Flying Off Everest (6 page)

“He basically pestered me until I took him paddling,” Astles says. Babu followed him and his friends to supper that night and listened intently to every word they said. According to Astles, “He just wanted to learn everything about kayaking that he possibly could.” He couldn’t help but like Babu and his infectious grin. And so he agreed to take him out on the river.

“His paddling just kept getting better and better,” Astles says. “I could tell he was very, very talented right away.” The professional paddler from the UK and his friends showed Babu how to paddle on the river on relatively easy Class II whitewater: how to move with it while sitting inside of a tippy boat approximately the size of a bathtub. How to see the different parts of the river—the waves, holes, pour-overs, sieves, and numerous other features—and how to recognize which ones were safe to interact with and which ones weren’t. They had a hard time believing that Babu had swam some of the Class IV big
water rapids on the Sun Kosi, “just for fun,” when he was a child. They also showed him how to surf standing waves, which Babu caught on to with a flourish. “We would show him new freestyle tricks, and within a few minutes he’d have it dialed in,” Astles says. It takes even expert paddlers sometimes months to master some of the complex maneuvers Babu learned, often in the same amount of time it would take most people to make a sandwich.

That next year, in 2003, Babu and his wife moved into Gaillard’s home to live with him along with his wife and daughter. (Babu had fulfilled his promise to Susmita, bringing her to Pokhara two years after their marriage, though she had never before left village life and wasn’t sure she wanted to.) When Astles returned to Nepal that year for the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, he spent nearly a week paddling down Babu’s home river with him—the Class III-IV Sun Kosi, a relatively advanced high-volume run—to visit Babu’s family in Rampur-6.

Five years after first leaving home, Babu found himself standing on the sandy beach below his home village with a paddle in his hand and a kayak at his feet, a neoprene spray skirt dangling at his waist, a PFD on his shoulders, and a helmet on his head. It was his childhood dream come true. “My first adventure dream,” as Babu puts it. But like most dreams people live to see realized, it wasn’t enough. After visiting his family for a few days, Babu and Astles got back into their boats and paddled downriver, looking for new adventures.

In the years that followed, Babu and Astles ran numerous Himalayan rivers together, including the committing 82-mile Class IV+ Tamur, which drains from Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world, and the infamous Dudh Kosi: the River of Everest.

Starting at 17,500 feet from the toe of the Khumbu Glacier at the base of Mount Everest, the Dudh Kosi runs alongside the main footpath leading to Everest Base Camp, dropping over 13,000 feet in the first 50 miles with an average gradient loss of 600 feet per mile. It’s
a six-day, Class V-VI run, prone to massive flooding,
*
that didn’t see its first kayak descent until 1976.

“There were some pretty stiff rapids,” Astles admits. “Babu would just be like, ‘Ah, possible.’ We would all walk around a dangerous-looking section, and he would just run everything. Always nailed it perfectly, no worries at all.” It was on this trip that Babu first saw Everest.

Gaillard points out, “Babu is not into competition.” However, whenever he did choose to compete, he did well. Babu took second in the junior division at the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge in 2004. The year after, he took second place in the senior division.

Babu was quickly becoming one of the world’s best kayakers, paddling the hardest, most committing whitewater in the Himalaya—and not only with Astles, but with other international whitewater heavyweights too. He befriended and boated with Gerry Moffatt, a Scotland-born, Idaho-based whitewater paddler and adventure filmmaker who was a member of the first successful expedition to paddle the legendary “Upper Gorges” of the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet in 2002. Moffatt also was part of another expedition set up for
Men’s Journal
and the Outdoor Life Network that became the first to paddle North America’s “Triple Crown,” three of the hardest rivers on the continent—Canada’s Grand Canyon of the Stikine and Susitna, and Alaska’s Alsek—in under four weeks. Babu met him when Moffatt set out to become the first person to paddle all of Nepal’s major river drainages. Babu joined him on several of those expeditions. Babu also started paddling with the equally young but highly skilled American Erik Boomer, a world-class expedition kayaker and photographer who led Babu off his first 40-plus-foot waterfall on the nearby Burundi Khola River when they were both nineteen.

“Babu watched me go over the falls first,” Boomer says of his first visit to Nepal in 2003 when he met Babu. “I went over the handlebars, landed upside down, but rolled up fine in the pool below. I’m sure it looked bad. Babu ran it anyway. I think he was the first Nepali to run a waterfall that big.”

Babu spent what little money he earned from working with Gaillard to pay for dozens of expeditions across Nepal to northern India, oftentimes picking up odd jobs along the way to pay for gas and food. “I remember he told me about one paddling trip he took with Gerry Moffatt to northern India,” Boomer recalls. “He was on his own, on his way back to Nepal, and somehow ran out of money, somewhere real high in elevation. And he had to stop for a month and chip rocks to make gravel for a road to make enough money to finish the trip.”

Abruptly, in 2006, Babu switched his career from kayaking to paragliding. The modified parachute of a paraglider (which is differentiated from a hang glider because it lacks a rigid frame) holds the pilot aloft through a series of eight precariously thin-looking support lines, which in turn are attached to a chairlike harness the pilot sits in while operating two “brake” handles dangling overhead, in order to control the descent from whatever high place he or she has leapt from. “It’s a lot like kayaking,” Babu says. “The air moves like water, and you have to read it the same way and anticipate what’s going to happen next.” The only difference is the medium you’re trying to read is all around you, above and below. And you’re in a chair in the sky.

“I don’t know what happened,” Gaillard says, reflecting on Babu’s sudden switch from paddling off waterfalls to jumping off cliffs. “A few kayakers here had stopped kayaking and started flying, so maybe he thought, ‘Why not?’ So he tried it, and he liked it. More than kayaking, I think. So he starts paragliding, and does one day, two days, three days; and then same like kayaking. Now he’s crazy about the paragliding. Starting again. New life, new sport. And he learned very quick,
same as kayaking. He took a course, and now, every day he flies—too much.” As it turns out, being a tandem paragliding pilot happens to pay almost double the wages of safety kayakers and whitewater guides in Nepal. “He can definitely make more money paragliding,” Gaillard says.

The three-day introductory paragliding course Babu took at the lake and nearby Sarangkot was under the tutelage of Swiss pilot David Arrufat, owner of Pokhara’s Blue Sky Paragliding and the head of the recently founded Association of Paragliding Pilots and Instructors (APPI). He is a 6-foot-tall “acro” (acrobatic) pilot with dark, cropped hair; a heavy, slow Swiss accent (which makes him sound perpetually tired); and a rather unique claim to fame: being the inventor of the Rhythmic SAT, an aerial paragliding maneuver that involves going into a spiral and eventually flipping end over end, in midair, repeatedly—on purpose.

“Lots of Nepalese ask me to teach them how to fly,” Arrufat says of his and Babu’s first meeting in Pokhara. “But they want me to give them everything for free. Babu tells me, ‘I want to learn. I don’t have money, but I can work.’ I say, ‘OK, tomorrow you start.’ Many come and say, ‘I want money,’ or ‘Give me a glider.’ He’s the only one to say, ‘I can work.’” So Babu told Gaillard he couldn’t work for the Ganesh Kayak Shop anymore and started from the bottom, cleaning and organizing gear and cooking meals for the instructors and participants at Blue Sky Paragliding in exchange for flying lessons. He was on a new adventure.

That same year, Astles took Babu mountaineering for the young Nepali’s first time on 20,305-foot Island Peak, a relatively easy “trekking mountain” near Everest in eastern Nepal. It typically requires nothing more than a strong pair of legs and lungs, along with guidance from hired sherpas, to climb. Moffatt’s Kathmandu-based guide company, Equator Expeditions, led and helped fund the expedition. Bad weather and Babu coming down with a severe case of altitude sickness stopped them from reaching the summit; however, the rarified air had,
along with inducing a white-hot migraine, planted an audacious idea in Babu’s mind: paraglide off Mount Everest.

He discussed his idea with Arrufat and Astles shortly after the expedition, while eating dal bhat together in the shade at a small restaurant by the lake after a day of flying.

“He was really kind of proud to take us to dinner and tell us his idea,” Astles says. “We didn’t dismiss it immediately, but we kind of looked at each other and thought in our own minds, ‘That’s kind of crazy.’ We said, ‘Oh, wow. That’s an undertaking.’ That was it. He kind of stunned us with this idea, I think.”

Babu then asked Arrufat if it was possible to fly a paraglider from the top of Mount Everest. “It’s possible,” Arrufat told him. “But I think you should learn to fly a little better first.”

Pete Astles was sitting at his desk in his office at the Peak UK building in Darley Dale, England, checking his e-mail, when he received an unexpected phone call from Babu, asking him for a tandem kayak. And quick. “To paddle to the ocean,” Babu explained excitedly over the receiver. He told Astles that he needed the boat within the month; that he had met a climbing Sherpa named Lakpa who was going to take him to the top of the world, and then jump off of it with him, and then paddle to the Bay of Bengal. That their weather window was closing, and that they were leaving for Everest Base Camp within the month. He also told Astles that Lakpa had never kayaked before and didn’t know how to swim. It had been over five years since Astles and Babu had sat by the lake in Pokhara and had their first, and last, talk about Babu flying off of Everest. The idea of paddling to the ocean was completely new to Astles.

Miraculously, Astles not only believed Babu, but also agreed to help him without hesitation. He immediately dropped everything he was doing and began trolling the Internet, trying to find a boat for Babu and his new Sherpa friend who apparently couldn’t swim.

“I’ve got contacts within the industry,” Astles says. “So we quickly found a Perception that wasn’t too long, I thought, and within a few hours we had a boat lined up for him.” The freight company told Astles that he couldn’t get anything into Nepal longer than 4 meters, since only passenger planes fly in and out of Kathmandu. “I had to rethink,” Astles says. The only thing he could find to send that was less than 4 meters but still a tandem was a boat manufactured by Jackson Kayaks: the “Dynamic Duo,” a 12-foot-long, eighty-pound roto-molded polyethylene craft that has an uncanny resemblance to a log and costs $1,450.

“I don’t think it was ideal,” Astles admits, citing the whitewater boat’s exceedingly slow nature on flat water. He knew that the sections of the Ganges that Babu and Lakpa would be paddling were going to be flatter than a chapati. “But with Lakpa not knowing how to paddle or swim, it’s not like they could take two singles,” Astles acknowledges. So he called Babu back in Nepal and told him they’d have their boat by the time they reached the river at the end of May. How it was going to get to the river after arriving in Kathmandu, exactly, Astles wasn’t quite sure.

After five months of flying together around Pokhara, Lakpa and Babu had eventually shared their separate dreams of flying off the top of the world with one another. After a few more weeks of shared daydreaming and several beers at the Pokhara Pizza House, they eventually decided that it would make sense for them to climb Everest together, paraglide from the top, and then paddle to the ocean. It was as simple as that. Babu’s paragliding and paddling experience would make up for Lakpa’s limited paragliding experience and nonexistent paddling experience, they figured; Lakpa’s climbing experience would counterbalance Babu’s noticeable lack of technical climbing experience. Lakpa had led inexperienced Westerners up Everest before, after all. “I trusted Babu’s flying and kayaking abilities,” Lakpa says. “And I
trusted Lakpa to keep me safe on the mountain,” Babu confirms. “So why not?” Lakpa asks. It all made sense, in theory.

They initially planned to do the expedition a few years out, giving themselves time to prepare. After all, the narrow, one- to two-week “weather window” for climbing Everest near the end of May each year was fast approaching.

The weather window is only a few days when the fierce westerly jet stream, a river of air that blasts the summit with winds often over 100 miles per hour, is moved off the summit by the oncoming monsoon from the Indian Ocean and its accompanying deluge of precipitation. Attempt to climb Everest before the weather window, and you risk getting blown off the mountain. Too late, and you’re likely to get stuck on top of the world in the middle of a monsoon-scale blizzard. After hearing from some friends that two other foreign teams were going to try to fly from the summit that year, however, Babu and Lakpa decided to scrap preparedness for the chance to do it first.

The two other people attempting to fly off Everest that year were twenty-nine-year-old British adventurer and television personality Louise Falconer, better known as “Squash,” and the Brazilian mountaineer and paragliding pilot Rodrigo Raineri. Squash, a pretty, short blonde with a perky, if not overtly bubbly, personality, had the self-proclaimed goal of becoming the first woman to paraglide off of Everest solo. Raineri, a strong, dark, thoughtful mountaineer, was doing it in an attempt to raise awareness of global warming and alpine water pollution, which has become a growing problem in the world of high-altitude leisure activities. He figured he would get more attention for his cause if he flew off the top of Everest. Each was named in
Outside
magazine’s 2011 list of “This Year’s Top 10 Everest Expeditions.” And each knew that they weren’t going to be the first person to paraglide off the summit. The French paragliding pilot Jean-Marc Boivin had already taken that prize in 1988. And even he wasn’t the first one to fly off of Everest, or numerous other 8,000-plus-meter peaks around the world. Lakpa and Babu weren’t
aware of Everest’s already well-established aerial stunt history, however. And if they were going to plan an Everest summit-to-sea expedition in under a month, which is exactly what they were proposing to do, it’s somewhat understandable that they didn’t have the time to research it extensively, or at all.

For all practical purposes, free flying in the Himalaya started (or at least was first noticed) on September 6, 1979, when twenty-eight-year-old Frenchman Jean-Marc Boivin—a talented mountaineer, skier, BASE jumper, and pilot with a gift for self-promotion—launched a hang glider from 24,934 feet off the Southwest Ridge of Pakistan’s 28,251-foot K2. Known locally as Chogo Ri, “the Great Mountain,” or in climbing circles as “the Savage Mountain,” it’s the second-highest peak in the world behind Everest. And also one of the deadliest: One out of every four climbers who has stood on the summit has died on the mountain, usually on the descent. It’s also considered to be significantly more difficult to climb than Everest to begin with.

Boivin’s four-month-long expedition was the biggest and most expensive in K2’s history at that point. Over 1,400 porters carried more than twenty-five tons of equipment to the expedition’s base camp at roughly 16,400 feet. There were ten filmmakers, press photographers, and journalists. The climbing team eventually turned down 525 feet from the summit, after attempting a new route to the top, but after returning to Camp IV, Boivin decided to descend the rest of the mountain attached to a paraglider, which the team’s porters had, conveniently, carried over 8,530 vertical feet up the mountain for him. The flight back to base camp lasted thirteen minutes, and in the process, Boivin set the record for world’s highest hang glider takeoff and effectively introduced the world to the novel concept of not only climbing, but jumping off 8,000-meter peaks. The K2 flight won Boivin the International Award for Valour in Sport, a prize given to him at an awards ceremony in London in February 1980.

The first person to jump off the actual summit of an 8,000-meter peak, with either a hang glider or paraglider, was French alpinist Pierre Gevaux, who launched a very early-model paraglider from the top of 26,258-foot Gasherbrum II, the world’s thirteenth-highest mountain, on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 11, 1985. Only three days later, Boivin wound up launching his hang glider from the very same spot.

The paraglider design (essentially an outsize parachute) that Gevaux used on Gasherbrum II had only recently been rediscovered and popularized in Europe. It originally had been conceptualized by a NASA consultant named David Barish back in the 1960s. Barish had called his invention, designed to launch from and sail over gradual slopes in the United States, the Sail Wing (the term
paraglider
originated at NASA). Barish tested the Sail Wing himself by launching it from Mount Hunter, New York. It worked. Then nothing happened. The idea was shelved.

The Sail Wing didn’t catch on until 1978, when French parachutists at Mieussy in Haute-Savoie tried launching their ram-air parachutes by running down nearby mountain slopes. Their experiments soon developed into the rather outlandish sport of parapente, an activity defined best as not quite BASE jumping, in that there was no free fall involved (hopefully), but close, in that you couldn’t really control where you landed all that well. For example, as Lowell Skoog shares in his 2007 article in the
Northwest Mountaineering Journal,
“On a Wing and a Prayer,” a parapente pilot nicknamed “Downwind Dave” had the misfortune of landing in a Canadian Forces rifle range after a flight from Mount Mercer in the Chilliwack Valley, British Columbia. Standing at the takeoff, his friends watched, horror-struck, as he touched down in the middle of a live-fire military zone. A few minutes later, Dave’s voice crackled to life on the radio. “Downwind Dave here,” he said. “I’m fine, but the soldiers are very angry.” Regardless, by the early 1980s most of the major peaks in the Alps—the Aiguille Verte, Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, and Eiger—as well as
most of the major peaks in the US Pacific Northwest had all been descended by parapente.

In the same
Northwest Mountaineering Journal
article, Skoog astutely points out that the media took notice when
Climbing
magazine published a feature on parapente in April 1987. Around the same time, he also notes,
Rock & Ice
magazine,
Climbing
’s main competitor, published another. All of a sudden, people—mainly climbers—outside of the Alps knew what parapente was. And they liked it, he says.
Climbing
’s description of the activity was decidedly favorable at first: “It packs to the size of a small sleeping bag, weighs about as much as an eight millimeter rope, and is used to effortlessly descend in minutes from climbs which used to require hours or days of painful and sometimes dangerous effort … As skis and ice tools expanded the boundaries of alpinism to snow and ice, the parapente makes the sky the limit!”
Rock & Ice
published an article that claimed, simply, “It beats a magic carpet!” The only problem was people were getting hurt left and right doing it: crashing into cliffs, breaking both of their legs, or worse. Soon, proponents of the sport, who still considered themselves climbers first, parapente enthusiasts second, also realized that in order to do it safely, they now needed to plan their climbing trips around flying conditions. It was a tricky proposition. You could climb a mountain in a gale, but you’d be smart not to try to fly off of it in one. And it was a notable and frustrating discomfort to haul a wing up a mountain, just to carry it back down. Paragliding, it was generally decided, at least according to Skoog, was something you did as an end in itself, not a part of regular, ideally safety-oriented, mountaineering.

In a 1992 interview in
Rock & Ice,
Mark Twight, a respected climber and paragliding pilot in the Pacific Northwest, was blunt about it. “It’s useless for climbing,” he said. “It’s the most seductive thing to say, ‘Oh man, I’m so wasted, I’ll just fly down.’ But the conditions are rarely right. I never got over my fear. I’d be on top, and I’d throw up. The most fun for me was packing my parachute after I landed—‘Wow, I lived.’”

Naturally, this didn’t stop people from doing it, and the attention of those looking to fly off the world’s tallest mountains inevitably turned to Everest. In the fall of 1986, US pilots Steve McKinney and Larry Tudor became the first to attempt to launch themselves off the slopes of Everest. And from the outset, flying off of the peak proved to be as much a logistical challenge as a physical one. The idea was to take hang gliders off the West Ridge, on the Tibetan side of the mountain. Chinese customs became suspicious of the odd-looking contraptions, however, and impounded them upon McKinney and Tudor’s arrival into the country. Their friend and expedition mate Craig Colonica, a 6-foot-3, 240-pound rock and ice climber from Tahoe, California, requested their release. “Craig went ballistic,” Tudor later reported to
Cross Country
magazine. “His eyes turned blood red like a deer in your headlights. He grabbed the customs guy, yanked him over the counter and with his face inches away told the interpreter, ‘You tell this guy these are our gliders, we paid for them, we are here with permission from his government and if he doesn’t give us them to us right now I’m going to twist his head from his skinny little neck.’”