
Clouds rolled slowly through the lesser mountains to the north. Babu looked up at a brilliant cold blue sky, feeling suddenly light-headed. It wasn’t just vertigo; he realized he had run out of supplemental oxygen. His body was beginning to shut down. Lakpa, standing in front of him and attached at the waist by a pair of locking carabiners, took his last remaining bottle, which he was using, and hooked it up to Babu’s regulator. Lakpa turned it on full flow, deciding that he wanted the man who would be piloting the paraglider to stay awake during its upcoming flight.
They were no longer laughing or joking. No one was joking. There was just the sound of the wind howling in their ears, with the sky above and the world below.
Babu, feeling only slightly more coherent, began to pray.
During a brief lull in the wind, Babu told Nima Wang Chu, who had been holding the wing firmly to the snow behind them, unroped on an overhanging cornice, to lift it up and launch it. Babu and Lakpa took a step forward in unison, toward the 10,000-foot drop into Tibet in front of them. The wing suddenly caught an updraft, taking off like a kite. Their feet lifted off the ground. For a moment the two were airborne. Then they crashed, landing exactly, and extraordinarily, right where they had been standing a moment earlier.
Getting up from the snow, apparently unfazed, Babu yelled over to Ang Bhai, who was still roped in to the fixed line leading up the Northeast Ridge to the summit, crouched behind a boulder, holding a small video camera. Babu told him to unrope and help Nima Wang Chu launch the wing. If he helped Nima, Babu knew, there would be no footage of him and Lakpa taking off from the top of Everest, except for what was being recorded on the small GoPro camera dangling from Babu’s left wrist, attached to a stick. He didn’t care.
“Run,” he told Lakpa. Firmly. Without yelling. “Run.”