‘No One’s Going Back’: Everest Industry Shut for a
Second Year
Ada Tsang remembers the ground
shaking and then trying to zip up a tent flap before the roaring ocean of snow
overtook her. Ice and rocks flew into her face and Tsang, a high school teacher
from Hong Kong, was slammed to the ground, unconscious.
“Everyone just yelled, ‘Run! Run!,’”
she recalled as she recovered in a Kathmandu hospital, her face cut and swollen
and her head bandaged all around. “Eventually it caught up and hit everyone.”
When she awoke, Tsang saw bodies
strewn around Mount Everest, just some of the victims claimed by the earthquake
that rocked Nepal on Saturday. The official death toll now numbers more than
3,700 people, including 19 on the mountain. Those figures will almost certainly
increase.
For the second consecutive year,
fatal natural disasters struck Mount Everest, hitting one of the most important
revenue sources in Asia’s second-poorest country. IHS, a consulting firm, says
rebuilding costs could “easily exceed” $5 billion. That’s about one fifth of
the annual output of the mostly agrarian economy, which depends on tourism and
remittances for foreign exchange.
$50,000
Each
Since New Zealander Edmund Hillary
and Nepali Tenzing Norgay reached the summit in 1953, more than 4,000 people
have followed, creating a sizable industry. Websites for American expedition
companies advertise group trips to the top with western and Nepali guides
exceeding $50,000 per person and more than twice that for ascents with a
personal western guide. For a sherpa, the job provides a salary of up to
700,000 Nepalese rupees, said Bhim Paudel, operations manager for a trekking
company in Kathmandu. That’s about $6,900 in a nation where the World Bank pegs
per capita income at $750.
Paudel said that he knows there are
bodies of guides waiting to be collected at the base camp. He hasn’t had time,
though, to think about compensation for their families.
“Our first priority is the injured
people,” he said. “The dead people are already dead. There’s nothing you can do
for them.”
It’s dangerous work.
“People go to Everest knowing that
there are risks, objective dangers which they don’t have control of -- such as
traveling through the Khumbu Icefall from base camp to camp one, the risk
associated with mountaineering at very high altitude,” said Tom Briggs,
marketing director for Jagged Globe, a U.K.- based company that leads groups to
Everest. “But they don’t go to Everest thinking they might be caught in an
earthquake.”
Estimates
Vary
Estimates vary for how many people
were on Everest when the shaking earth triggered the avalanche.
Paudel said there were about 1,000
at the time, of whom 400 were climbers and the rest porters and sherpas, the
ethnic Nepali group famed for leading hikers up the tallest mountain in the
world.
Ang Tshering Sherpa, president of
Nepal Mountaineering Association, a group that promotes tourism, put the total
at 800. He said he doesn’t expect “there will be more bodies discovered” on
Everest.
It may be many days before there’s
opportunity to comb the mountain and see if he’s right.
A group of light helicopters was
able to dart up to a higher-altitude camp Monday and ferry most of the 180
hikers who’d gotten stuck on the mountainside down to Everest’s base camp, said
to still be inhabited by hundreds of people. An icy stretch between the camps
known as the Khumbu Icefall had been rendered impassable.
While Tsang recalls five people in
her group perished, she says she saw 30 to 40 bodies on the mountain.
Human
Snowglobe
The earthquake was described in a
blog post by a guide working for U.S.-based Rainier Mountaineering Inc., who
was at a camp at another mountain in Nepal, as feeling “as if we were inside a
snowglobe being shaken by God.”
Paudel, sitting in the dimly lit
offices of Himalayan Guides Nepal as six men planned rescue operations,
recalled the 2014 climbing season, which was canceled in Nepal after 16 guides
died in an avalanche. He’s had enough of the mountain for now.
“Hopefully, people will stop coming
this season,” he said.
The state newswire in China -–
Everest straddles the Nepal-China border -- reported on Monday that the country
called off all spring climbs on its side of the mountain.
Briggs, of Jagged Globe, said that
he “can’t imagine” that tours will continue this season.
“It’s difficult to think ahead to
potential, future Everest expeditions,” he said. A Google Inc. executive named
Dan Fredinburg, who traveled to Everest with Jagged Globe, was among the dead.
As she recalled the noise and the
pain of her world turning upside down, Ada Tsang sat near a makeshift ward of
mattresses on the ground under a tarp roof at the Swacon International Hospital
in the capital. Some patients refused to go inside to get treatment for fear of
another earthquake.
As for Mount Everest, she said, “No
one’s going back up after what’s happened.”
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