Flying Off Everest (17 page)

At Dolalghat the Sun Kosi turns gradually to the southeast, flowing through a wide, deep valley separating the slightly lower,
green-covered Mahabharat Mountains to the south and the high, white-crested Himalaya to the north. Over the next 175 miles, it drops an average of 10 feet per mile until finally reaching Chatra and the start of the Gangetic Plain, where it flows steadily, if not more slowly, onward toward the sea through India, where it eventually merges with the holy Ganges. As it pours through the valley between the Mahabharat Mountains and the Himalaya, the river meets with myriad other tributaries emptying down into it from high in the mountains, primarily from the north, including the Tamba Kosi, Likhu Khola, Majhigau Khola, and Dudh Kosi, along with the Arun and Tamur, eventually, near Chatra. Thus draining the majority of eastern Nepal.

The amount of water in the Sun Kosi increases considerably with the flow from these tributaries. In November, the dry season in Nepal, the amount of water in the Sun Kosi moving past any given point along its banks at Dolalghat is about 3,500 cubic feet per second (cfs)—enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool approximately every twenty-five seconds. Just over 50 miles downstream, where Babu and Lakpa’s team was about to put in, just below the Dudh Kosi confluence, it’s approximately 11,000 cfs—a typical flow for the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Just a little farther on, at Chatra, after the Arun and Tamur confluences, the flow is regularly over 28,000 cfs. And that’s when the Sun Kosi is low.

Starting with the onset of the monsoon rains in June, when Lakpa, Babu, and their team were putting into the river, flows just below the Dudh Kosi confluence often jump to over 21,000 cfs within a matter of days. Each individual drop of water falling from the sky combines with the ones next to it, slowly flowing downhill to meet with others, until finally they become a massive wall of tumultuous whitewater. By July there’s typically more than 100,000 cfs flowing past the same spot—enough to fill nearly two and a half Olympic-size swimming pools in two seconds. At these levels small ripples turn into 10-foot standing waves followed by recirculating holes large enough to swallow a bus.
Whirlpools form in eddies capable of consuming and submerging an entire kayak. Paddler included.

And that’s not to mention the continual threat of a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF): in short, an entire glacial lake emptying into a river drainage at the drop of a hat. And it happens with some regularity all across the Himalaya, about once or twice every decade, give or take. It occurs after a large, semisolid geological feature, such as a glacial moraine constructed of loosely consolidated stones and ice, suddenly bursts from the pressure created by the thousands upon thousands of tons of glacial meltwater that has been collecting behind it for years, sometimes centuries. This, in effect, unleashes hell.

In 1998 Manish Rai, a Nepali raft guide trainee of the same caste as Babu, was paddling a commercial group’s gear raft downstream just north of the Dudh Kosi confluence, near the same spot on the Sun Kosi that Babu and Lakpa were now standing, when a GLOF hit, pouring down from the Dudh Kosi drainage. In an interview with Peter Knowles, author of the guidebook
White Water Nepal,
he later said, “It was as if we were paddling uphill. As if the river was backing up… the water was like liquid mud, chocolate brown color and there were big trees and the remains of houses being tossed around and swirling in the current.” Within twenty seconds two of the three rafts in his group flipped, including the one Manish was rowing.

Manish managed to clamber back on top of the raft, which was miraculously flipped back upright amidst the swirling chaos, but was flushed downstream, alone, after discovering one of the oarlocks—the part of the rowing frame that attaches to the oar itself—had been sheared clean off. The rest of the group made it to shore. Two safety kayakers took after him. One pulled out a mile downstream, fearing for his life. The other, a Nepali named Tarka Kumal, continued his pursuit.

“I saw my friend Tarka and I cried for him,” Manish told Knowles. “I shouted, ‘Please don’t follow me! Please don’t follow me!’ I felt that I would probably die, but I did not want my friend to die with me.”
Swimming to shore wasn’t an option. “This seemed certain death,” Manish went on to say. “There was no flat water—just huge waves and sometimes we crashed into a tree or a log. The water was this horrible brown color, there were masses of dead fish floating on the surface and I then saw Tarka hit and capsized by a huge log and I lost sight of him.”

The raft Manish was in continued to capsize, repeatedly. “I thought that it would never end,” he says. “I had given up hope and just prayed to my gods.” He and Tarka were eventually pulled out of the river, half-drowned, several miles farther downstream by villagers. Manish’s eyes and nose were completely blocked by mud. After washing them out, he realized that he had also lost his shorts in the fray. He had been stripped naked by the force of the water. They were evacuated by helicopter a few days later.

The sun rose slowly behind the hills to the west of the gravel bar where Lakpa, Babu, and their support team were camped. The sky was a crisp blue framed against the valley below: a long, green shadow with a dark, churning white-orange river pushing through it. The air was cool but not cold. It was to be Lakpa’s second day of kayaking, the start of a 300-plus-mile paddle to the Bay of Bengal. As Krishna prepared breakfast on a small gas stove, Lakpa asked Babu for the names of the first rapids they were going to encounter that day.

“Jaws,” Babu says. “And Dead Man’s Eddy.”

Lakpa proceeded to put on his gear, his spray skirt first, stepping into it just like he would an actual skirt, as Babu had shown him the day before. Sand stuck to the edges of the oval-shaped neoprene, which was still wet with dew from the night before. Then he pulled his PFD over his head and cinched down the two buckles on each side, so that it would cinch-shut the top of the spray skirt’s neoprene tunnel that was around his waist, which would help keep more water out of the boat. This Babu had also shown him the day before, after they had
practiced paddling in the calm eddy next to their camp. Lakpa then put on his blue skateboard helmet with the Nepali flag sticker, which he had worn on Everest, picked up his paddle, and wedged himself legs first into the front cockpit of the tandem kayak. The balls of his feet touched the adjustable bulkhead in front of him, which Babu had set in place for him the day before, making sure that Lakpa’s thighs were pressed firmly against the concave foam-padded thigh braces located just under the cockpit combing once it was set. This, he told Lakpa, was so that he could use his lower body to adjust the tilt of the boat in the water. Why, exactly, he would want to do that, Lakpa had absolutely no idea.

Pete Astles, Babu’s friend and paddling mentor who shipped the tandem kayak, has paddled the Sun Kosi from Dolalghat to Chatra three times. He describes Dead Man’s Eddy like this: “The river goes to a right-angle bend. There’s a huge cliff, and it creates a massive eddy line, just a real swirling whirlpool. All sorts of stuff gets caught in there.” The “stuff” he’s referring to often includes dead human bodies, hence the rapid’s name. As a part of local tradition, the bodies of the deceased are regularly put in the river, which is considered holy and, in general, a good place to be if you’re dead. These bodies, like all other floating things in the river, eventually get caught in the recirculating currents found in eddies along the riverbank, where water moving downstream is forced back up to fill a hole created by an obstruction in the current. Dead Man’s Eddy is one of the largest and strongest of these features on the Sun Kosi. Placed along a sharp right angle in the river, the water hits a massive headwall, creating a nearly river-wide whirlpool. Half the current goes right, downstream; half goes left, back up against the cliff. The left side is more than capable of holding a kayak, raft, or human body—live or dead—within its vortex for an extended period of time. At lower water it’s a manageable Class II maneuver to avoid it. At high water it’s deadly.

Nim Magar, a co-owner of Paddle Nepal, the company that supplied the support raft and crew, and one of Babu’s best friends, has
paddled the Sun Kosi more times than he can remember. He has guided the run commercially for years. “We always scout Dead Man’s Eddy,” he says. “At some water levels, we can sneak around to the right.” Otherwise, he and his guides always make their clients walk around. “It looks simple,” he says, “but if you get in there, it’s too difficult to get out. Lots of people have died there. You can’t cross swimming in the main current. You’d go around and around and around…. We don’t want to see a customer go in there. Even if we go in there, we can’t get out.”

He had warned Babu about Dead Man’s Eddy and asked him not to run it, knowing that the water would likely be at a medium to medium-high flow. “I told Babu, ‘You guys need to run safe lines,’” Magar says. He would send his gear and staff only if Babu and Lakpa promised to not run “crazy rapids.” Dead Man’s Eddy was one of these crazy rapids, the craziest at medium-high water, in Magar’s opinion. “You do it on the safe side,” he told Babu. “And they said OK,” he recalls.

Before Dead Man’s Eddy, however, there was Jaws to deal with first: a difficult, long Class IV wave train littered with massive holes capable of flipping a 16-foot raft like a pancake. Most of these holes are stacked near the top of the rapid. Only a few hundred feet separate the run-out of Jaws and the lead-in to Dead Man’s Eddy. A single, large eddy is on river right,
*
where Babu and Lakpa would need to be if they wanted to avoid going into the massive whirlpool on river left. It’s easy to hit if you’re in your boat and in control. It’s not if you’re swimming. The majority of the current feeds left, toward Dead Man’s Eddy.

In October 1999, during a period of high flow on the Sun Kosi (over 50,000 cfs), an experienced forty-four-year-old kayaker named Jim Traverso flipped amidst the large exploding waves that make up Jaws. A fellow kayaker in the group managed to reach him but was
unable to pull him to shore before a huge surge of water separated them just above Dead Man’s Eddy, pushing Traverso left, into Dead Man’s, and his rescuer right, to safety. It was the last time Traverso was seen alive. All of his team members’ efforts to retrieve him failed, including an attempt at paddling into the recirculating eddy themselves, as well as descending the cliff from above. The accident report filed with American Whitewater soon after the incident stated:

His body was never found.

Babu knew that Jaws probably wouldn’t be a good place for Lakpa to learn how to swim. Just in case, however, he proceeded to instruct his friend on the finer points of surviving a rapid outside of a kayak, before they actually pushed off from shore that first morning into the mouth of Jaws. The general strategy is to lay on your back, not entirely unlike a sea otter, with your feet up in front of you, facing downstream, and to back paddle with both your arms at an angle slightly against the current so that you eventually make it to the riverbank and into a calm eddy. This, in theory, allows you to push off any obstructions in the river with your feet, as well as keeps you from getting a foot caught on something below the water, which would likely kill you. If there’s something downstream that you desperately need to avoid—say, Dead Man’s Eddy—you can, in a pinch, switch over to swimming on your stomach, face-first, and kick with your feet. Although this is not overtly safe—if you were to hit an obstruction, you’d peg it square on your nose—it does get you where you want to go slightly faster,
and that’s a risk worth taking when the other option is likely a vicious beating and/or drowning.

According to Lakpa, Babu told him that, no matter what, they needed to both end up in the eddy on the right side of the river at the bottom of Jaws, whether they were in the kayak or out of it. He also showed Lakpa how to grab the loop attached to the front of his spray skirt and pull it off the cockpit combing, if they did happen to flip over and he couldn’t roll them back over. This way, Babu explained to Lakpa, he wouldn’t become trapped in the boat, upside down.

After giving his quick introduction to basic whitewater safety, Babu clambered into the back of the two-man kayak and prepared to paddle a boat that was nearly twice the length of the kayaks he was used to into a Class IV big-water maelstrom with someone who had no idea how to even swim. Krishna helped to push them free from the sandy beach and into the calm eddy in front of their camp, which was now disassembled and packed neatly away in waterproof drybags in the back of the gear raft. Shri Hari mounted a GoPro to the bow of the kayak and then got in the raft along with Madhukar, who was rowing. Resham, who was in his own solo kayak, along with Krishna, paddled alongside the raft for safety—Krishna having already been assigned as Lakpa’s personal on-water savior. They paddled for almost an hour before Lakpa saw the horizon line of the river drop-off suddenly in front of him. A haze of white mist rose up from the darkness below, the jungle rising behind it. The sound was like thunder. It was Jaws.