Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (2 page)

PART I

AMBITION

Rolwaling, Khumbu, and Arun regions of Nepal:
The Sherpas in Chhiring’s village of Beding (center) believe they are protected by a goddess who inhabits the mountain of Gauri Sankar. Pasang grew up in Hungung (far right), which became a war zone as the Maoists wrested control from Nepal’s monarchy.

1

Summit Fever

Rolwaling Valley, Nepal
12,000 feet above sea level

H
is walk was more of a jog. He didn’t drive a car; he rocketed through traffic on a black Honda Hero motorcycle. In the seven languages he spoke conversationally, Chhiring Dorje Sherpa talked so quickly it seemed as though each sentence were one long word punctuated by exclamation points. Everything about him was accelerated: his eating, his thinking, his climbing, his praying. He couldn’t control the pace. Speed was hardwired into his DNA.

His first name meant “long life,” but its pronunciation to English speakers—CHEER-ing—personified him. Cheerful determination radiated from Chhiring. It got him noticed. Clients praised his you-can-do-it, let’s-rock-’n’-roll, give-me-your-pack attitude. It was contagious. How could you sit still in camp when every few minutes he would lurch up, stride forward, chop his arms through the air, make a pronouncement, plop down, and spring up again? There was a reason this thirty-four-year-old dynamo rarely drank coffee. He was caffeinated enough.

“Chhiring was always crazy,” said his father, Ngawang Thundu Sherpa. “He was a naughty child, and I knew he’d be a naughty adult.”

“We have relied on his climbing for income,” explained Chhiring’s younger brother, also named Ngawang Sherpa. “Without his money, we wouldn’t be where we are. But Chhiring became too ambitious. I was always telling him: ‘Slow down.’ ” The family complained that Chhiring’s line of work offended the gods and disrupted village life. His relatives wouldn’t state the obvious: Chhiring’s job could get him killed.

The summit of K2 was a long way from where Chhiring started. Before he climbed mountains, Chhiring lived in Beding, a remote village in Nepal. Wedged between India and Tibet, “
like a yam between two boulders
,” Nepal is on the collision zone between two continental plates. This region of Southeast Asia used to be flat, submerged beneath the Tethys Sea, but for sixty-five million years, the Indian plate, moving north at twice the speed of a growing fingernail, has been jacking up the Tibetan crust, lifting the ancient seabed. It’s now earth’s highest mountain range. Nepal hosts a third of the Himalaya, including the south side of Everest.

Chhiring describes his birthplace as “mostly rock and ice.” About 12,100 feet above sea level, the village of Beding seldom appears on maps, and when it does, it is plotted at different locations and, like many remote villages, goes by different names. Beding is about thirty miles west of Everest in a valley known as Rolwaling. Getting there takes a trek. First, travelers must jostle over a jeep track that ends near a cliff. Afterward, they zigzag up switchbacks, ford rivers, and wobble over chain-link bridges. After six days of lugging their own food and shelter, travelers see the village
chorten
, a shrine painted with unblinking blue eyes, rimmed in red. Symbolizing Buddha’s gaze, the eyes stare down on Beding, inspiring the devout and spooking evil spirits.

Glaciated peaks surround the village, which is constructed of rocks, wood, mud, and dung mortar. A film of gray dust off the moraine coats the children. The air smells of threshed grass, blue smoke billows from fire pits, and the clouds seem so close you could jump up and punch them. Goats, sheep, cows, and yak-hybrids called
dzos
graze on steep terraces that resemble giant staircases. Below, the Rolwaling River shoots iridescent spray into the air.

Sherpas inhabit Beding and the other villages of the Rolwaling Valley. Although
sherpa
, with a lowercase
S
, is used colloquially as a
job description
,
Sherpa
is also an ethnicity, just as Greek, Hawaiian, and Basque are. And the Sherpas are a tiny ethnicity at that: The
150,000 Sherpas
in Nepal make up less than one percent of the country’s population.

Chhiring’s village is often described by a list of what’s missing: antibiotics, electricity, machinery, public sanitation, roads, running water, telephones. Residents lack formal education. Some don’t know how to spell their names or read a clock, and many are told when they were born not by day but by season. A calendar’s main function is to track dates commemorating the life of Buddha.

The Sherpas of Rolwaling seldom characterize themselves this way. They prefer to recognize what they have: faith and a self-reliant community. The gods are near, and neighbors are family. In Beding, locals take time to chat, drink tea, and play
Carrom
, a hybrid of billiards and shuffleboard in which players flick pucks at targets. They have a sophisticated knowledge of folklore, farming, and the region’s topography, and they speak an unwritten language that combines eastern and central dialects of Tibetan, reflecting their long journey into Nepal.
Rolwaling Sherpi tamgney
is spoken nowhere else.

As with many Sherpa communities, the residents of Rolwaling rotate among three villages according to the season. The winter village heats up too much in the summer, the summer village cools down too much in the winter, and the central village, Beding, is more hospitable for crops and livestock in the fall. Residents live off the land, growing and eating
astonishing amounts of potatoes
. As Buddhists, they follow a tradition variously described as Tantrayana, Vajrayana, Nyingma, or, by detractors, Lamaism.

Written history on Rolwaling is hard to come by, and the legends vary, depending on the imagination of the storyteller. Anthropologist Janice Sacherer has studied the Sherpas of Rolwaling since the 1970s. “Piety they have,” she said while discussing the challenges of studying their folklore. “Consistency they do not.”

According to Tibetan scripture, Rolwaling is a
beyul
, a sacred valley formed as a refuge for Buddhists during times of turmoil and hidden until divinely revealed. Guru Rinpoche, who converted Tibetans to Buddhism in the seventh century, is credited with finding the
beyul
of Rolwaling, or even creating it with a
giant horse and plow
. Five centuries later, when Mongols were invading Tibet, the ancestors of the Sherpas moved to Nepal, and Buddhist visionaries told followers about the
beyuls
on the southern flanks of the Himalaya. Full of caves and rock monuments with spiritual properties, the
beyuls
are tributes to Guru Rinpoche and his consort, Yeshi Tsogyel, who aimed to peacefully enlighten all sentient beings.

At the hands of Chhiring’s father and his elderly friends, however, these legends take on a less Buddhist tone. According to them, the Rolwaling Valley is the
center of the universe
and the cradle of life. The world began eight hundred years ago, before time was linear. Guru Rinpoche and his wife were meditating in a cave near Beding. After two days, the couple made a pact to rid the valley of evil. They stormed out and waged war against the demons.

Wings and scales were stripped like husks. Limbs were twisted; fangs, extracted. The demons rallied and tried to blot out the sun, stirring up dust to choke the gods. Guru Rinpoche summoned support, instructing his troops to gouge out their enemies’ eyes. Crippled demons, swooping blindly, plunged into the Rolwaling River. Some of them sank. Guru Rinpoche waded in after the others, forcing their heads beneath the surface. Those who wiggled free of his grasp retreated to clefts in the rocks.

In the end, almost all of the demons were killed or tamed, but the war had taken a toll on the land. Features of Rolwaling’s landscape—a massive rock on a level plain, a deep pit in the hills, a crack cleaving a boulder in two—attest to the battle. Afterward, the gods retired to the mountains, and Guru Rinpoche and his wife conceived five children, who became the genesis of all others. A few stayed. Most left the valley and became corrupt. That’s the rest of us.

These days, the gods are impatient with the world outside Rolwaling. The elders predict that these gods will wipe out civilization fairly soon, maybe tomorrow, sparing only those who live in the valley. They frown upon anyone leaving. Deserters will be butchered along with everyone else.

The younger generation is less concerned. They say the apocalyptic legend is a scare tactic their grandparents use to get them to visit more often. In the standard Buddhist version of the founding myth, Guru Rinpoche traveled across the Himalaya like a sacred bounty hunter, tracking down demons and proselytizing them without the use of force. At that time, five sisters inhabited the crags in Rolwaling. Predating Buddhism by centuries, they were goddesses of an ancient Tibetan sect that demanded blood sacrifice.

As Guru Rinpoche entered the valley, chalk-faced Tseringma, the eldest, sent a snow leopard in pursuit. The guru charmed the cat until it purred and spoke of Buddhism, without pausing to eat or sleep, until Tseringma reformed.

Tseringma ascended a nearby mountain that now bears her name—but known to Hindus as Gauri Shankar—and renounced her diet of human flesh. Tseringma, the goddess of longevity, still lives on the 23,405-foot peak above Beding. Snowmelt from her glacier surges into the Rolwaling River, and its properties are miraculous. Some elders claim to be
120 years old
, thanks to the water’s effects.

After Guru Rinpoche subdued Tseringma, he pursued her four younger sisters. One by one, they repented and became Buddhist deities, moving to mountains of their own. Miyolangsangma patrols the summit of Everest on the back of a tigress. Now the goddess of prosperity, her face shines like 24-carat gold. Thingi Shalsangma, her body a pale shade of blue, became the goddess of healing after galloping on a zebra to the top of Shishapangma, a 26,289-foot peak in Tibet. Chopi Drinsangma, with a face in perpetual blush, became the goddess of attraction. She chose a deer instead of a zebra and settled on Kanchenjunga, a 28,169-foot peak in Nepal.

The final sister—Takar Dolsangma, the youngest, with a green face—was a hard case. She mounted a turquoise dragon and fled northward to the
land of three borders
. In the modern Rolwaling folklore, this is Pakistan. Guru Rinpoche chased after her and eventually cornered her on a glacier called the Chogo Lungma. Takar Dolsangma appeared remorseful and, spurring her dragon, ascended K2, accepting a new position as the goddess of security. Although Guru Rinpoche never doubted her sincerity, maybe he should have: Takar Dolsangma, it seems, still enjoys the taste of human flesh.

Rolwaling is a
beyul
, a frontier community that granted amnesty to refugees. It was thought to be guarded by a powerful mountain goddess. By the mid-nineteenth century, the valley was a popular destination for debtors and thugs to settle down and become pious. At first, famine limited population growth. In the 1880s, the introduction of the potato provided a measure of food security, and the population quadrupled to about two hundred.

The next significant incursion, after the potato, was Edmund Hillary. Two years before he achieved the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Hillary trekked through Rolwaling with a British reconnaissance team, searching for the best route to Everest. The British ultimately chose a different approach, through the Khumbu Valley to the east, but some Rolwaling Sherpas were offered jobs, including
Hrita Sherpa
, who broke trail for Tenzing Norgay and Hillary days before their first ascent.

Rolwaling never underwent development like the Khumbu, where Everest-bound tourists injected money and jobs and Hillary built schools, a hospital, and an airstrip. During Chhiring’s childhood in the 1970s, Rolwaling was the “
most isolated, traditional and economically backward
of all the Sherpa communities in Nepal.”

Traders seldom passed through, and beasts of burden could barely scramble up the banks of scree. The Sherpas relied on local materials and their own labor to feed and clothe themselves. No one owned a cotton T-shirt; yak wool was woven into cloth. Chhiring’s father dressed in a
chuba
, a wool robe secured by a sash over his trousers. In the winter, he wore buffalo leather boots that were padded with dried moss. His mother wore an
ungi
, a sleeveless tunic draped with a blue-striped apron that covered her front and back. To signify her unmarried status, Chhiring’s younger sister wore an apron only on her back.

Chhiring was born in 1974 on the floor of a room that served as his family’s kitchen, barn, and bedroom. The boy—said Chhiring’s father, aunt, and uncle—was a slacker who loved to sneak away and explore the mountains. His relatives still tell the story of his gravest transgression: the time when, as an eight-year-old playing with fire, Chhiring set the hills ablaze. The flames burned the winter reserves of feed, and the animals went hungry. Chhiring’s father beat him with a stick, and, twenty-six years later, still hadn’t forgiven him.

It was a childhood disrupted by death. Chhiring’s younger sister returned from the fields one afternoon with red blisters crawling up her skin. As the pustules clustered on her tongue, she suffocated. Another sister was carrying water from the river when a rock dropped off a cliff and crushed her internal organs. No one could figure out what happened to Chhiring’s two-year-old brother. Perhaps he ate something toxic. One day, his gut inflated. With his stomach painfully distended, the child soon died. A third sister’s birth left Chhiring’s mother, Lakpa Futi, hemorrhaging. Mother and infant died.