Keeper Of The Mountains

by Bernadette McDonald

  The Frenchman Jean-Christophe Lafaille was one of these who, in the spring of 2000, soloed a direct line up the Northeast Face of Manaslu, summiting on May 5. Another was the talented and persistent Russian Valeri Babanov, who established a new line on the 6783-metre Kangtega, a peak southeast of Everest.

  But on Everest the crowds were huge and climbers sometimes got on each other’s nerves. One such incident occurred between an American Discovery Channel correspondent, Finn-Olaf Jones, and Briton Henry Todd. Jones was filing Internet reports from base camp that so irritated Todd that he threatened to kill Jones. Elizabeth heard several versions of the goings-on; one was that Todd beat Jones up. Todd denied he even touched Jones, claiming he only shook his fist at him. Whatever the truth, Jones fled, and in doing so, he fell and injured himself on a boulder. Threats of legal action flew back and forth and Jones was finally whisked away by helicopter. Elizabeth was disgusted.

  The death of Babu Chhiri at the end of April 2001 stunned the climbing world and all of Nepal. Elizabeth heard he had left Camp II to take some photos, and when he had not returned five hours later, his brother Dawa went out to search for him. At midnight they found footsteps in the snow that ended at a crevasse, in which they found his body. A media frenzy ensued with reports around the world. His body was brought to Kathmandu and displayed at the Sherpa Center, where it was covered with flowers and ceremonial scarves. Many dignitaries, including the prime minister, came to pay their respects. Tributes poured in – even King Birendra sent a condolence message to his family: “Babu’s demise has caused irreparable loss to the nation and to the mountaineering fraternity.”

  Elizabeth was saddened by the death of this charming man. He had wanted to build a school for the children of his home village, Taksindu, which was still without a school. And he had finally told her that his next great project was going to be a traverse of Everest from the northern slopes to the top, down the southern side to base camp, and then an immediate reversal from south to north – an itinerary that Elizabeth described as “a plan that only Babu Chhiri could even contemplate.”

  Elizabeth had seen many climbers die over the years. Most often she was not emotionally involved with their lives, but every now and then she grieved, such as when German climber Robert Rackl died in October 2003 while leading an expedition on Ama Dablam. He had gone ahead of the rest of his team to inspect some old fixed ropes and must have lost his balance and reached for a rope that either came out or was rotten. He fell the entire distance of the route and was found dead at the bottom of the mountain. She remembered him as a man full of energy, someone who was patient and kind. A year later she could not speak about him without her voice breaking.

  Another death that distressed her was of the French snowboarder Marco Siffredi. She first met him in 2001 when he climbed and snowboarded Everest. In 2002 he returned to attempt a snowboard descent of the much more direct Hornbein and Japanese couloirs on the North Face. She chatted with him at his hotel before he went and recalled that he was “very nice, interesting and so very, very young – twenty-three years old. He was doing remarkable things and he was excited about his opportunities – his life was in front of him. He just disappeared!” His parents came to Nepal a few months later and explained that they had had two sons; one died in a climbing accident in the Alps and the second in Nepal. “That one really did sadden me,” she said. “He was so full of life and had tremendous enthusiasm. It was a wonderful world for him and it just went up in smoke!”

  On the subject of climbers with disabilities, Elizabeth was impatient at best, seeing them as stunt climbers. Her reaction to the blind American climber Erik Weihenmayer’s plans to climb Everest after his Ama Dablam attempt in 2000 was classic: “I hope for his sake that he doesn’t come back.” Despite her comment, he did come back, in the spring of 2001, and succeeded in his quest. He told her he had spent two and a half months from his arrival at base camp, had worked incredibly hard along with a devoted team and had taken it day by day. He explained to her that one of the biggest challenges was negotiating the complex ladder system in the Khumbu Icefall. Jumping crevasses was difficult because he couldn’t see how far to jump. She asked him why he would want to go to Everest when he couldn’t even see the view. Erik responded that he experienced great pleasure from the wind and sun on his face and the feeling of rock and snow under his feet. An enormous amount of vicious cynicism and black humour had accompanied Erik up the mountain, with one climber commenting that he hoped to “get the first picture of the dead blind guy.” But it didn’t faze Erik. Guided by a bell on his teammate’s rucksack and his own determination, he stood on the summit on May 25. Although she may have been cynical initially, Elizabeth was professional with Weihenmayer. American filmmaker Michael Brown, who created an award-winning film about the climb, remembered her interview with Weihenmayer as respectful: “She didn’t pass judgment – she was classy.”

  Another event that many considered a stunt – a ski descent of Everest – captured Elizabeth’s imagination and admiration. Slovenian skier Davo Karničar made what she considered to be the first honest-to-goodness, top-to-bottom ski descent of the mountain. He used oxygen for his climb but not on the descent. As Elizabeth observed, “What for? He was going too fast.” For the steepest sections of the descent, he sidestepped with his skis down the slopes. When she inquired about his method of avoiding avalanches, he replied, “I go very fast.” At less than five hours, his descent was actually faster than he expected. Elizabeth thought this was “quite an accomplishment.”

  Elizabeth seemed hard to pigeonhole. She didn’t consider the ski descent to be a stunt, yet a blind climber’s Everest attempt or a speed climber was. Who created these rules of engagement on the mountain? Did she come to these conclusions individually, based on her like or dislike of someone’s personality? Did she have some kind of guideline for what she considered admirable? Who influenced her opinions?

  Sometimes her opinions were influenced by reports she heard from the climbers she trusted, including the Italian Simone Moro. Such was the case on Lhotse in 2001. Nineteen-year-old British climber Thomas Moores was on a U.S.-led commercial expedition and fell at about 8300 metres. Moro was in his tent at 7950 metres at the time, preparing for his summit bid the next day. As soon as he heard shouts about the fall, he left his tent to try to rescue Moores. He was the only one who did. Everyone else at the same camp apparently refused to help. Elizabeth was sure it was because they didn’t want to jeopardize their chances of reaching the summit the next day. Moro found Moores at 7:00 p.m., picked him up and carried him to his tent, where he gave him water and administered first aid. Moro arranged for some Sherpas to carry him down the next day and then realized he was too tired to try for his own summit bid. Other climbers on the mountain said Moores was inadequately prepared with backup support, and when things went badly it meant that another team (in this case, another individual) had to cover for him.

  She heard of more antics on the French Annapurna I expedition commemorating the original 1950 climb, on which Lionel Terray had played an important role. Nicolas Terray, son of the famous climber, was the leader of the 2001 climb. The team, which included Christophe Profit, didn’t get far on the mountain. Profit came back earlier than the rest of the team and contacted Elizabeth because he wanted to talk. He told her he was upset because when the leader decided to retreat, he (Profit) asked to continue, believing he had found a safe alternative. He wanted to try it alone with two Sherpas. They made a stab at it and Profit actually got quite high, but one of the Sherpas was worried about frostbite and had to descend. Profit was sure it was worth another try, but when he got down to base camp the decision had been made to abandon the mountain. The expedition was declared over. Profit was forbidden to stay back and try again. He was infuriated and wanted Elizabeth to know.

  When Elizabeth met the leader, Nicolas Terray, a few days later, she asked him why he hadn’t allowed Profit to stay on longer to try to finish the route. Startled b
y her question, Terray was irritated and abrupt with her. About two weeks later she received a fax from him: “I think you are not allowed to judge it. It’s not your problem even if you think it … I have been a little bit disappointed by your attitude.” She wrote and rewrote her response letter, communicating in what she considered to be her most diplomatic style: “I don’t know about my being allowed to judge that decision, but you must be aware that I try to learn and understand as much as possible about any climb and the reasons for putting an end to them before a summit has been reached. Furthermore, I also understood that in the case of your expedition the decision to stop was not unanimous, and I wanted to learn your point of view.… Please accept my apology if my questioning was too sharp.”

  But despite her attempts to understand the nuances of the members of this particular expedition, she sometimes questioned the motivations of climbers and their obsessions with peaks, routes and records. She tried to put it into a bigger context: just how important were these climbs?

  In the larger arena of Nepal the political situation was beginning to affect climbers and trekkers, and Elizabeth heard more frightening stories all the time. In the fall of 2000, six young Spanish students intent on climbing Manaslu were camped at a village named Seti when about 200 terrorists, later identified as Maoists, surrounded them. They were forced to give up every rupee they had. The Maoists injured one of the porters and confined the climbers to their tents all night. After this incident, the climbers flew by helicopter to Kathmandu to flee the area, as well as to get more money from home to continue the expedition. They expected the Nepalese government to cover the cost of the helicopter, but the government said no. To add insult to injury, they returned to the area, having been promised police protection, but found none.

  Another team approaching Shringi Himal, a 7187-metre mountain northeast of Manaslu and not far south of the Tibetan border, was turned back by a group of Buddhist monks who said they could not continue up the Shringi River because the gods living on Shringi’s west side would bring violence to them if they did. Despite considerable discussion, the monks wouldn’t back down, so the team changed their objective and went to a different side of the mountain, one the monks didn’t object to. After some time and effort, they abandoned their climb only to find that local villagers had stolen about $5,000 worth of belongings from their advance base camp.

  Along with the rise in crime, Elizabeth continued to be concerned about the growing number of permits issued for expeditions. Especially in the spring season, when the weather was supposedly a bit more favourable, the numbers kept increasing. According to her, the Nepalese authorities briefly tried to limit the number of permits, but they received resistance from trekking agents and Sherpas who made their living from expeditions. Ama Dablam was a typical example. As Elizabeth explained, it was a beautiful mountain and not difficult, so everyone wanted to climb it. As a result, there were often too many expeditions on the peak at the same time, causing long waits on certain parts of the ridge. There was also overcrowding at the camps; people were sometimes forced to skip camps and go up the mountain too quickly, which caused physiological problems and accidents.

  There were a lot of complaints to the ministry from teams returning from the mountain, but “it goes in one ear and right out the other,” Elizabeth said. Foreign exchange was a highly prized commodity in Nepal, and mountaineering was an important foreign exchange earner.

  Then the inconceivable happened. At 4:00 in the morning on June 2, 2001, Elizabeth received a telephone call from Lady Hillary in Auckland asking her if it was true that the royal family had been massacred. New Zealand reporters had called Sir Edmund for comments. Elizabeth immediately called the Reuters correspondent in Kathmandu, who confirmed the news. An army source had informed him just hours before.

  On the evening of June 1, at the regular royal family dinner gathering at the palace, Crown Prince Dipendra took up his personal weaponry and proceeded to slaughter his parents, two siblings, two aunts, two uncles, a cousin and finally himself. The house of Shah was finished. In one fell swoop, a dynasty that had ruled Nepal for 10 generations was almost entirely wiped out.

  Pandemonium broke out as news of the massacre spread like wildfire throughout Kathmandu and the world. Meanwhile, what remained of the royal family was in a state of shock and upheaval. The problem was that the crown prince, successor to the throne, did not die immediately of his self-inflicted wounds. Would tradition require them to crown a known murderer? In the end, they did just that, and an unconscious Dipendra was declared king, while the former king’s brother, Gyanendra, was appointed regent until the new King Dipendra could carry out his duties. Dipendra died two days later and Gyanendra became king. The people of Nepal had had three kings in four days.

  In those four days, no explanation for the massacre was forthcoming from the palace. Like the rest of Kathmandu, Elizabeth wondered why they didn’t immediately issue a statement to stop the rampant speculation and fear-mongering that swept the city. But when she realized what they had faced with the delayed death of Dipendra, she understood their hesitation. In the meantime, massive conspiracy theories floated about: the Maoists, Gyanendra or the queen mother was behind it. Elizabeth was convinced that the official version – that it had been Dipendra – was the truth.

  As the story emerged, it became known that the prince had developed a serious drug and alcohol dependency and was angry with his family because they had used every argument they could muster, including talk of revoking his right of succession, if he persisted in marrying the woman he had chosen. This unstable man had also accumulated an arsenal of weapons that included an M16 assault rifle capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a minute, a 9 mm submachine gun with 900-rounds-per-minute capacity, a single-barrel shotgun and a 9 mm pistol. The public was shocked to learn that the palace had allowed such a situation to develop: an unstable prince with unlimited access to drugs, booze and weapons and a seemingly unresolvable conflict with his family over the woman he loved. Escaping the slaughter was Queen Mother Ratna, the woman chosen by Crown Prince Mahendra against his father’s wishes 50 years earlier. She had been in another part of the palace when the bullets flew.

  There was considerable instability in Nepal following the massacre, some of which was caused by the palace’s delay in telling the truth. Political leaders hoping to gain some headway fuelled the conspiracy theories, as did the Maoists, who hoped to further their own cause. In Kathmandu a curfew was imposed from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. Outside Elizabeth’s door, demonstrators taunted and threw stones at police, burned tires and effigies in the road and demanded an investigation. The funeral procession carrying the bodies to the royal cremation site at Aryaghat was lined with demonstrators shouting, throwing stones and condemning Birendra’s murder. These demonstrations confirmed the affection the population had for Birendra and the queen. Elizabeth found this confusing, because just 10 years earlier huge crowds had protested against the royal couple, calling the king a thief and the queen a whore.

  Once again, the citizens of Kathmandu were witness to a royal cremation at Pashupatinath Aryaghat, the site reserved for royals. Only this time it wasn’t just the king. It was the king, queen, princesses and princes, all aflame at once. Nepalis who gathered on the far side of the Bagmati River watched a complete dynasty go up in smoke.

  On June 4, 53-year-old King Gyanendra was crowned, for the second time in his life. In 1950, Gyanendra, then four, had been crowned after King Tribhuvan fled Nepal for India and left him behind. The last of the Rana prime ministers had crowned the child, but there was no international recognition of this boy king. Now crowned king of Nepal for the second time, Gyanendra named his wife, Komal, queen. She had been seriously injured in the bloodbath, with a bullet missing her heart by millimetres. The citizens of Kathmandu were exhausted. In one week they had witnessed ten funerals.

  By autumn the numbers of climbers coming to Nepal had diminished drastically. Elizabeth attributed this to sev
eral factors: the massacre, fear of terrorism in Nepal, fear of aviation safety following the September 11 tragedy in the United States, and downturns in the economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan. In Nepal the Maoists and the security forces had agreed on a ceasefire, but the Maoists broke it in November and a number of villages across the country – even in a remote part of the Kathmandu valley – experienced violence. The death toll continued to rise. The king declared a state of emergency, allowing the Royal Nepal Army to be unleashed on the Maoists. Two platoons of soldiers were flown by helicopter to Namche Bazaar, and the army was active around the country trying to flush out the Maoist fighters. Elizabeth acknowledged that it was no longer safe to travel about the country.

  But the climbers who were still in the country needed to travel through the valleys to get to their peaks, and Elizabeth heard many frightening stories about Maoist attacks. In some cases, it was impossible to determine whether the bandits were Maoists or just Nepalis posing as rebels, but climbing teams were regularly stopped by armed men demanding money and cameras. Near the village of Tashigaon on the way to Makalu, a six-member Spanish team led by Edurne Pasaban encountered a group of men and boys armed with rifles, pistols and grenades. The team was relieved of about 5,000 rupees and several cameras. A Swiss team in the same area was stopped by Nepalis carrying rifles but not wearing Maoist uniforms, who demanded 10,000 rupees and one camera. In the Solukhumbu district, two days of incidents at Lukla Airport damaged the control tower, and a bank was robbed. The number of trekkers dropped, business was down and Elizabeth’s Tiger Tops earnings suffered as a result.

  Elizabeth had frequent reminders from her nephew, Michael, that she could, at any time, return to the United States and live with him and his family. In light of the deteriorating situation in Nepal, she appreciated the offer, but she declined. She tried to assuage his fears by telling him that Kathmandu itself had a noticeable presence of security forces: armed soldiers and police were on patrol and manning checkpoints. She added the reassuring news that “only a few small bombs” had caused damage and they were not in central areas. She felt secure going out in her Volkswagen Beetle with her driver, and she stayed home at night.