Climbing to Everest Base Camp Just Before the Nepal Earthquake

You never know what each season's gonna hold,

and for me, walking into base camp,

I always feel excited,

and this path here gives me a feeling

that I don't get anywhere else in my life,

and it's the same feeling,

whether I'm gonna go and climb,

or whether I'm just trekking into base camp,

and it's kind of like going home.

(men shout)

(horns honk)

(bells ring)

We're here now in Kathmandu, which is the capitol of Nepal,

and it's a pretty big and overcrowded city,

and the city itself is sort of

outgrown its own infrastructure.

You know the city of Kathmandu is a sort of

chaotic and crazy place, but it feels comfortable,

it feels like, you know, this big crazy city

where you come and you meet all your friends,

and you can all laugh about the same things,

and you all kind of can appreciate the chaos together,

so it's kind of become my home.

We're on our way right now to go see Miss Hawley,

who is the historian who keeps all of the records

on Everest climbers.

And Suhbin, when did Miss Hawley first arrive in Kathmandu?

Oh, Miss Hawley?

Yeah.

1960.

1960.

So, now it's 2015.

She's been here since 1960.

Taking oxygen,

but my intention is to climb without.

[Crewmember] I'm gonna use oxygen.

[Crewmember] It's true.

[Melissa] It's true.

We're on our way to the domestic airport to fly to

Lukla this morning, and it's always

a bit of a nerve-wracking process.

I think I feel more humble, in a way.

I feel like the first thing that I wanna tell people

is not that I've achieved success on Everest in the past.

It's that achieving success and getting to the summit

is absolutely uncertain no matter what.

I think I've learned that.

We just landed in Lukla in this tiny little Twin Otter.

The plane is about to come to a stop.

There you go.

We're here.

So now it really begins.

These planes are the last motorized transport,

and we're gonna walk the entire rest of the way.

The trek to Everest base camp takes about ten days,

and I've sort of procured this really specific

route that I go, and it's not the typical route

into Everest base camp, but it takes us over two high passes

that are both at around 17,500 feet,

and so we get to base camp feeling a little more

acclimatized than you do on the normal route.

I love taking people, clients, into this journey,

and this place that, you know, we hike for ten days,

and we stay in tiny little teahouses, and all of the

teahouses we stay in along the way are owned by

my friends, and my family, my Nepali family, really.

So there's our first view of Everest,

and we scrambled off of the main trail here

to get this really special little view, and you can actually

see the entirety of climbing on summit day,

from the South Col all the way up the triangular face,

to the south summit and then the summit proper,

and it always is a really special thing to see Everest,

and it has a sort of power, and absolutely a power over me

that's hard to explain.

We're up here in Namche,

which is at 11,200 feet, and it's the Sherpa capitol.

It's one of the biggest villages

in the entire Khumbu Valley.

And for me, coming up here is sort of like going home.

If I have any village that feels like home for me,

it's this one, and the family that lives at this house

has really become my sort of adopted Sherpa family.

Rituals and customs are completely central to

the Sherpa culture, and a scarf around your neck

to say goodbye to you and wish you luck

when you're leaving, and it's called a khata,

and I have that experience

in nearly all the Sherpa homes that I go to.

Oh, yes, love to see her, yes.

I feel like she's my daughter, second daughter.

She's, she has done a lot of things,

I mean, the amazing, you know, she's an amazing girl.

But, you know, she's so kind, she's so good to everybody,

and she has very good heart.

That's the most important thing.

We are doing this.

This is happening.

I think the first word that comes to mind about

Melissa's relationship with the Sherpa and the people here

is just genuine.

She's genuinely family, in all of the places that we go.

She cares, and they care,

we're playing with kids and families,

and we're welcomed like family everywhere that we go.

So we're here in Thamo about about 12,000 feet,

and this is the village that Chhewang Nima was from,

and he died while we were climbing together.

It was, you know, one of the biggest tragedies of my life,

and I came directly to, to this house,

after he died to tell his wife, and to see his sons,

and, it took a little time, but the idea for

The Juniper Fund, for me, it was born out of

watching the grief process for Lhamu Chhiki.

You know, I think that I feel so fortunate

that we have a support system in place

for families of local workers who are killed

while working in the mountains.

You know, it is a new purpose, and I'm not doing this

because it's a nice thing to have on my resume.

I'm doing this because it's something that I absolutely

think is vital to fulfill an obligation that we have

for utilizing the services of local workers.

We have to support their families when things go wrong.

We have to be able to do that.

We woke up this morning to thick clouds and

a light dusting of snow that had continued from yesterday,

so we think it's time to get out of Gorak Shep

and head into base camp.

We're gonna start walking, and in a few hours,

we're gonna get to base camp,

and that's gonna be our home for the next couple months.

Our Everest base camp is at around 17,800 feet.

Everest base camp is quite a strange place.

It's nothing like anywhere else I've ever been in the world.

You can have a lot of climbing experience elsewhere,

but it's still totally different from anything

you're ever gonna experience anywhere else.

I would guess around 800 people right now

at the start of the season who are gonna be climbing.

That's a lot of people, and so it requires some

communication and coordination to make sure that

everybody's trying to climb as safely as possible.

[Journalist] Take us back to the day of the earthquake.

So we went and climbed Lobuche Peak on the 24th.

Our intention was to sleep on the summit,

and our entire climbing team of four people

went to the summit of Lobuche, and it started snowing

in the afternoon while we were climbing,

and the snow really continued almost all night,

off and on, and when I woke up in the morning,

the morning of the 25th, it was still snowing,

so we stopped in Lobuche Village to drop off

our climbing equipment and have lunch,

and we were just sitting in the building,

and Ben was sitting against the wall,

and he said, oh, earthquake.

And we just walked a couple hours downhill,

not knowing if the earthquake was anywhere else,

and it's very clearly here in this village,

and it actually looks quite a bit worse here,

so we're gonna keep heading down the valley

and see what we find, but we definitely hope that

nobody at the base camp felt the effects of this earthquake.

And so, we sorta talked about it, like,

where do you think the center of this was?

And I used the satellite phone to call Seattle

and immediately I knew that there was a problem.

I knew that it was bigger than I thought.

And what my goals are, and what my desires are,

just don't matter right now.

(wind blows)