Flying Off Everest (13 page)

“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.”

A small crowd had gathered around an old desktop computer in the home of David Arrufat and his girlfriend, Wildes, outside of Pokhara. Babu’s wife, Susmita, and their two young sons, seven-year-old Niraj and four-month-old Himalaya, as well as Lakpa’s wife, Yanjee, and their four-year-old son, Mingma Tashi, anxiously peered over one another’s shoulders to get a better view, although they weren’t quite sure what they were looking at. The tiny yellow dot flickering on the screen, which supposedly represented Babu and Lakpa’s exact GPS location, transmitted by the SPOT locator device they were carrying, hadn’t moved in nearly thirty-seven minutes. It was fixed on a sloping ledge, partway up the North Face of Everest. Not moving.

“Everything looked like it had gone wrong,” Wildes, a dark-haired, brown-eyed, slow-speaking Brazilian says. Her boyfriend and Babu’s paragliding mentor, David, put his head in his hands. It was going to be difficult explaining to the children that their fathers were now dead.

Then, suddenly, the dot moved, jumping several miles to the south, to a spot just north of the small mountain village of Namche Bazaar, where Babu and Lakpa actually were floating blithely down toward the nearby Syangboche airstrip, singing loudly, exceedingly pleased
they hadn’t died, and completely unaware that their GPS tracker had stopped working almost immediately after takeoff when they had entered Chinese airspace.
*

The takeoff from the summit ridge had gone surprisingly well, all things considered. Lakpa couldn’t breathe for the first thirty seconds of the flight. “It felt like someone was choking me,” he says. After inflating the wing, an updraft ripping up the North Face had launched him and Babu 50 feet straight into the air—their crampons dangling beneath them along with 10,050 feet of exposure, the Rongbuk Glacier stretching off into the distance nearly 2 miles below.

Lakpa, who had chosen to skip breakfast that morning in favor of a cigarette, and who had given his last bottle of oxygen to Babu, simply couldn’t get enough air in his lungs anymore. He had used supplemental oxygen on all three of his previous successful summit bids. Now he was suspended even higher than the summit of Everest with none. He was so out of it he didn’t bother attaching his small GoPro camera to his helmet like he had planned. He didn’t even turn it on, figuring the 5.9-ounce camera would be too heavy on his head, which he was already struggling to hold up.

Babu, who was piloting the wing with Lakpa sitting in his lap, held their other GoPro in his left hand, attached to a telescoping plastic rod. However, since he needed both hands to hold on to the brake lines above his head in order to control the paraglider, the rod dangled from his wrist with the camera rolling.

As they continued to rise, Lakpa felt an invisible hand tightening around his neck. With what air he had left in his lungs he shouted at Babu, who was distracted by a desperate attempt to control their rapid
ascent, “Oxygen! Oxygen! Oxygen!” The last bottle Babu was using, which was keeping him from choking and passing out in the thin air, was almost empty. They needed to descend, he knew. Immediately.

Lakpa and Babu’s current predicament was not an entirely new one. In 1862 two English scientists named Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher actually became the first people to fly above 29,000 feet without the aid of supplemental oxygen. It was not on purpose. And it did not go well. The pair took off at 1:00 p.m. on September 5 from Wolvering-hampton, England, in a wicker basket attached to a 90,000-cubic-foot hydrogen-filled balloon. Overhead, a solid cloud deck loomed (in hindsight, ominously). They were dressed in simple wool suits, befitting their scholarly professions and the chilly autumn day. Their plan: rise to an elevation of approximately 26,000 feet, recording temperature and humidity levels along the way, then climb up into the overhead rigging and pull the gas release line and descend. In spite of the fact that no one at the time actually knew how the human body would react to being at extreme altitude, Coxwell and Glaisher smartly anticipated the air expanding and thus thinning as they climbed, and guessed, quite rightly, that it might present them a problem once they were about 5 miles up. So they decided that’s when they would call it quits and descend.

Things started off well enough. The pair climbed steadily toward the clouds, beginning to handwrite their measurements at precisely 1:03 p.m. Coxwell would later write about the experience, saying, “On emerging from the cloud at seventeen minutes past one, we came into a flood of light, with a beautiful blue sky without a cloud above us, and a magnificent sea of cloud below, its surface being varied with endless hills, hillocks, mountain chains and many snow white masses rising from it.” He tried to take a picture, but the silver bromide crystals in the film he was using didn’t expose right. After nineteen minutes they reached an altitude of about 10,560 feet. The temperature, as they had
predicted, was dropping—a lot faster than expected. The two mildly overweight forty-three-year-olds also noted having a newfound shortness of breath. Hypoxia, which is what they were suffering from, wasn’t a concept fully understood in the Victorian era. At just over 21,000 feet, they began having trouble writing down their measurements. Their hands, they also noted, were freezing.

After forty-seven minutes Coxwell and Glaisher reached their planned maximum altitude, just under 29,000 feet. The temperature was -30 degrees Fahrenheit. Frostbite was setting in on every part of their bodies that was exposed to the air. They were gasping for breath and feeling precariously light-headed. They realized, suddenly, that they could no longer even read their instruments. Glaisher noted that he didn’t seem to have any control over his arms and legs, shortly before passing out.

It was at this moment, after seeing his cohort slip unexpectedly into unconsciousness, that Coxwell decided it would be prudent of him to begin their descent. Without the use of his now-frozen hands, Coxwell somehow clambered his way up the rope rigging supporting their wicker basket, grabbed the gas release line between his teeth, and pulled three times. Just enough hydrogen was released from the balloon to initiate their descent and thus save both of their lives. It took Glaisher seven minutes to regain consciousness, at which point he resumed taking notes.

No one went higher for some time. And when they did, they brought their own bottled oxygen.

The first flyover of Everest occurred on April 3, 1933, twenty years before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary would actually stand on the peak’s summit. Two biplanes (Westland PV3s, to be exact) piloted by Lieutenant David McIntyre and Sir Douglas Douglas-Hamilton (the Marquis of Clydesdale) took off from Purnea in Bihar, India, about 160 miles to the southeast of Everest, attempting to survey the entire region through a series of “survey strip” photographs. The flights went routinely, aside from one photographer’s oxygen supply
temporarily failing and Lord Clydesdale flying daringly, and entirely unnecessarily, through the ice plume blowing off of Everest’s summit. They cleared the peak by 100 feet. The surveying part of the mission unfortunately and predictably failed, however, the lower part of the Himalaya being covered in its usual dusty haze, which rises up from the southern plains, obscuring most all of the lesser peaks on a daily basis. The flight didn’t set an altitude record, since planes at that time had already flown up to 40,000 feet. Just not over Everest.

No one bothered to fly over the mountain again until 1988, when Jean-Marc Boivin launched his paraglider off the summit. And he, technically, just flew down from the top, not over it—a fairly random, arbitrary distinction, but a distinction nonetheless. The same is true for Claire and Zebulon Roche, when they launched their tandem wing from the summit in 2001 and glided straight down to the Rongbuk Glacier below.

In 2004 a well-known Italian aviator named Angelo D’Arrigo (“the Human Condor”) attempted to fly over the summit in a hang glider, after being towed into position by a small microlight plane. After reaching an altitude of well over 26,000 feet, the towrope snapped. Angelo reported afterward: “We were at a height of about 9,000 meters, I was 500m south of Everest. I released what was left of the towrope and headed for the peak, flying over it soon after.” In the video footage of the flight, captured by a camera mounted on the wing, you can see D’Arrigo being shaken like a rag doll, the high winds and turbulence near the summit making him lose complete control over the glider more than once. D’Arrigo, who had trained in a wind tunnel for the stunt and used supplemental oxygen for his flight, also lacked a GPS track log. To this day, no one knows for sure exactly how high he went.

In 2007 the British adventurer, author, and popular television personality Edward “Bear” Grylls went so far as to attempt flying over Everest using a paramotor.
*
After hauling all of his equipment along
with a film crew to within 8 miles of the mountain, however, he didn’t actually fly over the peak; the Chinese government resolutely refused to issue him a permit to enter their airspace. Still, he managed to reach an altitude of approximately 29,500 feet with the aid of bottled oxygen and endured temperatures up to -76 degrees Fahrenheit, flying his paramotor just to the south of the mountain over Nepal.

The only other person to have flown directly over the summit was Didier Delsalle, who in 2005 allegedly went so far as to actually land an Ecureuil/AStar AS 350 B3 helicopter on the top. Likewise, he was breathing supplemental oxygen.

Aside from Coxwell and Glaisher, Lakpa was more than likely only the third person to ever experience dangling over 29,000 feet in the air with no motor and no bottled oxygen. And he didn’t have a gas release cord to pull.

Babu pulled hard on the brake lines above his head, hoping to direct the wing out of the edge of the updraft that was threatening to blast him and Lakpa into the stratosphere. Lakpa, now completely out of air, could no longer scream. Then, almost as quickly as they had taken off, they began to drop, the enormous wing above them struggling to catch enough purchase to support both of their weight in the thin air.

With precision Babu directed them back toward the summit, passing directly over it. Their GPS tracker later reported that they had reached a maximum altitude of 29,085 feet, making it the unofficial highest free flight ever.
*

After dropping back down below the level of the summit, Lakpa regained his ability to breathe. He began to sing. Loudly. What song, he doesn’t remember. “I sing when I’m happy,” he says. And he was happy he wasn’t dead. Babu said nothing, completely focused on flying the wing in conditions he had never experienced before. Still, he did it with one hand, holding the telescoping rod mounted with the still-running GoPro camera out in front of him. He switched it from hand to hand occasionally, to capture them flying from different angles. Lakpa pulled a small digital still camera out of his pocket and began taking pictures. He also started filming with the small handheld video recorder.

They flew across the West Ridge, clearing it by several hundred feet, as Waters and Babu had predicted they would. Lakpa, looking back on Everest from above, had a sudden moment of
déjà vu
. Although he knew he had never seen Everest from this angle, which had always either been above him or directly under his boots, he shouted back at Babu, “I have seen this once before!”
Yes
, Lakpa was certain,
I have seen this before in my dreams.
And this thought made him even happier. He continued singing as they reached the Khumbu Icefall.

Here, Babu turned them southwest, crossing the massive flank of 25,791-foot Nuptse, still well above 23,000 feet. Lakpa, still singing; Babu, silent and filming. They continued in a straight line, crossing above the summit of 19,049-foot Pokalde Peak and past the snowy ramparts of 22,349-foot Ama Dablam to the narrow gravel runway known as the Syangboche airstrip. Their crampons scraped loudly against the small rocks of the gravel runway as they landed, still wearing their full-body down suits. They unceremoniously folded up the wing, put it back in an unmarked, black non-paraglider-looking backpack, unzipped their down suits so they wouldn’t overheat, and walked into town.