Flying Off Everest (8 page)

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.

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
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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:

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.

Around 120 million years ago, the Indian landmass did something drastic: It broke free of the Mesozoic continent of Gondwana
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and began drifting northward at the rate of just over 6 inches per year, an impressive clip for a continent, considering most move, on average, less than an inch. Eventually, 75 million years later—a short, arm-flailing sprint in geological time—the Indian subcontinent ran headlong into the submerged edge of its larger neighbor, Eurasia. The impact zone was 1,500 miles wide. The denser ocean floor north of India, which was primarily made of basalt, dropped into the earth’s mantle and disappeared, literally melting beneath a line of now-extinct volcanoes. The comparatively lighter sedimentary rocks of present-day India and Tibet (limestone, shale, sandstone), formed millions of years earlier on the bottom of the ancient Tethys Sea,
^†
were thrust skyward, having no other place to go.

The process, which geologists refer to somewhat blandly nowadays as orogeny, created the youngest and highest-elevation mountains on the planet: the Himalaya (
Himā
, snow;
alāya
, abode). Home to the world’s largest subpolar glacial systems and deepest land gorges, the “abode of snow” is also the source of three of the world’s greatest river systems—the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra. One-sixth of the world’s population lives within its watershed. Averaging 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) along its northern rampart, the Himalaya also host all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter (26,247 foot) peaks. Thirty are over 25,000 feet tall.

For perspective: The highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, Argentina’s Aconcagua (22,841 feet), wouldn’t even make the top two hundred in the Himalaya. Most of the smaller peaks in the range are significantly higher than the tallest in Europe. And they’re still growing. India, although noticeably slowed by its now forty-five-million-year-long continental train wreck with Asia, is still persistently moving north nearly 2 inches each year, lifting the entire mountain range about 1 centimeter every 365 days. All of it, even the summit of Mount Everest at 29,035 feet
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—the highest point of elevation in the Himalaya, and thus, the world—was once at the bottom of the ocean. And after another few million years, it will return to it: one grain of silt at a time, flowing steadily out of the glaciers down the great, winding rivers of the Himalaya back to the sea. The world’s tallest mountains, eventually grinding themselves down to rolling hills, like the now ancient Appalachians in the eastern United States. To say where one truly ends and the other begins is more a question of time than space or distance. And that’s a much trickier thing to define.

In 1849 field surveyors in northern India working for Britain’s Great Trigonomical Survey, which had been assigned the rather daunting task of mapping, in excruciating detail, the entire Indian subcontinent for the crown, took measurements of a small speck of a mountaintop jutting up from deep within the then-forbidden kingdom of Nepal using a 24-inch theodolite. The mountain, pragmatically given the name Himalaya Peak XV, was over 100 miles away, situated at roughly 87 degrees east and 28 degrees north on the remote northeastern border of Nepal and Tibet. Due to the distance, other mountains in the foreground appeared much larger, so no special attention had been given to it at the time. Peak XV was obviously enormous, but so was everything else the surveyors were measuring. They were mapping the Himalaya, after all. The measurements sat in a folder collecting dust in Calcutta for three years until, in 1852, a mathematician named Radhanath Sikhdar finally did the math—and amazingly well. He took into account such factors as the curvature of the earth, atmospheric refraction, and plumb-line deflection (the sheer mass of a mountain creating enough gravitational pull to move a plumb line ever so slightly, thus altering measurements). Sikhdar put the summit of Peak XV at a neat and remarkably exact 29,002 feet.
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It was, without a doubt, the highest point of elevation on earth. And nobody outside of Nepal or Tibet had even known it was there. The world’s highest point had been hiding in plain sight for millennia.

In 1865 Sir Andrew Waugh, India’s surveyor general, decided to rename the peak Mount Everest in honor of his predecessor, Sir George Everest, an intense, bearded man with sand-colored hair and a passion for accuracy that drove him on several occasions to be diagnosed as mentally ill. At first glance this would seem curious, since official policy at the time encouraged the retention of local or ancient names, which “Everest” (pronounced EEV-er-est by the family) was decidedly not. With both Nepal and Tibet being closed to foreigners at
the time, however, Waugh had no way to actually ask the local Nepalis or Tibetans what they happened to call the peak, even if they did have a perfectly good name for it. And they did—two, actually. Nepalis to the south referred to the mountain as Deva-dhunga, “seat of God.”
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Tibetans on the north side of the mountain had been calling it Jomolangma for centuries, named after the goddess believed to dwell there: Miyolangsangma or Jomo Miyolangsangma, whose full name means something to the equivalent of “the immovable goddess mother of good bulls.” And even that has been quite regularly mistranslated, even today. In a 2013 essay written for National Geographic Books’
The Call of Everest,
Edwin Bernbaum, director of the Sacred Mountains Program of the Mountain Institute,
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points out:

As it turns out, in Tibetan Buddhism, there isn’t a goddess mother of the universe, or the world for that matter. “The idea of such a goddess doesn’t fit in a religion that doesn’t believe in a monotheistic supreme creator,” Bernbaum observes. He goes on to point out
that Jomo Miyolangsangma is actually a “relatively minor goddess.” Regardless, the mountain is still called Everest today.

In 1911, as Everest continued to slowly rise up from its ancient seabed, shrouded in obscurity, it suddenly became the center of the outside world’s attention, at least in regard to terrestrial conquest. Shortly after, a small group of Norwegians under the command of a man named Roald Amundsen, and then another, more ill-fated British group lead by Robert Falcon Scott, stood, shivering, on the South Pole. It was the most sought-after point to stand on the globe at the time, given that the North Pole had been stood and shivered on a few years previously by an equally cold and courageous group of Americans.
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The quest to put a human being smack-dab in the middle of each of the earth’s two polar regions, alive, had taken some three hundred years and much suffering and death by people from many nations. Standing on the top and bottom of the planet, as far as latitude and longitude were concerned, had been a great and obvious goal for humankind—it was the closest thing to the ends of the earth we could find, after having discovered that we were, in fact, living on a globe. And like any great, seemingly impossible goal, once it was proven possible and then finally accomplished, it left a huge, cavernous, anticlimactic hole—filled immediately with the same question such holes are always filled with: What’s next?

The answer was to be Everest: the next logical end-of-the-earth. Not long after Amundsen’s successful expedition to the southernmost point on the planet, the mountain quickly became known as “the third pole,” and a good number of people (mainly British) decided it would
be a smashing idea to put a person on top of it, despite the fact that the two countries the mountain straddled, Nepal and Tibet, were unquestionably and unapologetically closed to outsiders. This new goal would take over forty years to accomplish—more than a century since it was quantified as the tallest point on earth. Likewise, it would turn out to require much suffering and death.

Several British teams rapidly made plans to sneak into both Nepal and Tibet to do reconnaissance for a potential peak-bagging mission. In 1913 a twenty-three-year-old English army captain named John Noel, who would later become one of Everest’s most famous early photographers, actually took it upon himself to dress up like “a Mohammedan from India,” darkening his skin and donning a black wig to better blend in with the Tibetans, and managed to sneak through the border. He got within 40 miles of Everest before being turned around and chased out of the country by the local authorities, who were still upset about the last Briton who had entered their country, nine years earlier: Francis Younghusband. Lieutenant Colonel Younghusband had entered the peaceful Buddhist country—which consciously chooses not to support an army—with ten thousand soldiers on what was supposed to be a “diplomatic” mission; he spent nearly nine months marching to Lhasa, killing somewhere around five thousand Tibetans en route and sending the Dalai Lama fleeing for his life to Mongolia. Upon returning to England, Younghusband was knighted and made director of the Royal Geographical Society.

The same year Noel snuck into Tibet to catch a glimpse of Everest, another man named Cecil Rawling boldly drafted official plans for an Everest reconnaissance, with the support of the Royal Geographical Society, which was scheduled to take place the following year. Remarkably, the India Office did not straight-out reject the proposal, even though it recommended blatantly illegal actions—namely, entering a neighboring country without permission. But it also had not approved any of the plans by June 28, 1914, when all hell broke loose in Europe. A young Bosnian nationalist in Sarajevo named Gavrilo Princip shot
and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and five weeks later, the entire continent was at war. No one gave much thought to Everest at all for four horrific years.

The First World War presented a new and much more immediate set of challenges to the Western world, but also helped to shape the military siege–style tactics that are still, more often than not, used when climbing on Everest or other high-altitude peaks around the world. Not entirely unlike the trench warfare strategies developed in Europe, the goal was not a quick, clean victory but a sure one, even if it was excruciatingly slow and costly. It consisted of setting up a well-stocked base camp (complete with leather furniture and full libraries during some of the earlier Everest expeditions) and then launching several repeated “assaults” on the mountain, each time gaining slightly more ground and elevation, and then setting up a new, slightly higher camp from which to launch the next assault. It was a style of climbing that required a huge amount of manpower, time, money, and, again like war, human sacrifice.

Something being named the “world’s tallest” seems, on the surface, to be a fairly straightforward proposition, particularly in the case of mountains. It’s not. The summit of Everest, for example, while technically the highest point of elevation on the planet at 29,035 feet above sea level, isn’t actually on top of the world’s tallest mountain. The summit of Mauna Kea, the highest point on the island of Hawaii at 13,796 feet above sea level, is. Rising nearly 33,500 feet from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, only the top third of the massive shield volcano-turned-tropical-paradise is visible above water. If you were to place Mauna Kea and Mount Everest side by side on a level plane, Mauna Kea would be over 18,000 feet taller than Everest, which sits high up on the Tibetan Plateau, its base starting from anywhere between 17,100 feet when measured on the Tibetan side of the mountain to 13,800 feet when measured on the Nepal side, giving Everest a total
height from top to bottom of somewhere between 12,000 to 15,300 vertical feet. Alaska’s 20,322-foot Mt. McKinley (Denali) would also be taller than Everest if set next to it, rising some 18,000 feet from its approximately 2,000-foot base on the tundra of North America.