The Call of Everest Read online

  In 2004, the Mountain Institute and American Alpine Club joined with local people in the upper Imja Valley, gateway to the Everest Base Camp, to form the first Khumbu Alpine Conservation Committee. This community organization began active efforts to protect and restore its alpine ecosystems by promoting the use of imported kerosene as a fuel alternative to wood from juniper and alpine cushion plants. Juniper cover has regained a strong foothold in the last decade, but much more work remains to be done to remedy the growing problems of human and solid waste management.

  Most of the thousands of people who visit Khumbu each year do so in the fall or spring seasons, avoiding the June-to-August monsoon rain and attendant leeches found at lower elevations. Having spent a summer there in the 1980s, however, I have always felt that the beauty of the Khumbu monsoon period is one of the world’s best kept secrets. The days are normally sunny and partly cloudy until the early afternoon, when the clouds finally make their way up the valleys and to the villages. The rains, usually mild, arrive in the late afternoon or evening, encouraging the subalpine and alpine wildflower bloom throughout the period, beyond compare for variety, color, and density. One especially rewarding project, our pressed-plant collection, is now housed in the University of Colorado Herbarium, and it appears in the Khumbu Plant Catalog, compiled by the famous German botanist Dr. George Meihe for the British Museum.

  THE VIEW OUT of a restaurant tent at Base Camp shows a rock-strewn field and the Khumbu Glacier. Some 800 people called it a temporary home during the 2012 climbing season. Base Camp is wired for the Internet and has phone service, giving climbers a connection to the wider world as they get ready to attempt the summit.

  PEOPLING THE LANDSCAPE

  The northern side of Mount Everest is sparsely populated. The only year-round residents are the Buddhist monks at the Rongbuk monastery, and the Kama Valley is uninhabited except for seasonal Tibetan yak herders. The 3,500 Sherpa people who live on the Nepal side are believed to be descendants of the original Sherpa pioneers who crossed the Nangpa La from Tibet 500 years ago. Their name tells the story: Sherpa means “from the east” in the Sherpa language.

  THE SHERPA PEOPLE ARRIVE

  Lhakpa Norbu Sherpa, the second warden of the Sagarmatha National Park and the first Sherpa to earn a Ph.D. degree, believes that the migration was linked to political instability as well as economic conditions associated with the Little Ice Age cooling. The anthropologist Michael Oppitz, citing late 18th-century Sherpa texts, says that these migrants found uninhabited Khumbu “completely, from the highest height to the deepest valley, overgrown with thick virgin forests” and populated by an abundance of wild animals. “The rivers had no bridges, the cliffs no steps; there were no footpaths, no dwellings, no fields of grain, no woven cloth,… no cows to milk.” These early settlers “destroyed most of the forests and transformed the landscape into agricultural fields and pastures for cattle.”

  Tibetan Buddhists consider Khumbu a beyul, a sacred hidden valley whose secrets will be revealed to the faithful when the world approaches its end. Oppitz and sacred mountain specialist Ed Bernbaum report that Pangboche and Dingboche villages were already well known as meditation sites by the time of the migration. Sherpa legends state that shepherds grazed their herds here well before the arrival of their ancestors, and geographer Stan Stevens writes of “certain ruins in high places in the Dudh Kosi valley” believed to have been early shepherd huts.

  THE STORY THE SOIL TELLS

  While digging soil pits in the shrub grasslands above the village of Khumjung in the 1980s, I noticed that the soil profile was more typical of a wet forest environment rather than a dry, treeless hillside. I also found fairly frequent deposits of charcoal from burned trees at different depths, so I decided to collect charcoal and soil samples at five-centimeter intervals that could be later analyzed for pollen content, tree species, and dates of deposition. Over the years I continued to collect these samples, from the far western reaches of the park to the high alpine regions near the Everest Base Camp.

  The results show that these regions were cleared at a much earlier time than first supposed. According to analyses conducted by the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, humans began cutting and burning the south-facing Himalayan forests between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. The fir-birch-rhododendron forest still common on most north-facing slopes today was opened up year after year, most likely by Rai or Gurung ethnic groups from the south transforming the land for cattle grazing. Pollen analyses show that ferns became much more common starting 2,000 years ago, indicative of the drier, open woodland conditions that were being created. Birch, alder, fir, pine, and other trees and shrubs decreased starting about 1,500 years ago. Grass has dominated the landscape for 800 years now.

  So what did the early Sherpa settlers see when they first laid eyes on the Khumbu region in the 1500s? The landscapes may have been similar to those found today—shrub grasslands on the drier south-facing slopes, and cloud forests on the cooler and moister north-facing slopes. All in all, not a bad place to make a home.

  THE SHERPA ECONOMY

  Khumbu specialist Margaret Jeffries writes that the Sherpa economy was vitalized in the 1800s by the introduction of the potato, most likely from British colonial gardens in Darjiling. In addition, the accidental crossbreeding of the yak and cow produced an animal—the dzo—that lived longer, produced more milk, tolerated lower altitudes, and became a new trade item with Tibet. Namche Bazar became a lucrative trading crossroads where Tibetan traders brought salt to exchange for manufactured goods from Nepal and India. By the 1900s populations were increasing, new temples and monasteries were built, and young men began a seasonal migration to Darjiling in search of employment. The Scottish explorer and climber Alexander Kellas was the first person to recognize the talents of the Sherpas as high-altitude porters, after being impressed by their strength, commitment, and good humor when he took a group on a climbing expedition to Sikkim in 1920.

  A BRILLIANT SUNRISE illuminates sacred Gokyo Lake in Nepal. Bright blue Himalayan lakes offer a spectacular backdrop for the high peaks of the Himalaya, but warming temperatures have meant that meltwater from the glaciers forms these lakes. Some are dangerously close to breaking through their moraines, or walls of glacial debris.

  The 1949 Chinese invasion of Tibet closed the border and ended trade between the two countries. Trade with Tibet would be replaced by tourism beginning in 1950 as Nepal opened to outsiders. Sherpa resourcefulness, good luck, timing, and location all have allowed them to adapt to what could have been catastrophic changes in their traditional way of life. The role they came to play in climbing expeditions, beginning with the first attempt on Everest by the Swiss in 1952 and broadening to the trekking groups in the early 1960s, would have a revolutionary impact on Sherpa culture.

  VOICES

  THE NAME OF THE MOUNTAIN

  Many know the origin of the Western name for Mount Everest: When the mountain was determined by triangulation to be the highest peak in the world, the British surveyor general of India named it for his predecessor, Sir George Everest.

  Far fewer Westerners, however, know the true meaning of its Tibetan name.

  Almost every book on Everest mistranslates the Tibetan name as “goddess mother of the universe,” based on an assumption that the Tibetan and Sherpa people who live near its base must revere the highest peak in the world as the sacred abode of a supremely important deity. But the persistent use of this translation reflects the great importance that outsiders, rather than the local Tibetans and Sherpas, place on Everest.

  Everest is, in fact, a sacred peak, but a relatively minor one. Its Tibetan name—Chomolungma or, more properly, Jomolangma—comes from the name of the goddess believed to dwell there: Miyolangsangma or Jomo Miyolangsangma. The meaning of the full name of the goddess is obscure. A possible translation is “the immovable goddess mother of good bulls,” which may explain why every year at the festival of Mani Rimdu at Tengboche
the monks release a yak to wander freely in the mountains as an offering to the goddess.

  Jomo Miyolangsangma is a relatively minor goddess. As far as I know, there is no specifically designated Goddess Mother of the World or Universe in Tibetan Buddhism, and the idea of such a goddess doesn’t fit in a religion that doesn’t believe in a monotheistic supreme creator. If Everest were the abode of so major a deity, Sherpas such as Tenzing Norgay would not have climbed the mountain: As devout Tibetan Buddhists, they would have regarded its summit as too sacred to desecrate.

  So why isn’t Everest revered as the abode of a supremely important deity? Before the British measured the height of the peak, the Tibetans and Sherpas who named it had no idea that it was the highest mountain in the world. Even if they had known, their cosmology speaks of another mountain that dwarfs Everest: Mount Meru or Sumeru, a mythic peak at the center of the universe that rises more than 80,000 miles to the heights of heaven.

  Perhaps with this mountain in mind, the Tengboche Rinpoche once asked me, “How do you know Everest is the highest mountain in the world until you yourself have seen them all?”

  —EDWIN BERNBAUM Climber, speaker, and author Edwin Bernbaum directs the Sacred Mountains program of The Mountain Institute, promoting the spiritual and cultural significance of mountains.

  PRESERVATION CHALLENGES

  In 1975, the government of Nepal gazetted Sagarmatha National Park, 430 square miles. New Zealanders expert in forestry and environmental protection worked with the staff of Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation to design a management plan. This strategic and beneficial partnership drew on the New Zealanders’ extensive experience in managing their own mountain parks as well as their long familiarity with the Khumbu region in general, first embodied in none other than Sir Edmund Hillary.

  At first the Sherpa people did not greet the park and its staff with enthusiasm. Some muttered, “Hillary first gave us sugar, but now he’s rubbing salt in our eyes.” The “sugar” referred to the schools and clinics he established, but the “salt” was the national park. Many feared the park would infringe upon their way of life and restrict their use of natural resources. Reforestation exclosures built above Namche Bazar in the 1980s by park wardens Mingma Sherpa, Lhakpa N. Sherpa, and Nima Wangchu were criticized as taking away valuable grazing land. Because their browsing habits heavily damage vegetation, goats were banned and removed from the park, which angered the goat owners. The sudden presence of the military, assigned to patrol against poaching in national parklands, created new tensions. Regulations prohibiting the harvesting of shrub juniper in the alpine zone continued to be ignored by dozens of trekking lodges. Cord upon cord of the slow-growing shrub fed the growing woodpiles, while the hillsides became increasingly denuded and eroded.

  In the early 1980s I experienced the hazards of not communicating with local people firsthand. Without thinking to ask permission, I started installing my soil-erosion study plots and surveying the hillside profiles above the villages of Khumjung and Kunde. Soon my string fences, rain gauges, sediment-collection troughs, and other instruments were being destroyed during the night. Local people had seen me working and had jumped to the conclusion that I was a surveyor, intent on taking away their land. A village meeting resolved the issue, and my plots were never again touched. (I did, however, occasionally find that young yak herders had peed in my rain gauges, which I chalked up as an everyday boyish prank.)

  Today many of these former attitudes have changed, largely because the park’s operations have become much more inclusive, according to my colleague Ang Rita Sherpa of Kunde village. (His father, Mingma Tsering Sherpa, was Edmund Hillary’s main construction supervisor, largely responsible for building the schools, airstrips, and hospitals in the region.) Local residents now view the blue pine and fir forests reestablished on the slopes above Namche Bazar with pride. Most lodge owners in the upper Imja Valley alpine zone are active members of the Khumbu Alpine Conservation Committee, which has helped ban the harvesting of shrub juniper and other plants for firewood. Communities now report feeling a greater sense of pride and ownership in the park.

  VOICES

  SKIING EVEREST

  Everyone knows that the climbing season on Everest is in the spring.

  Usually. I am already a bit different, since I always want to ski down any mountain that I climb up, so I didn’t bother with the norm when starting my planning.

  My theory was that the summer monsoon season would bring lots of precipitation, and I hoped that would translate to more snow on the mountain during the post-monsoon season, so I could ski. I also knew that the mountain had been attempted from the Nepal side only twice during the post-monsoon season in the previous six years. The image of an Everest with few other people on it was a big draw for me.

  As it turned out, we were the only people on the mountain.

  With safety and the natural order of things in mind, our small ski team of my husband, Rob, and our close friend, Jimmy Chin, agreed on priorities before we left Base Camp: 1. Climb up. 2. Ski down. 3. Document it.

  On October 18, 2006, the three of us did ski from the summit, although several members of the team, including Rob, ran out of oxygen at the Hillary Step, and so in an effort to stay out of the evening news we put our skis on our packs and down-climbed most of the way from the Hillary Step to Camp IV. After an unplanned second night at the South Col, Jimmy and Rob and I stepped into our skis outside our tents and began our descent via a direct line from Camp IV to the Western Cwm.

  Usually we ski mountaineers who are still alive make a habit of climbing what we ski, but this pitch of the Lhotse Face was an exception. Climbing it would have been an undue risk on the way up the mountain that might have jeopardized the success of our first goal, which was simply to climb.

  DOWNHILL PROGRESS

  As we left Camp IV at 9 a.m. on Oct. 19, I went first. After we skied for a minute on a relatively gentle 45-degree slope, the Lhotse Face became significantly steeper ahead—so steep that I couldn’t see below, and the patches of snow among the blue ice that I had easily been linking together now became fewer and farther in between. I stopped, looked uphill, and when Rob and Jimmy came into sight made the X sign with my ski poles to signify that this was a very dangerous route and maybe they shouldn’t follow me. But knowing we were all still going to ski it, I next made an enormous shrug of my shoulders with my ski poles as extensions of my arms to show as if to say, “I don’t have any idea how to make it any better, so you choose.”

  The face was over 5,000 vertical feet of an uninterrupted 55 degrees and the type of terrain with zero opportunities to stop and rest safely. Although we didn’t speak about it, I was aware that if one person made one mistake, they would have been unrecognizable at the bottom. There were mandatory moments of having to leave the relative safety of a patch of firm snow and ski across frozen bare blue ice dotted with small rocks and ball-bearing-size pieces of white ice in order to reach another patch of firm snow on which to make a ski turn. Each of us remembers feeling as if we were free-soloing down a 5.13X slope (climbing grade for a route with consequences where death is a real possibility).

  At times I wouldn’t see Jimmy or Rob for 10, 20, or 30 minutes at a time. Each one of us had a simple light glacier ax but no rope beyond small pieces of cord and no rescue gear beyond the standard personal crevasse rescue kit. At only one point during the almost two-hour descent did I come close enough to Rob to have a conversation. He asked, “How are you doing?” I replied, “I am scared and I don’t want to die.” He said, “Good. Make a plan and keep going.” And we continued down.

  TEAMWORK ALL ALONE

  We had studied the face, and we had watched the film The Man Who Skied Down Everest, so we knew that after arriving at the house-size boulder where Yuichiro Miura had fallen, we would have to move a bit to the right to cross the bergschrund at its narrowest point. The easiest crossing still required what I will call a lift of our ski tips. Not qui
te fully catching air, but yes, it was a small gap jump. I had to psych myself up for it in order to hit it safely with speed.

  Now that I have lived it, I am not convinced of the theory that Everest is seeing more snow during the post-monsoon season, especially as our climate continues to change. While we were acclimating in September, there was such a storm that all the snow avalanched our planned route off the Lhotse Face and we had to start from scratch again. And it is Everest, and so then the wind blew.

  I do know that the days are shorter and colder with a summit date in fall instead of spring, yet I wouldn’t do anything differently next time—if there was a next time, which there won’t be. Being part of a team is inherently about self-reliance and working together, so if our bond is stronger because of the season and our experience alone on the mountain, then that’s the way I like it.

  —KIT DESLAURIERS The first woman to ski from the summit of Mount Everest, Kit DesLauriers has also accomplished several other first ascents and is an accomplished rock climber as well.