Mounting Our Own Everest
K A T M A N D U, Nepal, May 31, 2003 -- As a general rule, journalists loathe "anniversary" stories. There's never much to report when it comes to commemorating the 25th, 50th, 75th or 100th year since some momentous, or in many cases, non-momentous, event happened. News, by its nature, is topical, and anniversaries, by their nature, fall years, or decades, too late to qualify as news.
There are exceptions to most rules, however, and the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's first ascent of Mount Everest is one celebration we didn't want to miss.
The lure of Everest remains so powerful, climbers and trekkers and tourists just can't stay away, turning the slopes of the great mountain into something Hillary would barely recognize.
We decided to follow the well-worn path of a generation of Everest mountaineers — a path that immediately takes its toll in twisted ankles and painful blisters.
We are actually a pretty small group by Everest standards: a five-man team with just a half-ton of equipment. We arrived in the Nepali capital of Katmandu nearly a month ago, with a rough outline for our own assault on Everest, although our final destination was only Base Camp, a mere 17,550 feet high.
True, at that elevation, your body only receives half the amount of oxygen it does at sea level, some 3½ miles below. But the summit still stood more than 12,000 feet higher, and we prepared for our own adventure with the knowledge that, in actuality, we were only planning to travel to the bottom of the mountain.
Although there are any number of tour operators that will gladly guide you to Base Camp and back again, for a price, most of the groups or individuals setting out for Base Camp put in several months of planning and conditioning for their trips.
Given the nature of the news business, we had about 10 days. That meant 10 days to sort out our gear, plan our trek, set up our stories editorially, start a last-minute fitness program, and get ourselves to Katmandu. Easy.
Upon arriving in Nepal, our team tried to get our collective head around this Plimptonian adventure, as we struggled to figure out exactly how we were going to complete a fairly rigorous trek and still find a way to do our jobs as we went. Every plan included at least two worst-case scenarios, which involved everything from getting stuck in a storm, to having a member of our team go down with Acute Mountain Sickness, to having our equipment freeze up or fall into a crevasse. Luckily, we managed to avoid any of these situations, although we ran into several other tricky ones before we were finished.
We started in the village of Lukla, elevation 9,000 feet. (In 1953, it took Hillary's expedition one month to reach this point.) After meeting our small army of approximately 30 Sherpa guides, cooks and porters, we set out for the village of Phakding, a relatively easy hike, we were told. Considering our porters were lugging close to half a ton of television equipment on their backs, we couldn't complain about trekking for a few hours.
The stunning scenery helped. The mountains loomed larger with each step down the trail, and the rivers glimmered with a beautiful aquamarine color. In between gasps for breath as we trudged along, our sound recordist, James Brolan, shrugged his shoulders and commented that the trek gave a whole new meaning to "walking to work."
First Bump in the Road
It wasn't long after, that we encountered our first bump in the road on our way to Everest. Our cameraman, Francois Bisson, twisted his knee and aggravated an old injury. He hobbled his way to Phakding and bit his lip most of the way, only admitting that he had hurt himself when we arrived at our camp for the night.
He had been looking forward to the trip for weeks, and the injury was crushing. He knew that he couldn't make it to base camp, and we started thinking about how to get him home safely and how to fly a new cameraman to the foothills of Mount Everest. Logistics seem to grow more complicated in proportion to increasing elevation. But, a few satellite phone calls later, and our replacement cameraman, Matt Green, was headed to the airport in London.
In 1953, it was a potential disaster. In 2003, it took a few satellite phone calls to London.
The next day, Matt and Francois shook hands and traded seats in a helicopter in Namche Bazaar, a bustling Sherpa village built into the hills at just over 12,000 feet. The wonders of modern technology and transport had kept our trek alive.
This spring, as luck would have it, has been unseasonably cold on the mountain. At night, we crawled into our sleeping bags and with several layers of clothes on, shivered our ways to sleep. The mornings were equally frigid, but the higher we got, the clearer the skies were.
Work Calls
It's one thing to push on towards Base Camp when you're in the middle of a vacation, making your way at leisure up the hill. If you have a headache, you take an extra day and rest. If you twist a knee, you wait until it feels better before your resume climbing. When you're working, however, there's little margin for error.
On the morning of the 21st, we finally made it to Base Camp.
Each of us was breathing a little heavily, from the lack of oxygen, but we went to work, as we had decided to spend only a few hours there.
In fact, our arrival at Base Camp itself was a bit anticlimactic. Situated along a massive glacier, and at the foot of the treacherous Khumbu Ice Fall, Base Camp looks like an over-populated version of the moon — tents sitting virtually on top of one another on the rocky terrain.
This year, Base Camp was more crowded than ever, with a record number of expeditions on the mountain, and we scrambled around for several hours to make sure we spoke to everyone. And then, it was time for the walk back down the mountain.
We arrived back in Lobuche, tired, cranky, unshowered for nearly two weeks, but enthused about our trip — getting to Base Camp, even if it is just the bottom of Mount Everest, was no small feat, and our stories were coming together well. All that was left was getting off the mountain and back to Katmandu.
We needed to get back to Katmandu in time to edit our stories in time for the anniversary, but we had little, if any margin for error. We had a helicopter booked to take us from the high altitude village of Lobuche back to Katmandu on Friday, May 23, so we ignored our headaches, dodgy stomachs, cuts, bumps and bruises, and pressed on.
In fairness, we didn't have much to complain about. We were carrying only our daypacks while our Sherpas, each one more underdressed for the bitter temperatures than the next, lugged our personal bags and our TV equipment up the hill.
Katmandu Bound … Almost
We awoke Friday at 6 a.m., as instructed, to wait for our helicopter. Six hours later, we were still waiting, and we eventually found out that the chopper had been rerouted for an emergency. The beautiful, blue skies that began the day tended to fade in the afternoon, so we were stuck for another night.
Our poor porters hauled our gear back inside from the helipad, and we hunkered down, setting up a makeshift office to log our videotapes, and playing several games of scrabble.
The next morning, we repeated the drill. By 9 a.m., there was still no sign of the helicopter, and I got on the sat phone to find out what the problem was. We could feel our editing days slipping away, and the Scrabble games were becoming particularly heated by that second morning.
The news, we discovered, was not good. The helicopter was grounded — fogged in, in the valley. Although the skies were clear and cloudless for as far as we could see, the weather lower down the mountain, was supposedly abysmal. No matter how firmly we argued, we were stuck for another day.
On the third morning, it became more difficult to roll out of our sleeping bags. Nobody went outside to wait. Nobody reveled in the blue skies that dominated the morning. A few false alarms only served to sink our spirits.
And then, just as we were about to give up hope, as is usually the case, a large, old Russian helicopter touched down. Within two minutes, all five of us, plus our half-ton of equipment, were hovering in the sky, on our way to Katmandu.
And looking back at base camp, we were reminded that for those serious about climbing to the summit, up there in the clouds, this is really just the bottom of the mountain.