One of the first reporters to
reach the place where tragedy struck last week on the grief, anger and calls
for change
By Ed Douglas
 |
| Climbers approaching the Hillary Step just below the summit of Everest. Photograph: Pemba Dorje Sherpa/AFP |
On the narrow trail
to base camp from the small settlement of Gorak Shep, yak trains pass each
other, those returning from the mountain laden with equipment. Porters rush to
base camp, taking advantage of suddenly inflated wages as expeditions quit the
mountain. Whatever you think of the notion of Everest as the ultimate tourist
attraction, to see this immense logistical effort is impressive.
There has never been
a week like this in the history of the mountain. As one expedition organiser
said: "This is a seminal moment. The whole system will change now."
However much purists yearn for the days of George Mallory or Edmund Hillary,
the unavoidable truth is that Everest is now big business in a poor country and
its worst disaster has put that business – and how it is regulated – under the
microscope.
From base camp, it's
impossible to see the summit. The hundreds of colourful tents that spread for
over a mile along the Khumbu glacier are so close that the peak's west shoulder
blocks the view. Yet Everest's most dangerous feature is all too obvious. The
icefall emerges from the Western Cwm, a blocky white river pushing down the
narrow gap between Everest and its neighbouring peak of Nuptse. Not only is the
icefall dangerous in its own right, it is also threatened from above. Looking
up hundreds of metres, I could see the ice cliff, or serac, that calved tons of
ice that Friday morning.
As factory floors go,
it's hard to imagine anywhere more dangerous. And that is what the Khumbu
Icefall is: a place of work for the Sherpas and other high-altitude workers who
make their living there. It is hard to imagine anything in nature more
capricious or beyond human control, yet Sherpas ferrying supplies to the upper
slopes must pass through this labyrinth up to 30 times during the climbing
season. They are playing Russian roulette for a living.
The aftermath of a predictable disaster was
shock and grief. These men had families, children, wives, fiancées. Photographs
of Sherpa women grieving at funerals held in Kathmandu's Buddhist district of
Boudha were the most eloquent expression of the human cost of so many lives
wiped out. But even as the pujas for the souls of the Sherpas
were being held, a new mood took hold: anger. Its first and most obvious target
was the government, which had announced a compensation package of 40,000
Nepalese rupees (£245). This was a derisory sum to the Sherpas, whose funeral
rites could cost 10 times that figure, and a demonstration last Monday followed
the religious ceremonies.
It's calculated that, of the £60m climbing
Everest turned over this season in Nepal, around £7m will stay in the country. Of that, the
government collects about £2.4m in peak fees and other permits.
Last week the
government had much bigger priorities than the fate of those climbing Everest.
It has been struggling to pay the debts of the state-owned oil company;
consequent shortages have meant queues hundreds of vehicles long at petrol
stations.
Amid growing calls
for an immediate end to climbing on Everest as a mark of respect to the dead,
Madhusudan Burlakoti, a senior official at the tourism ministry, quashed the
idea that the season should end: "The expeditions will continue up the
mountain. There is no reason to think it's unsafe now because of this natural
disaster. These things happen in cycles and we will address them as they
come."
Such breezy
reassurances did nothing to quell the growing anger among Sherpas that it is
they who take the risk on Nepal's mountains and the government that takes a
disproportionate share of the profits. On Everest, with a four-day climbing
moratorium in place, hundreds of Sherpas from Khumbu, the district surrounding
the mountain, returned to their villages to be with their families.
Those who do not come
from the region remained in camp, talking about what should happen next.
Younger workers from other regions of Nepal that in the last decade came under
the influence of Maoist political tactics of coercion and threat found the
atmosphere of grief and anger the perfect moment to pursue a more aggressive
agenda.
Two strands emerged
at base camp, a 13-point plan demanding reform of Sherpa working conditions and
a greater share of revenue for local people, and a more strident, less
developed agenda that demanded an immediate end to climbing. A religious
ceremony on Tuesday ended in a well-orchestrated demonstration.
More darkly, the team
of Sherpas known as the Icefall Doctors who fix the ropes up this part of the
mountain were told not to go back to work. Filmmakers were ordered to put their
cameras away. One foreign expedition had communications cables cut during the
night. Climbers and Sherpas alike speak of an atmosphere of fear and
intimidation.
Last year, following
an assault on three European climbers by an angry mob of Sherpas at camp two,
the government promised better security on the mountain, including a
"facilitation office" with a police and military presence. It also
promised that expedition liaison officers, who rarely bother to visit base
camp, would be more visible. None of this happened. When the bodies of the
Sherpas were airlifted to base camp, there were no officials on hand to record
the names of the dead.
In a bid to shore up
government authority, Nepal's tourism minister, Bhim Acharya, flew to base camp
on Thursday, an oxygen mask on hand, to bolster morale, agree to most Sherpa
demands for improved working conditions, and promise foreign climbers their permits
would be valid for five years should their expeditions quit the mountain.
It was already too
late. The exodus was under way, and as each of the bigger, better-resourced
teams quit, the rest followed. Dave Hamilton, leader of British commercial
expedition organisers Jagged Globe, told me: "The season is over. Almost
all teams, including us, have cancelled for a variety of reasons. But it really
comes down to the vast majority of Sherpas do not want to work. The minority
who do have been threatened and intimidated into joining the action."
Away from Everest,
the human cost of the tragedy and the equivocal place of climbing mountains in
Sherpa culture began to percolate. Sitting in a trekkers' lodge in the small
village of Pheriche, at 4,200 metres a staging-post on the trail to Everest,
Dechen Sherpa was playing with her eight-month-old son, Karma.
"I think he's
going to be an engineer," she told me. "He's always grabbing things
with his hands and turning them over."
"Not a climber
then?"
"No, I don't want
him to be a climber. But for some Sherpas it's a good way to make money. Not
everyone has a lodge like this."
If the tragedy on Everest has done one thing, it
has broadened the understanding of who Sherpas are. In a moving blog that explored issues of identity and the
personal cost of their work in the mountains, Jemima Diki Sherpa wrote of the
unique place they hold in the popular imagination: "It is something to
behold, the open-hearted enthusiasm that the Sherpa name elicits in the western
mind. It is the branding mother-lode – stimulating a vague positive association
founded on six-odd decades ofmountaineering myth-building."
The consequences of
living in what she calls "a very large, very coveted piece of real
estate" have transformed Sherpa lives. Across the Himalaya, there is no
valley like the one that descends from the slopes of Everest. The Sherpa
capital of Namche Bazaar is the most affluent district in the whole of Nepal,
its prosperity built off the back of the region's tourist trade.
The notion that the
business of climbing Everest is morally bankrupt has gained currency in the
aftermath of 18 April. Journalist Tanya Gold dismissed those climbing the
mountain as "blithe cretins" who have turned "an explicit
wasteland to a moral and internal one, which also serves as a perfect metaphor
for the contempt in which we hold the planet".
Yet the Everest
region is no wasteland to the Sherpas, and to characterise them as oppressed
victims of a strange, over-privileged narcissism on the part of those who pay
around $60,000 to pursue their ambition is to miscalculate the depth of
expertise Sherpas have developed and the self-respect they take from their
work.
Walking up to the
small collection of lodges at Lobuje on the trail to base camp, I fell in step
with Tashi Sherpa from the Rolwaling valley, which neighbours Khumbu. He is an
internationally accredited mountain guide, one of a growing number in Nepal,
and isn't shy in looking forward to the day when he and his colleagues displace
western guides. The notion that men like this are passive victims is laughable.
Tashi had expected to
make his tenth ascent of the mountain this spring: "I won't be going, out
of respect for my friends. But it's going to be very difficult for Sherpas who
don't have any other work. What are they going to do? The government takes the
money from Everest and doesn't put anything back."
That sentiment may
win support among expedition organisers and the many western friends of the
Sherpa, but it can breed resentment in Kathmandu. With a quarter of Nepal's GDP
earned from foreign remittances, the fate of Nepalese working abroad is a more
burning issue than well-paid climbing Sherpas. As a Kathmandu friend put it to
me: "There are two body bags a day coming home from the Gulf. Nobody
writes about those."
The trekking industry
that has grown up in the wake of mountaineering expeditions is also full of
horror stories of porters from ethnic groups without the same profile as
Sherpas who are simply abandoned when they get sick and die unrecorded by the
media, their plight a matter of ignorance among their foreign employers.
So although the
tragedy on Everest has caused outrage, the immense attention it has generated
is seen as an opportunity to put pressure on the government to take regulation
seriously – or hand it to an organisation that will. Where there is no shame,
it seems there is no progress.
Russell Brice is the
director of Himex, one of the big expedition organisers working on the mountain
with more than two decades' experience. He has been calling on Nepal's tourism
ministry to allow helicopters to stock camp two and save Sherpas trips though
the Khumbu icefall.
"They've
rejected these ideas in the past," he says, "but maybe they'll listen
now. It will mean fewer rotations [through the icefall], the same number of
Sherpas employed with a small decrease in their income. But they'll be much
safer as a consequence."
The morality of
paying men to work in such a dangerous place as the Khumbu icefall remains a
complex issue. Sherpas I spoke to were in two minds about the end of the
season. Tashi Sherpa, who works for Himex, had been home to see his family in
the aftermath of the accident. "They're not asking us to stop," he
says, "they're just asking us to come back."
Lachhu Chhetri, who
works in Himex's impressive kitchen, feeding clients, was less equivocal:
"It's a pain in the arse, to be honest. Where am I going to find work
now?" Those who face the risks of the mountain make far more than base
camp staff.
For Amanda Jones,
chief operating officer for Infrastructure New South Wales, this is the second
time she has had to abandon her expensive ambition to climb Everest. Two years
ago she was part of a Himex expedition that quit the mountain after Brice and
his lead Sherpa, or sirdar, Phurba Tashi, deemed the peak too dangerous.
"I completely
respected that decision. It was about the danger to the Sherpas. This tragedy
was the kind of accident Russell and Phurba Tashi had in mind in 2012. What's
important to me as an aspiring Everest climber is that management of the mountain
is improved."
In the past, negative
headlines about Everest have improved things. Stories of garbage and human
waste have led to changes that have left base camp tidier than many trekking
lodges. Brice has calculated that it costs each climber $5 to defecate on the
mountain, using a bio-degradable bag that is shipped to a specially constructed
septic tank in a neighbouring valley.
The social impact of
the Everest business is a far more complex issue. The deaths this spring will
resonate down the generations, as Jemima Sherpa records: "There will be
gaps, like missing teeth. If the remaining teeth shuffle forward – like
adolescents now a little less awkward than last year move a little closer to
the fire – [they will] fill the spaces of the ones that are missing."
EVEREST TIMELINE
1852 The
Himalayan peak is officially named the world's highest mountain, making it the
holy grail for climbers.
1865 Peak
XV is renamed Mount Everest, after Sir George Everest, surveyor general of
India. A few years earlier, it had been measured at 29,002 feet (8,840 metres).
It is known as Chomolungma in Tibet and Sagarmatha in Nepal.
1920 The
Dalai Lama opens Tibet to foreigners, making it possible for the first
expeditions to take place.
1921 The
first reconnaissance expedition is made by a British team including George
Mallory and Guy Bullock, who reach the North Col at 23,000 feet.
1923 "Because
it's there." Mallory tells a reporter why he wants to conquer the
mountain.
1924 Mallory
and Andrew Irvine disappear, presumed dead, while attempting to reach the
summit.
1933 Two
British biplanes fly over Everest. The photographer passes out due to lack of
oxygen, failing to take a picture of the summit.
1953 Edmund
Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, below, are the to reach the mountain's
summit.
1955 The
height of Everest is revised up to 29,028 feet (8,848 metres).
1975 Dougal
Haston and Doug Scott are the first Britons to conquer Everest via the
south-west face, in an expedition led by Chris Bonington.
1996 Fifteen
climbers die, then the most fatalities in a single year.
1999 Mallory's
body is found at 27,000 feet; there is no evidence that he had reached the
summit.
2011 Nepalese
mountaineer Apa Sherpa reaches the summit for the 21st time.
2013 The
number of times Everest has been scaled nears 7,000; more than 250 people have
died trying.
Luc Torres
