Jennifer Hull - Shook: An Earthquake, a Legendary Mountain Guide, and Everests Deadliest Day

SHOOK

JENNIFER HULL

AN EARTHQUAKE,

A LEGENDARY

MOUNTAIN GUIDE,

AND EVERESTS

DEADLIEST DAY

2020 by Jennifer Hull

All rights reserved. Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8263-6194-3 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6195-0 (electronic)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

Cover illustration: Rescue helicopter. Courtesy of Robert Massie.

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

To Jack and Liam

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,

dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your

mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers

flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling

with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a

dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through

miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red

rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone,

and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where

bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the

white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs

upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful

and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you

beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

EDWARD ABBEY

DAVE HAHN The lead guide of the expedition, his childhood was fractured by loss and he struggled to find his way in life until he began guiding others in the mountains. He eventually summited Everest fifteen times.

CHHERING DORJEE SHERPA A professional mountain guide born in the Khumbu and sherpa sirdar of the expedition, he was forced to abandon his childhood aspirations of becoming a doctor or software engineer when his older brother was killed in an avalanche.

JEFFREY JAMES JUSTMAN JJ A burly mountain guide with a fondness for motorcycling and the Argentinian tango, he called upon his eighteen years of experience on the worlds highest mountains as the assistant guide of the expedition.

MARK TUCKER Having summited Everest as a member of the 1990 Peace Climb, he served as the base camp manager of the expedition and was at Everest Base Camp when disaster struck.

HANS HILSCHER The kind and affable CEO of a German technology company longed to climb each of the Seven Summits.

ERIN MACHINCHICK An elite rock climber from the Midwest, she contended with the physiological challenges of stage-three polycystic kidney disease during the high-altitude trek to Everest Base Camp.

ROBBIE MASSIE The strong and fit thirty-one-year-old Minnetonka, Minnesota, native had trained at the YMCA and saved up for five years to bankroll his trip to the highest mountain in the world.

HEMANSHU PARWANI HP Born in India, the forty-six-year-old CEO from Dallas, Texas, viewed the Everest expedition as an opportunity to pursue his boyhood dream while raising money for cancer research.

BONNY ROGERS An acupuncturist and experienced trekker from the Washington, DC, area, Bonny reluctantly accepted her husband Peters desire to climb Everest and later decided to join him for the trek to Everest Base Camp.

PETER ROGERS Having already summited Aconcagua, Denali, Elbrus, and Vinson, he celebrated his sixty-second birthday on the first night of the Everest Expedition.

LARRY SEATON The sixty-four-year-old founder of a construction firm in Napa Valley, California, had previously scaled the highest peaks of five continents but was stymied by illness and injury during the Everest Expedition.

HAO WU After his 2014 Everest attempt was thwarted when an avalanche in the Icefall brought the season to an aborted end, the tenacious venture capitalist was attempting to summit Everest, the final peak in his quest for the Seven Summits, for the second time in two consecutive years.

MISS ELIZABETH HAWLEY An American journalist who moved to Kathmandu in 1960 and never left, she chronicled Everest expeditions for over fifty years, conducting dogged and exacting interviews with elite mountaineers and compiling her records in the authoritative Himalayan Database.

LAMA GESHE The beloved and revered Tibetan Buddhist Lama blessed trekkers and climbers en route to Chomolungma.

BILLI BIERLING A journalist and mountaineer from the Bavarian Alps, she worked as an assistant to Elizabeth Hawley at the Himalayan Database.

2015 MOUNT EVEREST EXPEDITION

This latest disaster comes a year after an avalanche killed sixteen guides in what was then the deadliest disaster to hit the worlds highest peak.

Everest image: Dreamstime.com | Reference map: Hao Wu

MOUNT EVEREST SCHEDULE

Reference map: Hao Wu

10-DAY HIKE TO EVEREST BASE

DAYS 12 Kathmandu

DAY 3 Lukla / Phakding

DAYS 46 Namche

DAYS 78 Tengboche / Deboche

DAYS 910 Pheriche

DAYS 1113 Lobuche

DAYS 1470 Everest Base Camp and Rotations

SHOOK

1 CAMP ONE, EVEREST

More than 25 million years ago, India, once a separate island on a quickly sliding piece of the Earths crust, crashed into Asia. The two land masses are still colliding, pushed together at a speed of 1.5 to 2 inches a year. The forces have pushed up the highest mountains in the world, in the Himalayas.

New York Times, April 4, 2019

In the vast bowl of the Valley of Silence, four canary-yellow tents sat in a row, perched on a narrow fin of glacier, like birds on a wire. Dave Hahn, the lead guide of the 2015 RMI Everest Expedition and his assistant guide JJ Justman were in the second tent. Beside them, clients Robbie Massie and Peter Rogers shared the first tent. On their other side, sherpa sirdar Chhering Dorjee and client Hemanshu Parwani, HP as he liked to be called, listened to tinny Nepali music playing from an iPhone in the third tent. Clients Hao Wu and Hans Hilscher occupied the tent on the end. They had just crawled wearily inside of their nylon shelters, their heads throbbing from the oxygen-deprivation hangovers of their first night at 19,689-foot Camp One, and thirsty and exhausted from their successful morning rotation to 21,000-foot Camp Two. Moments earlier, they had crossed quivering metal ladders over deep crevasses, scraping their crampons on the frozen metal as their gloved hands clutched thin ropes on either side. It was 11:56 a.m. on April 25, 2015. Dave was wiggling out of his climbing harness and JJ was bent over a camp stove melting snow to make tea when they felt the ground move in waves below them. Dave froze. At nearly 20,000 feet on Everest, he suddenly felt like he was in a boat on the ocean. He and JJ glanced at each other and at the same time said, Earthquake!