Flying Off Everest (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They needed help, and quick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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