On top of the world with Mount Everest’s rescue pilots

With earthquakes, avalanches and more to contend with, meet the men saving lives in the Himalayas

The Khumbu Icefall is the most dangerous square mile on the planet. A groaning mass of contorted ice pillars as big as six-storey townhouses, the infamous stretch of glacier on Everest’s western approach is lacerated with bottomless crevasses. To cross it takes between four hours for a seasoned professional and as long as 12 for those who have not yet acclimatised to the altitude. On a typical expedition, the way is paved at first light by a team of sherpas who deploy an improvised tightrope of ice screws and rope and ladders to ford the monstrous chasms.

‘The worst thing is the noise,’ says Joe French, an Everest veteran whose recent climbing history has been pegged dramatically to the whims of this vast ice field. ‘The whole time you’re on it, it’s making these awful creaks and groans. It feels like it’s speaking to you, warning you.’

That’s something of an understatement. As soon as the morning sun hits the Khumbu Icefall, the frozen monoliths begin to deteriorate rapidly. ‘The thing to remember is that this ice wants to make its way to the bottom of the valley,’ says Joe. ‘Millions of pounds of pressure is slowly building up behind these gently creaking blocks of ice. The whole thing is a dam of monumental proportions.’

At lunchtime on the 25th of April 2015, the dam broke to catastrophic effect. The 7.8Mw earthquake that devastated huge areas of Nepal and caused unfathomable loss of life in the country was felt just as savagely on its most famous peak. At 11:56am, an enormous avalanche began to career down the Everest Massif, tearing from the Pumori peak towards Base Camp at an incredible speed. When it came into contact with the icefall, the effect was that of match dropped into a barrel of gasoline. ‘There was this horrendous noise, followed by the most terrifying sight I have ever seen,’ remembers Joe, who was making his way back to Base Camp for lunch when the earthquake hit. ‘A vast wall of ice and debris coming down directly on top of us.’

Twenty-two people were killed in the avalanche and its aftermath. It is the most deadly day in the mountain’s history.

Accounts from the 24 hours that followed are understandably sketchy. Joe’s own recollections are a fever dream of missing colleagues, blunt trauma, improvised triage, and the life-affirming coming together of communities. On one thing, however, he is resolutely clear: ‘Without the helicopter pilots and their efforts, I am absolutely certain things would have been a hell of a lot worse.’

It’s 6.30am local time when I first speak to Jason Laing. He’s at his home in Queenstown, New Zealand, and when I mention that I’ve just finished reading an article about him on the town’s local news site, he sounds amused and genuinely surprised: ‘Oh, there’s some stuff about me online, is there?’ It would be far more surprising if there was nothing at all. Jason is perhaps the most experienced high-altitude helicopter pilot in the world, having served six seasons in the Nepali Himalayas.

And, though he’d never mention it himself, he’s also the most decorated. The awards came in recognition of his work in the wake of the earthquake – extraordinary efforts that are belied by the matter-of-fact understatement with which Jason talks about them. When I ask him about the April 2014 avalanche (the devastating earlier collapse of the Khumbu Icefall that trapped and killed 16 sherpas), he sums up his involvement in a six-word shrug: ‘I got pretty busy up there.’

In reality, Jason operated near the limits of his helicopter for several hours, flying solo missions. From a point around 20,000ft, Jason used a 100ft longline to lift the sherpas from the snowfield and carry them to safety. By the end of the day, he had single-handedly rescued four injured guides and retrieved 12 of the deceased. It is considered the biggest high altitude rescue operation ever.

‘My boss chose to put me in that position because of my skill,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t the only one there on that day. But I seemed to get a lot of the recognition for that, and it sort of went global. You’re really only a link in the chain, and you just get it done in the hopes that the rest of the chain can do the best job.’

But he is a far more crucial link than he imagines. As the most experienced pilot on Everest, Jason is a bridge between the realities of the mountain and the best-laid plans of the greenhorn pilots that arrive each season at the Simrik base. ‘It’s one of the toughest places to fly on the planet,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to pass on my experiences to the newer guys.’

But some lessons have to be learned first hand. ‘One day, early on in my time there, I was sent to Camp 2 [a muster point at 21,000ft] to retrieve an Italian who was about to lose his hands to the cold.’ I’m speaking to Ryan Skorecki, an Atlanta-born, Antarctic-trained pilot who was scouted for the Nepali rat race by Jason. ‘The weather wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, so I was confident going in. Finally I see them, and begin to make my way over. But in the five minutes that I’ve been distracted, looking for the spot, a fog had settled in the valley. It filled the valley like cement.’

Once he’d loaded his injured cargo into the helicopter (alongside an Indian climber with severely frostbitten feet), Ryan prepared to make his descent. ‘But then I look up, and I’m just horrified. I can’t see a thing. The entire valley is white with fog. Two injured passengers, 21,000ft, 15 minutes of gas, zero visuals. And I’m not acclimatised.’ Suddenly, a small gap broke open in the cloud, and Ryan was able to make a frantic dash for the sky. ‘I got lucky,’ he exhales. ‘If I hadn’t, the helicopter would still be up there. I can’t say what would have happened to those two passengers. But I would have been coming down in a bag.’

Joe French is telling me what it feels like to die. ‘Ice was flooding my mouth and lungs, I was being buried and pelted in debris, and I was deafened by this horrendous roar,’ he recalls. ‘But all I could think of was how stupid I was for leaving my rucksack open.’

Seconds after the avalanche hit the Khumbu Icefall, a succession of vast seracs (the huge teeth of ice that makes up the icefield) had torn away from the glacier and exploded like a chain-reaction of nailbombs in the valley. ‘One part of my mind was rushing round and round, saying, “You stupid bastard!” and thinking about my kids, and scolding myself for leaving my rucksack open – I was fixated on this bloody rucksack!’ he remembers. ‘And then there was another part of me that was sort of outside of that, observing everything. I think a lot of it was that I didn’t want to let myself be scared of it. No: I was calm and aware and certain that I was leaving.’

And then, seconds later, he was certain that he was not. ‘It wasn’t like a normal avalanche – it was like a bomb had exploded. And somehow, I realised, all the blast debris had missed me.’

Joe dug himself out of the rubble and ran over to the two nearest bodies. ‘They were dying, twitching – two porters who had been picked up and thrown about 200 yards by the blast. They were smashed to pieces.

‘I ran to the Base Camp for help – somehow I thought maybe this was it, that we were the only people that were hit. And then I realised how big a disaster this really was.’

He remembers: ‘The tent poles had been picked up and thrown about, piercing people’s skin and flesh. One of the first people I saw had his face hanging off. I could see his skull.’

Amongst the creaking ice and aftershocks, with communications patchy and confused, the survivors’ position was deeply precarious. ‘We were desperate for helicopters,’ Joe recalls. ‘But there was no way in the fog and the cloud that they were going to get to us.’

The climbers were cut off for the night: dozens dead, many more severely injured, the survivors utterly in the dark as to the scope of the catastrophe. And then, on the morning of the following day, Joe remembers hearing a familiar noise. ‘I’ll never forget the first sound of the helicopter blades,’ he smiles. ‘Everyone looked at each other and said, “Wow, are we going to be okay?” We couldn’t believe it.’

It’s striking how often, during these interviews, that particular sound is brought up. The first time I hear it mentioned it takes on a timbre that I’d never really considered – one of faint embarrassment, of relief tinged with disappointment. ‘I’m a seasoned climber, and I needed to be rescued by helicopter,’ says Robert Kay, an American mountaineer. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing – like a racing driver crashing on his way to work.’

When pilot Ryan recalls it, meanwhile, it’s mingled with guilt and frustration. ‘I was sent to rescue a father and daughter who had severe frostbite at Camp 2,’ he remembers. ‘And, as frequently happens, the conditions change. As I was approaching, I realised that there was no way I could get down and back up through the fog that was pouring in.’ So he had to turn away and leave the climbers there. ‘I knew they could hear the blades of my helicopter. And they must have heard me and thought, “They’re coming for us!” And then I just disappeared,’ he says. ‘I was thinking about that for a while. I got back to Lukla, and I was having beer and pizza, and I thought about them on the mountain, suffering from frostbite – and they could hear me, right there…’

More often than not, however, it’s evoked in broken tones as a miraculous thunderclap from the heavens. ‘As soon as the helicopters arrived, the energy changed,’ remembers Joe. ‘Their efforts were just incredible.’ Lead by Siddartha Gurung, the talismanic head of operations at the Simrik helicopter base, a team of pilots set about transporting 22 of the severely injured from Base Camp to a rudimentary hospital at Pheriche. ‘They landed and took off, landed and took off, refuelling on the go with their engines running, jerry cans being passed down the line. It was like Apocalypse Now on Everest.’

But the weather soon conspired to cut those efforts short, leaving several hundred still at basecamp and more than 200 climbers trapped on the mountain above the collapsed Icefall. The next day the fog lifted, and Jason and Siddartha were able to get to those camps higher up the mountain. In the space of a few hours the team lifted 60 climbers from Camp 1 and 170 from Camp 2, the latter at an altitude within a hair’s breadth of the helicopter’s operating limit. Finally, on the morning of the 27th, Joe and his team were airlifted to safety.

‘I got down in a very overcrowded helicopter that could barely take off,’ he remembers. ‘The pilot couldn’t fly properly, we were so jammed in. We were very traumatised, very relieved, and there was also this guilty feeling – that we were in a helicopter and others weren’t.’ But what affected him most was the attitude and temperament of the pilots themselves. ‘Not only were they flying in these impossible conditions and facing the same trauma we were facing, seeing the bodies, but they’re staying so level and so calm.’

I ask Swiss pilot Lorenz Nufer how that’s possible. ‘It’s very calculated, you just have to treat everything as an analysis, from second to second,’ he says. As far as he is concerned, the risks that we sense at ground level simply do not exist in the air: there are no risks, only calculations. ‘People have it the wrong way round. They say, “The helicopter pilot is the hero, he is risking his life to save others.” But I don’t agree with that. If the pilot is in a situation when he is risking his life, then he is doing something wrong.’

That’s not to say, of course, that he’s immune to the cruelties of the mountain. ‘I was thinking about that a lot, before I went out there. How it would feel to take a dead body down in the heli. I feel that perhaps I can do something meaningful for the relatives, I can help a little bit at this very sad time for them.’

When the time came for Lorenz to retrieve his first body, he tells me, ‘it didn’t feel as strange’ as he thought it would. ‘I think that’s probably because death and life are a little bit closer out here.’ That’s true of the mountain, of course, but it’s also true, sadly, of Nepal as a whole. ‘This is a third-world country,’ says Lorenz. ‘They expect death where we wouldn’t. They have seen it more. It is always close.’

It’s a funny thing, this relationship between climber and pilot. ‘Don’t forget, this is a commercial operation at its root,’ Ryan tells me. ‘There’s a lot of money spent on getting onto Everest, and a lot of money spent on getting off it.’ The more climbers that flock to the highest point on Earth, the more pilots that will be needed to patrol the area. And the more pilots there are, the more climbers will attempt to reach the summit. It’s hard to say whether this circle is virtuous or vicious.

‘They’re facing a difficult future,’ Joe says. ‘They’re the best pilots in the world flying in the most challenging environments, and now they’ve got this increasing expectation from the climbers that they’re going to be able to get rescued as high as Camp 2, no matter what.’

More often than not, though, the relationship takes the form of a simple bond. ‘I’m certain I would be dead if it wasn’t for that helicopter,’ says Robert Kay, the climber who succumbed to high-altitude pulmonary edema as he made his way back down from a summit. ‘I was drowning inside my own lungs.’ Then, after 24 hours spent under the watchful eye of his team and the influence of several shots of adrenaline, a chopper touched down. ‘We dropped from 21,000ft to 9,000ft in a few minutes – and suddenly I could breathe again.’

I ask Robert to tell me the strongest memory of that morning, and he recalls the atmosphere in the cabin as they dropped away from the mountain. ‘Jason was just chatting to me, making sure I was alright, asking about my background, as if this was the most normal thing in the world,’ he says. ‘But at the same time he was saving my life.’ And then he asks the question that thousands more will find themselves pondering as the Everest circus rolls on: ‘How the hell do you thank someone for something like that?’

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