Journal
Fracture Line of the Sheep Creek Avalanche
Jason Blevins wrote an interesting article about the Sheep Creek avalanche a couple of weeks ago near Loveland Pass. I’ve known Jason for several years, he’s interviewed me for articles about mountaineering accidents. His latest article talks about group dynamics and how it can play a role in making bad decisions. This is a very real phenomenon that is the root of many mountaineering accidents and I wrote about this extensively in Colorado 14er Disasters and Playing for Real. As for the recent avalanche disaster, I’m not so sure. The article doesn’t point to any specific evidence that group dynamics was the root cause of this accident, but it is certainly possible.
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Ok, this week had an unusual national news story about a big “brawl” on Mount Everest between Sherpas and some climbers. The basic story: A group of Sherpas were installing fixed climbing ropes high on an ice slope on Everest when three western climbers wanted to pass. The Sherpas told them to wait but the climbers decided to continue, allegedly knocking ice chunks down on the Sherpas. When the climbers returned to camp, a gang of Sherpas “…punched and kicked the climbers, [and] threw many rocks as well.” The climbers felt their lives were threatened and got the hell out of there, retreating all the way back down the mountain.
Though this news seems terribly shocking to the western world, it is completely expected to those who know the Sherpas and climbing culture in Nepal. I don’t mean the idealized and glorified image that one or two time visitors might see, I mean the actual culture that is only visible if you don’t close your eyes to it. I have had first hand experience with angry Sherpa mobs.
The first was in a very remote little mountain village called Tashigon in 1994. All expeditions to Makalu pass through Tashigon, an area where Sherpas are indigenous. They feel Makalu is their mountain and thus are entitled to take over porter duties, meaning the money, from whomever you had up to that point. Normally this means you pay off the lowland porters and hire these guys (for three times the price) and they get you to base camp. Well, some of the original porters wanted to continue with the expedition and after a big late-night rakshi-fueled party, the fighting started and the Tashigon-ers pulled knives and drove the original porters running out of town in the dark. Kind of like an inner-city street gang.
The second time was much more frightening. It was in 2003. We had just gotten back to Kathmandu after some peak climbs in the Everest region. Shelly and I wanted to move a bunch of gear from one storage facility to another and we recruited our lead Sherpa to help us. We flagged a little taxi and drove to the outskirts of town where our gear was stored and loaded it up. Just as we were about to leave a gang of Sherpas, who also helped us with our climb, showed up and an argument ensued. Our lead guy freaked out and jumped into the taxi and locked the door, telling us the gang that was gathering, growing to about 20 Sherpas, was going to kill him. I tried to get the taxi driver to leave but he walked away saying they would kill him if he tried to drive away.
This confrontation was the result of some incident that happened between the Sherpas weeks before during our expedition. Anyway, the gang opened the doors of the cab and were trying to drag our leader out. I pushed through the crown and tried to close the doors when a rock about the size of my fist cracked our guy in the face (note the “…threw many rocks” reference in the above story). Shelly tried to get the neighborhood’s attention by running down the road screaming for help while I jumped into the drivers seat and started to drive away. The taxi driver, seeing the blood and Shelly’s running scream, ran over to me and said he would drive us away.
Our guy wasn’t seriously hurt and to tell you the truth, Shelly and I were probably not in much personal danger. But it was freaky to witness this street-gang style revenge. To this day the Sherpas in our local Nepali restaurant called Sherpa’s remember this even though we never brought it up. Word spreads fast among this small ethnic tribe, even when they are half way around the world.
The point of this story isn’t that Sherpas are terrible people. They are quite the opposite actually, generally very happy in life and almost overly friendly. In the climbing/trekking world, Sherpas are viewed as almost super-human in strength of both body and character. But in reality, they are human beings.
Bottom line is this: Helping Everest climbers is a job for Sherpas and an extremely dangerous one at that. It pays well relative to other jobs Sherpas could do, but in comparison to western climber’s wealth, it is miniscule. The highest paid Sherpa on an Everest expedition might make $10,000 over the climbing season (the vast majority make less than $500) while a climber might pay six or seven times that amount just to make an attempt. Climbers are on Everest at their discretion and convenience. These guys who got “Sherpa-handled” on Everest are very well known in the high altitude community. Knowing these personality types, my first impression is the climbers ego got away from them and the Sherpas got pissed off, and it probably wasn’t a single event but the result of many smaller confrontations. No doubt there is more to the story we haven’t heard and probably never will, at least not on the national news.
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Wow, another foot of snow fell in Boulder on May 1! It’s been more like February than May this week. Another pic below, it’s hard to see exactly how deep in the photo but it’s about 8 inches. Four more inches fell after this.
Posted in Journal by Mark with comments disabled.