High Altitude

High Altitude - Chapter 2

Friday, December 6

6:45 AM

I’m on the plane now. The pilots are waiting to get the go-ahead to take off for Lukla, the world’s most dangerous airport; some say the flight to Lukla is worse than Everest itself. Fifty people died in plane crashes at Lukla since 2000. Thirty-three in the last four crashes. Only small planes fly in and out of Lukla. And yet I cannot not go to Lukla. It’s the gateway to Everest. 

Of course I could walk from Kathmandu. But that would take weeks. The plane ride takes about 45 minutes. I sit in the front of the plane, a twin-otter propellor with 12 passengers onboard. My seat is on the right side, directly behind the open cockpit. The two pilots wear sunglasses and bomber jackets. They’re checking the gauges, waiting for the go-ahead.   

Sixty years ago Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali, were the first to successfully summit the mountain which the Tibetans call Chomolungma, and the Nepalis Sagarmāthā. Both of those names mean mother of the world. Chomolungma/Sagarmāthā/Everest stands 29,029 feet tall, and it's getting taller. Shifting tectonic plates drive the Indian subcontinent Northward, which results in about half an inch of growth every year. It’s not much, but it’s only going up. After Hillary and Norgay first climbed the roof of the world, hundreds of thousands of people followed them. Tourism is now the lifeblood of this economy, but those same tourists are tipping the stability of the mountain and of the whole region. 

Of the almost 6,000 summit attempts since 1953, around half succeeded. More than 200 climbers died climbing—a one in 10 chance to never make it off the mountain. Because most times when someone is lost, they’re never found again.

I’m here to climb to Base Camp, the starting point of the summit attempts. What I want to see most specifically is the price of tourism. Climbers bring big dollars to boost the local economy, but they also bring loads of gear, and leave human waste and toxic trash that clog the trails and have already turned some areas into an environmental mess. With no roads for cars and trucks, and only a few airports, waste is either burned or hauled hundreds of miles on the backs of pack animals or porters. At first sight the mountain looks as untouched as when it was first created. But the ecological balance between man and nature is becoming tenuous. An estimated 8 metric tons of waste have been dumped over the last six decades, and much of this waste isn’t degradable. Plastic, metal, batteries, oxygen tanks, artificial fibers, forever part of Everest.

Here I am on my assignment for the BBC and I’ve never climbed a seriously challenging mountain before. The closest equivalent is Mount Baldy, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. Baldy’s about 10,000 feet. I scaled it twice when I was in college.

The first time, me and a childhood friend had to turn around just before it got dark. It had taken us half a day and we were only a few hundred feet from the peak. The second time, we made it to the top and found it iced up. I slipped and injured my back. We didn’t have much sun left, or flashlights so we had to run down the mountain in the dark, the least safe way to do it. At 21 I wasn’t thinking out the consequences too clearly, but I knew we couldn’t spend a night on the mountain, exposed to the freezing cold.

That was still only 10,000. When we land at Lukla it will be 9,000 feet.

The pilots start the propellers. The one flight attendant, a Nepalese woman in traditional dress, a cotton sari called a guniu, checks that everyone is strapped in. I turn around. There isn’t an empty seat on the plane. A few rows away, Suman leans his head back, eyes closed. Sleeping or praying?

The flight attendant tells me I’m sitting right next to the emergency exit row. “Are you going to help if something happens,” she asks with a smile.

I look at her name tag, “Sajita,” and underneath “Yeti Airlines,” green with a white outline of a big foot. I smile, and turn to my fellow passengers. “Of course I’ll help,” I say, laughing nervously.

There’s an axe encased in plastic in front of me on the cabin’s wall. I’m surprised, it could be used as a weapon. But who would hijack a plane here, and for what purpose? If we crash will I be able to cut a hole in the fuselage, opening a way to survival for myself, and hopefully other passengers, too? 

I look around the cabin. There’s an air of excitement among the dozen or so travellers. In the last five minutes I’ve heard German spoken, and Spanish and Swedish. Some of them are headed for Base Camp, but most of them are just on-board to take pictures. 

I mentally check the gear I have in my backpack. Laptop, solar panels, WiFi modem, a panasonic video camera. Plenty to worry about. And carry. I’ve no idea how my body will react to the trail, the altitude, the food. But as the plane moves I too feel the rush of excitement. 

And then we’re off, climbing through the hazy early morning. Kathmandu shrinks below, blocks upon blocks of densely populated housing. And then the slums all around them. The city is a chaotic mess, a huge puzzle missing too many pieces to ever add up.

We soar through the clouds, ears popping as the twin propellers shred pillowy mounds, and the mountains call out over the left side of the plane. Everyone stares left. The city is gone, replaced by green countryside below. Rivers cut deeply in the mountainous ravines. Houses cling to sharply angled hillsides. Dirt trails are now the only roads. Squinting, I see potato fields, rice fields, farmers working the land. Not one car, or a motorcycle, or even a bicycle. This a flight back in time. I can believe there are tigers in those forests below. Yetis even. What will this wilderness show me? What secrets will it reveal?

The flight attendant told me to turn off my mobile, but I can’t help myself. I snap furtive photos. One after the other. The propellers in motion, the mountains close enough to touch.

“Five minutes until landing,” the flight attendant announces.

Stomach churning, head racing, she approaches. I hide my phone. Am I in trouble? 

“Five minutes until landing,” she repeats.

Staring ahead through the cockpit right between the pilots I see no airport. The plane is descending, the pilots seem calm. One has his hand on the throttle, the other on the yoke, the plane’s control column. He pushes the yoke and the plane’s nose lowers. 

I strap my seat belt tighter and start filming. In the camera, I still see no airport. Then, like in a movie with special effects, a sheer cliff shows dead ahead, like a giant’s face sculpted in rock, surrounded by green vegetation. It pulls closer and closer and I command myself to sit tight and keep filming, staring through the camera, we’re headed right for the mountain…...WHERE IS THE AIRPORT?? 

I lower the camera, the sun is right in my eyes, and I realize the sun is in the pilots’ eyes, too, and I still don’t see the airport, just the golden glare of the sun…

And then I see it: the long white streaks of paint shooting off across a tiny gray strip, so tiny it’s choked by vegetation on both sides. This is our lifeline, this tiny gray strip, straight ahead, 500 yards and closing. If something goes wrong it goes wrong now, just a few feet off the ground, at 9,000 feet up in the Himalayas. 

At the end of the runway I see a stone wall. Flashing up in my mind, something I read about Lukla’s airport. There’s a 2,000 foot drop before that wall, into a valley that’s swallowed many lives. We don’t have one  extra yard for a missed landing or equipment failure. I focus on keeping my arm straight and the iPhone’s camera steady while I think to myself: 60 flights a day land at Tenzing-Hillary Airport at Lukla.

We get lower, lower, lower until the twin otter’s wheels touch down. Safe. Alive. 

We taxi before making a hairpin turn, avoiding that stone wall. The whole plane is shuddering from the strain of the landing and the passengers exhale all like one, and clap and yell in excitement. I clap and yell, too. What a landing! And I got it all on tape!

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Later that day, I checked the specifics of the world’s most dangerous runway: only 66 feet wide and 1,500 feet long, with a 12 percent slope. Most commercial runways are more than 8,000 feet. And on flat land.