Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest

by Jules Mountain

  I could see a helicopter, as cold and real as the snow around my knees. It was coming in to land on the piles of rocks the Sherpas had placed on top of the glacier to act as a helipad.

  My heart leapt at the thought that help had arrived. Did this mean that the injured could get real medical help and were going to be transported to hospital – and that it was all over?

  I felt a pang of guilt, wishing away the people I had helped keep alive the previous day – wishing away Mark, Richard, the Gurkha captain – but a part of me wanted them to be gone, taken away by a helicopter to become someone else’s problem.

  Nine hours in that ‘hospital’ tent had been enough for me. I had steeled myself, prepared myself for another few days of the same, another few days covered in blood and urine, watching people whimpering in agony, with only Paracetamol to give them. It wrenched my very soul and I felt their pain. Too long in that environment would destroy anybody. I wanted the problem to be someone else’s responsibility.

  As I stood up from my tent and watched the helicopter land, I felt redoubled respect for those in the medical profession.

  Few Westerners alive today would have been through what I had been through just eight hours earlier. Only if you were involved in a war zone, or a massive pile-up on the motorway, a tsunami or some other sort of natural disaster, would you be forced to care for so many horrific injuries, tasked with keeping dying people alive for an unknown amount of time.

  I’m not sure how I managed it, but I suspected I would return to England a changed man – someone with severe psychological issues – if I had to endure any more time in the hospital tent.

  Still…were they actually gone?

  A nagging doubt crept into my brain like a snake. What if they were still there – still dying?

  I had to find out.

  I pulled on my boots and headed to the mess tent, ashamed of myself for praying they’d all been taken away. But I knew that if they were still there, I was going to go straight back into the tent, standing tall. I was going to start looking after them again, and keep looking after them until they were picked up. Somehow I would have to handle it; find the emotional energy from somewhere.

  I reached the mess tent, drew a deep breath, and pulled aside the entrance flap.

  The stale, dank smell from the night before hit me like a fist. I staggered in, my hand covering my mouth.

  It was empty. The tent was completely empty of bodies.

  It looked like a recently abandoned medical tent on a battlefield. Bloody rags littered the floor, discarded bedding was strewn about the place. That smell infested everything.

  But the bodies were gone…the people were gone.

  Mark, Richard, the Gurkha captain and the other 22 injured souls... All of them had been carried off to the helicopters, and flown away down the valley. The problems had been lifted off my shoulders.

  I heaved a huge sigh of relief – my duty was officially over.

  I heard no news of the injured. We never found out how they got on once they had been airlifted off the mountain. They took off in the helicopters and flew out of my life, just as quickly and suddenly as they had entered it.

  I left the tent and found John, who was standing nearby with Louise.

  John told me the injured people had been flown out.

  “All of them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “The helicopters managed to get in early this morning. They’ve all gone. First port of call will be the hospital in Lukla, then, presumably, Kathmandu.”

  Everyone who didn’t require urgent medical attention, who was not a priority for the helicopters, had been left at Base Camp.

  Of course, there had been a mass exodus on foot during the night. The majority of the Sherpas had left Base Camp to seek news of their families. Many of the climbers had also fled down the valley, in an attempt to get away from the disaster, and probably to try to catch the next flight home, to get out of the country as soon as possible.

  That left the rest of us.

  I couldn’t see the advantage of rushing off to Kathmandu. We were aware by now that the earthquake had struck close to the city; it would be chaos down there. The airports would be choked with people trying to get away.

  I was safer here, I decided.

  I looked up towards the summit of Everest, hidden behind the nearer mountains and clouds…

  I imagined it stood, much as it had always done, looking proudly over the entire world from its unique vantage point. I was to discover later that the force was so great that Everest had lost a full inch of its height during the earthquake, but this made no difference to the imposing figure that it would cut upon the skyline.

  I stumbled into the second mess tent, found a tea bag and a flask of hot water (good old Bill). I made a cup of Her Maj’s finest. It tasted so good that it turned the lights back on in my head.

  I looked over at John.

  “I guess we should clean up the other mess tent,” I said.

  “I guess.”

  It was a big job, we had no idea where to start, and we were both exhausted from the exertions of the previous day.

  We started by clearing everything out of the mess tent that had served as our hospital ward, pulling out the soiled sleeping bags, mattresses, the chair I’d sat on the previous night, the urine bowl, the bandages, the remnants of the polystyrene we’d used to make the splint for Mark’s neck, the blue Paracetamol tablets, the towels, the smelly, wet socks we’d removed from people’s soaking feet – they all came out. We aired the sleeping bags and mattresses as best we could, hanging them over rocks in the hope that it would remove some of the smell.

  After several hours’ work, we had the tent back to something resembling its original state.

  We then swept the thin carpet that lay on top of the snow – I could still see the splattering of blood on the carpet from the previous night… As we swept, the sticky, putrid smell came back, along with the stench of old pee.

  I opened the back of the tent, to try to get some air passing through it.

  We moved the chairs and the long table back inside. We gathered the fake flowers that had adorned the walls before the disaster and put them back up again. This gave the space a touch of normality, returned it to something that resembled a safe place.

  A helicopter breezed overhead and landed on the helipad.

  “That’s come from Camp 1,” said John.

  We hadn’t heard much from Camp 1, but we knew that two expeditions had sent their teams up there just before the earthquake. They had been up there when the earthquake struck.

  We knew that there were some 70 people up at Camp 1, and that the earthquake had kicked off an avalanche near them as well. As Camp 1 was positioned in the middle of the flat area at the top of the Ice Fall, with crevasses around it, the force of the avalanche had somehow very narrowly missed the tents on the perimeter of the camp.

  Somebody had radioed them to say that the helicopters were focusing on the injured at Base Camp, and that they would be sorted out later…

  Once the helicopters had started to fly to Camp 1, they could only take two passengers at a time, as the air was so thin. People were fighting to get onto the helicopters. Panic had clearly set in.

  There had also been people up at Camps 2, 3 and 4. We heard later that those at Camps 3 and 4 had been obliged to trek back down to Camp 2, from where they were helicoptered back to Everest Base Camp.

  At EBC, 5,400m above sea level, you are higher than any point in Europe, including Mont Blanc, and basically two-thirds of the way up Everest. It is, essentially, a staging area, where climbers acclimatise and wait for their chance to attempt the summit.

  On the day of the disaster, Adventure Consultants (AC) had left only a skeleton crew behind at Base Camp. They would soon appreciate how lucky they were to have set off to reach the sum
mit. It was a miracle that Katherine and Angela, who had remained behind, were still alive and unhurt, if emotionally scarred. The three Sherpas had not been so lucky. If the whole AC team had still been at Base Camp when the avalanche hit, the death toll from the avalanche would probably have been doubled.

  As the two helicopters descended from Camp 1 to Base Camp, we could see people disembarking from the helicopters in twos, ducking under the whirring propeller blades and heading over to the remnants of their camp.

  Someone shouted to the four people from Adventure Consultants who had already managed to get down from Camp 1: “You guys use this tent!” pointing at the old hospital tent we had just about cleared out. I was really glad that we had the other, clean mess tent, but I felt a twinge of guilt – I should be grateful just to be alive, I thought.

  It was now lunchtime, and Bill had somehow managed to dish up a good meal – vegetable soup followed by corned beef and beans. It tasted fantastic. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was.

  We ate in silence, thinking about the predicament of the AC team. In my mind’s eye, I could see them picking through the wreckage of their campsite, trying to come to terms with the utter destruction of all their belongings. They were homeless, on a glacial mountainside, miles from anywhere. They had nothing left, nowhere to go. Their mess tents and everything else had been annihilated by the power of the impact.

  Not long after, a dishevelled figure approached us, wandering around aimlessly. He was wearing odd shoes; one training shoe and one big, thick summit boot, making him look mildly ridiculous. He wore an expression of confused resignation as he limped around in the snow.

  “You’ve got odd shoes on,” I said to him, a bit stupidly.

  “These aren’t even mine,” he replied. “I can’t find my shoes.”

  He tucked his hands under his armpits.

  “Come and have a cup of tea,” I told him.

  We guided him into our tent and set him up with a cup of Her Maj’s finest. He clutched it in both hands.

  It transpired he was a member of the Adventure Consultants team, who had been up at Camp 1 when the earthquake hit.

  “There’s nothing left of our campsite,” he said. It’s incredible. The Sherpas are dead, the tents are destroyed, all of my stuff is gone.”

  “Are you going to stay here?” I asked.

  “Where else can I go? I have nothing – no passport, no plane tickets, no money, no means of communication.”

  The gravity of his situation struck me. These people were refugees, stuck on a mountain with no way of getting home.

  “Stay here, get warm – drink as much tea as you like,” I told him.

  I ran over to the shelf in the corner.

  “Here,” I said, as I turned and thrust a packet of ginger nut biscuits into his hands. “Eat some of these. Bill has knocked up some food – you must stay.”

  The majority of our expedition team was in the mess tent at the time, so we had something of an impromptu meeting.

  We decided we’d give up the second mess tent that had served as a hospital tent for the Adventure Consultants team to eat in, and they could use our white pod to sleep in. We could all shuffle up at dinner and fit into one mess tent. At the very least, the two tents would be warm places for them to get their heads down and recoup some energy while they sorted out what they were going to do.

  In the end, they spent a couple of days sifting through the wreckage, trying to find lost possessions and save as much as possible of their camp. Then they set off down the mountain, thus restoring to us the use of our tents.

  * * * * *

  The following day, after a good night’s sleep, we moved on to repairing the toilet tent. It had been completely flattened, with the stainless-steel toilet and blue collection barrels blown several metres away, spilling the contents over the ice and rocks. It stank at the best of times, but now…whew!

  Still, I preferred it to the smell of the sweat and sickly treacle blood from the other night.

  The whole thing was buckled and bent out of shape, but we managed to get it into a condition that vaguely resembled its former self – but a bit shorter. It was usable, at least.

  After hours of hard labour, we washed up and packed ourselves into the single mess tent. It was around four o’clock and the sun was setting, taking with it any sense of warmth, to be replaced by the usual chilling cold.

  We had all headed quickly to our tents to grab our thick downing jackets and trousers. The Adventure Consultant guys were huddled in the white pod, short of such warm layers – we had put a gas heater in there to help keep them warm, along with sponge mattresses and sleeping bags, but it wasn’t really enough.

  In our mess tent, everybody was trying to get a seat at the back of the tent, near the gas heater. In the cold, the true horror of the disaster came flooding back.

  Luckily, Bill had knocked up some tasty dishes to help keep our minds off it, although anything would probably have tasted great in the circumstances.

  As we were about to start eating, the tent flap opened and Lincoln entered, looking flustered. There was no sign of the smile that was usually plastered across his face.

  He came straight up to the table.

  “I’m going,” he said. “I can’t be here any more.”

  We pointed out that it might be worse down the mountain – better the devil you know, and all that, but he was having none of it.

  “I’ve missed too much,” he said, his face rigid and assured. “I’ve missed too much following this stupid dream. If I go now, I might be able to get back for my kid’s graduation.”

  His Texan accent, usually jovial, sounded severe, serious – the sound of a man realising his mistakes.

  “I have to go; I’m sorry.”

  We made no effort to stop him. I thought back to the moment I first met Lincoln, back in the Hyatt Regency in Kathmandu, only a few weeks previously. I thought about how welcoming, cheerful and carefree he was. But a disaster like this has the ability to bring out the true nature in people, and make them see what’s truly important. At that point, for Lincoln, it was getting home, getting away from this cursed mountain.

  With that, he turned and left. The tent flap closed and he walked out of our lives for good.

  Lincoln must have gone to organise a helicopter ride down to Kathmandu. Officially, this shouldn’t have been possible, because all the privately owned helicopters that usually serviced climbers in the Khumbu Valley had been recalled by the Nepalese government, and ordered to help in the aid process. But, in practice, here they were, helping out the foreigners on Everest instead of their own people.

  It was hard to blame them, and even harder to take a moral stance and not utilise their services. The Nepalese government was extremely poor. It might pay them for their costs, but it just as likely might not. Whereas the Everest expeditions were a much more reliable source of income; they would always pay, because they would be unable to survive on the mountain without helicopter support, and would not want to be blacklisted.

  What would you do if you were a pilot in that situation? Would you carry on flying up and down the Khumbu Valley, transporting people around and getting paid for it, or would you go to work in a dangerous area, with about a 50 per cent chance of payment? There was a moral responsibility sure, but Nepal’s infrastructure is not sophisticated, and these people need to keep making money to be able to feed their families.

  It was a sobering thought, but a harsh reality in a country such as Nepal.

  “Maybe he’s right,” said Paul. “Maybe the expedition’s over.”

  These words rang in my head: ‘maybe the expedition’s over’. It couldn’t be over; it wasn’t finished. I hadn’t had much of a chance to think it through since the disaster; there’d been too much going on, too much to do. But now that the mountain had returned to its eerie stillness…

>   It was still there. Everest was still standing. We were still ready, prepared, fully acclimatised. Surely we still had to give it a try. I’d been up this mountain for weeks, sacrificing time I could have spent with my lovely daughters, in order to prepare myself mentally and physically for the challenge that lay ahead. They couldn’t just take that away from me.

  I knew that if we didn’t do it now, I would force myself to come back again – and I really didn’t want to go through all this again, to put myself through missing my daughters dreadfully for two months all over again.

  Three of the people in our group of ten – nine, now that Lincoln had left – were on their second attempt. Louise and Paul had attempted the summit the year before, but had had their expeditions cancelled due to the Sherpa strike following the deaths of 16 Sherpas in the Icefall. Taka was also trying for the second time.

  The Khumbu Icefall, between Base Camp and Camp 1, at 6,200m, is one of the most dangerous parts of the entire ascent. The route through the ever-moving Icefall is littered with crevasses and deadly drops.

  Ice doctors are employed by the Nepalese government to plot a safe route through this dangerous terrain each season, laying guide ropes and setting up aluminium ladders, which are lashed together, sometimes four or five at a time, to provide a path across the giant crevasses.

  I wondered what condition it was in, whether any of the routes were still navigable, whether any of the crevasse-spanning ladders remained intact. The others were evidently of the same frame of mind.

  “The Icefall will be impassable,” someone ventured.

  “How do you know that?” I said, concerned at the direction the conversation was heading. “We need to go and assess it before making any decision. We know Camp 1 is fine – we’ve seen the people coming back.”

  “But they didn’t cross the Icefall.”

  That was true; they were helicoptered back to Base Camp. But that meant nothing until we were able to fully assess the Icefall.

  “We need to look, to find out for ourselves, before calling the whole thing off, before giving everything up,” I said.