An ambitious mountaineer recounts the experience of being in the thick of a deadly avalanche on the highest mountain range in the world. While he survived to tell the tale, many of his comrades did not.
“In Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky—lest we forget. This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it. If the peak hints at you to wait, then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go, then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might.”
—Bear Grylls
25th April 2015, 1141H IST
Everest Base Camp, Khumbu Glacier,
Himalayan Mountain Range
The mist was so dense that I couldn’t even see my gloved hand. A deafening noise rushing down from the higher reaches sucked the air out of the atmosphere. The blitz of ice, snow, rock and thunder struck with fury, swallowing all that was human-made. “Am I alive?” I wondered, bewildered, “or is this an after-death chapter?” Barely a few minutes before, I was lying in the warmth of my sleeping bag in my one-man tent pitched at the Everest Base Camp (EBC). Suddenly, the tiny electric lantern strung on the tent’s centre had wigwagged. Sensing trouble, I had come out rather abruptly, shivering and muttering under my breath. As I set my eyes at the horizon, I realised it was not just the lantern. The entire Everest Massif, with the Lho-la, Nuptse, and Lhoste peaks, was swaying. Watching such enormous mountains move like a deck of cards, I sensed trouble. ‘Faith moves mountains’ is a saying I had heard before but this seemed like my worst nemesis was heading my way. On my right, a team of climbers formed human chains to hold each other in case a crevasse opened up under their feet.
My heart was pounding as if it was going to bounce out of my rib cage, and I began sweating profusely at sub-zero temperature. In the presence of a deathly uncertainty, self-preservation emerged. I wore my shoes, tightened them as much as I could and stood outside my tent, gazing at the pandemonium that had erupted from the shifting of tectonic plates.
People around me were shouting, running, hiding and doing whatever their sensES dictated in anticipation of the unknown. I quivered with fear and wondered, “Ohh Rab (God), is this a violent glacial shakeup or an earthquake?” My once-in-a-lifetime dream had just collided head-on with a one-in-a-hundred years geological event.
I saw Prabhu running frantically towards the Khumbu icefall, screaming, “Run, run, run…!” Prabhu, my comrade on this expedition, had been a friend since our days at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), Darjeeling. Although he was from Tamil Nadu, the Himalayas resided in his heart. Back in the day, at the institute, we would indulge in a juvenile but amusing ‘cross-country run’ to the dormitory we shared. My unending feeling of claustrophobia that stemmed from sleeping on the lower part of the bunk bed made us both race to claim the upper bunk. But, today, Prabhu’s run was different. I could comprehend that this was driven entirely by fear.
In no time, I heard a thunderous noise. Looking back, a twenty-floor high avalanche was charging towards me. The demon was engulfing the great Himalayas with its dark shadow and was now nearing me with such savagery as if to swallow the life out of me.
Staring helplessly at the colossal Himalayan beast, I knew it was going to crush me in no time. In the final act in the play of life, in the few moments of calmness before the denouement, is where our blessings reside. I recalled a question that our HMI instructor was once asked, “Avalanche se kaise bachna chahiye?” (How does one save oneself from an avalanche?). Jokingly, he had replied, “Sawal hain ki kaise marna chahiye”. (The question really is how should one die in an avalanche?). While his retort sparked a rollicking laugh in class, he continued, “Kismat acchi huyi to koi bada ice block ya pathar lag jayega, nahi to barf mein dab gaye to bhagwan malik”. (If you are lucky, you may just get hit by a block of ice, but if you get submerged in snow and ice, then only God can save you). His survival advice was to hide behind any natural feature, keep your face away from the incoming blast and roll into as small a ball as possible to lessen the shock from the blow. Protecting your head was crucial. In those split seconds, these words resonated with me. Unable to find any natural formation to hide behind, I took a few steps forward, sat down and put my head between my thighs. I tried my best to wrap myself into as small a ball as I could. In my thoughts, all I wanted was to disappear magically.
And then the avalanche struck. I was hit and it felt like a billion needles pierced through every inch and pore of my body. I was lifted like a piece of paper. It was so powerful that, at one point, I could feel the fear leaving my body.
Like an enraged demon dancing over the dead, the sound it made was so loud that it zapped every ounce of courage to open my eyes. I closed my eyes, waiting for my end. “Maybe it is time to meet Papa, I said to myself.
The storm’s decibel dropped gradually as I lay buried under the snow, and it took me time to realise that I was not dead. I summoned every shred of energy in my body to break out of what I believed was my snowy burial pit. As I looked around, nothing was the same. Every tent had been blown away, and big rocks had been moved around like dry leaves. What was a depression in the landscape earlier had turned into a knoll.
The cloud of ice and rocks had chased away my dream to climb the Everest summit: a dream once dreamt in the warmth of my home.
Through the dense cloud of mist, a green sleeping bag lying 20 yards away from me could not be missed. As I went closer, I discerned the shape of a human in the bag. Walking towards it, I could hear a piercing cry of pain. There lay a fellow climber, probably hibernating in the warmth of the sleeping bag on this cold morning before nature’s fury struck.
I rolled the sleeping bag to stabilise her on her back. She was in immense pain. Wiping away the blood seeping from her head, I was able to see her injury clearly. As a desperate knee-jerk reflex, I screamed my lungs out, “Doctor, doctor, doctor,” before reality dawned on me. I was at 17,500 ft in Khumbu glacier’s sub-zero temperatures with no medical infrastructure for treating such a severe injury.
The EBC is a global village during climbing season. Climbers from across continents get together to realise their mountaineering dream and frequently visit each other’s dining tents to meet, greet and have a tête-à-tête over tea or soup. It was during one such interaction that I happened to meet her. Our tents were pitched close to each other on the same feature, and now she was fighting for her life.
A shiver darted through my spine. She was attempting to talk to me but her pain would not let her speak coherently. I could not discern a single word of what she was saying but I knew she wanted to live. I kept repeating “Don’t worry,” without any real idea of how I could offer respite. A few others joined me but her situation was bleak and survival, uncertain. I removed my neck buff to tie around her head injury but she went silent in no time after that.
A moment of truth dawned upon me. We were men and women from different parts of the world, speaking other languages but sharing one dream—to scale Everest. Now, death had taken over.
I rushed to my yellow tent and crouched to find my belongings. There were items right in front of me but I could not make sense of a single entity. I must have been in shock. Suddenly, I heard someone shouting at me, “Who the hell has gotten into my tent!” I crawled back out to discover a fellow climber telling me that the tent I entered was his, not mine. I started running in every direction to find my missing tent and belongings. But there was none to be found.
My tent had been blown away by the all-powerful avalanche. I was left with nothing except my life. I requested Singhi Lama, a sherpa with my team, to help me search for the tent. Lama, an extremely kind-hearted man, hailed from Solo Khumbu, a Nepalese region to which sherpas belong. He was one of the older ones, and his wrinkles spoke of tales of kindness and wisdom of the mountains. He was the one with whom I had had my first tea, on arriving at base camp.
While our search ensued, we found scores of injured climbers trapped under the mass of ice and snow. Then, suddenly, another ear-splitting sound came from the side of Mt. Pumori. Lama and I rushed for cover, knowing well that the base camp area was wholly exposed, with not a single feature to hide. Fortunately, this one was weaker than before; it didn’t hit our camps. Overwhelmed by the aftershock, we could no longer hold our feelings in. Both of us were facing the situation with utmost courage but the trauma of being amid nature’s wrath, surrounded by dead bodies with no hope of relief, intense emotions swelled outward. Tears poured out of my eyes. We hugged, and I said to him, “It looks like Goddess Chomolungma (the Tibetan goddess associated with Everest ) is angry with us.”
Everyone was in exit mode. Laden with just the bare essentials, teams were rushing downhill towards Tenbouche or Namche Bazar. Helping the injured was a tall order but a few teams with medical kits tried their best to save lives. The next few days went in estimating the numbers of the dead and the injured. At those heights, trauma management and blood transfusion were impossible. Many died of excessive bleeding. The ones who could not be saved were respectfully wrapped in sleeping bags, with prayers in our hearts and silence on our lips.
Counting our team members and loading our backpacks, we moved towards Gorakshep, a two-hour trek from the EBC. It was considered relatively safer than the EBC.
Scary, sleepless nights followed. A big earthquake is generally followed by multiple aftershocks. In the darkness of the night, these aftershocks were aplenty. Teams would sleep in shifts, one member playing sentry to alert everyone of an impending avalanche. Several SOS calls were made to Kathmandu but in vain. The Nepal earthquake resulted in massive destruction across the country, including the capital, with deaths reported in the thousands. Diverting resources to the mavericks on the Himalayas was not high on anyone’s priority list.
Three days later, the weather started clearing up. Looking up at the first chopper, I breathed a sigh of relief. It came in to ferry the casualties. The flying machine’s red signage signified not danger but hope, that we were connected to the other world and that our story would be told.
Owing to the thin air, the chopper could take only two injured people at a time and drop them at Pheriche. From there, it flew with double the capacity as the air thickened. Once the seriously wounded and deceased climbers were ferried out, I finally took the chopper to Lukla airport. It had one seat for the pilot, with the co-pilot seat removed to fit stretchers. As I squatted on the helicopter floor, I cried out in pain. I realised that my left pelvic joint was swollen and that the events of the last few days were so overwhelming that my mind had not even registered the pain.
As the chopper took to the skies, the blood on its floor moved in thick red streams in every direction. The blood belonged to spirited souls who had dared to test their human limitations and brave all odds. But fate had had something else in store for them. I thanked the Almighty for keeping me alive through this ordeal. Looking out from the window, I saw the trail to the EBC, the crisscrossing mountains and valleys and recalled the day I had left Kathmandu. In those moments, I said to myself, “I am hit, I am down, but I will not bow out. The journey shall never cease. I will be back.”
(This appeared in the print edition as "Blood In The Mountains")
(The author scaled Mt. Everest (North Face) in 2016. This essay is a part of his forthcoming book.)
Suhail Sharma is an IPS officer, mountaineer and oxford graduate.