Eerie Music, Then a Roar of Avalanche

The hiss was now becoming a roar--the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow--but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.--”Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken

Charles Wright thought he heard a flute. The sound lilted across the Ngozumba Glacier, sweet, melodic, enticing.

And quite impossible, Wright thought. He considered himself a rational chap; he was a recent graduate of London University, a sensible person with no tolerance for tales of the paranormal, rubbish like that. Here they were, he and his chums, about 16,000 feet above sea level in the heart of the Himalayas, well out of shouting distance of any human settlement, on top of the world, practically, jagged peaks all around, and they could see--it was plain--that no one was playing a flute anywhere near them.

Wright’s friend Jimbo--James Ryan--spoke up. “Did anyone hear that flute?”

So Jimbo heard it too. This was weird.

Then Adrian Valley, who seemed to know a bit about Nepalese lore, said something Wright would remember to this day.

“Ooh,” he said. “That’s death in the valley. That’s a harbinger of doom.”

Three hours later, the storm struck.

It came churning out of the Bay of Bengal and struck Nepal unexpectedly around noon that Thursday. It was Nov. 9, 1995, smack in the middle of Nepal’s dry season, when tourists from all over the world come to hike in the crisp fall air.

For 36 hours, rain lashed the lowlands and snow cascaded over the mountains as if poured from a vast celestial pail, 1 foot, 6 feet, 10 feet. It covered the mountains like a thick coat of cement, but unlike cement it would not dry and harden.

It would slide.

It would slide in uncounted avalanches across the spread of the Himalayan range. It would slide in explosions of snow capable of blasting apart a building with just the winds they pushed ahead of them.

When it finished sliding, 61 people, including 20 foreigners, would be dead. Hundreds more--Americans, Europeans, Japanese and Nepalese--would have to be rescued, some plucked from the snow in daring airlifts.

For the survivors, many of them, those days in mid-November were a crucible of sorts, a time of heroic deeds and strange events that brought out the best in people--and the worst.

*

It began as a light snow, a few fat, wet flakes swirling through the thin mountain air.

Michael Saberman trudged up a rocky slope toward Chola Pass. At 17,500 feet, it usually offered a commanding view of the mountains that rose craggy and snow-flocked around it. Now, with the snow falling, there wasn’t much to see.

Saberman was a volunteer firefighter and white-water raft guide from San Rafael, Calif., who had come to Nepal to spend a few weeks working for a rafting company. His river duties done, he had set off into the mountains, something he’d been doing in Northern California since he was a child.

Like thousands of other foreign trekkers, he was expecting pleasant weather. No one had warned him about a storm.

Later there would be recriminations. “What happened to our weathermen?” the Katmandu Post would ask.

As the snow picked up, Saberman crossed the pass. He began heading across a glacier that lay just below it. This was tricky business in perfect weather. Now, the swirling snow made it treacherous.

He picked up his pace, half-running, sucking great gulps of the thin mountain air. He just wanted to get across the glacier.

The snow fell harder.

Across the glacier, he began searching for a route to the village of Dragnag, just short of the Ngozumba glacier.

But trails were vanishing beneath the snow. Saberman began following a riverbed. Just keep heading for lower ground, he told himself. Just keep moving. He thought about what his father had told them on their backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada: Make a decision and stick with it.

He skittered downhill, until at last he saw three people in the distance. He ran toward them, yelling in jubilation, waving his arms. He could see them clearly now: One was wearing a yellow, North Face jacket.

Suddenly, the people began to change. Their human features began to vanish. The bright yellow jacket melted away. And he realized in horror that he was staring at three woolly, snow-covered yaks. He had been hallucinating.

He plodded on through the snow, shaken.

At last, he saw huts in the distance--a village. But this, too, was a mirage of sorts. The town was deserted, its doors padlocked.

He struggled on. The snow kept falling.

Finally, he came to a house where a man directed him to a nearby lodge filling with refugees from the storm. Saberman felt reborn. He had been tested, these last few hours, and he had passed. “Hey,” he told himself, “I’m perfectly OK. What an amazing experience.”

Inside the lodge, he found an Australian, Malcolm Roberts. Saberman introduced himself. For the next 10 minutes, he blurted out his story in a rush of words--he wanted to tell it all, and tell it now.

But there was no need to hurry. They had plenty of time to talk.

*

A few miles away, Palden Sherpa prayed in his tent that night: God give us clear weather and a safe ascent.

The snow had begun that morning, just as Sherpa and his clients--two Americans from San Diego--had reached their base camp beneath 20,000-foot-high Island Peak.

Now it was still snowing. In fact, it was snowing as hard as Sherpa could remember. And it seemed to him that there was something unusual about this snow. Something ominous.

As his name suggests, Sherpa is a member of the tribe of Himalayan highlanders who have guided virtually all Western ascents in Nepal and Tibet. Sherpas are known for their intimate knowledge of the mountains, their rugged acclimation to cold and high altitude, and their sixth sense about alpine survival.

Palden Sherpa’s father, a merchant, had saved for years to send him to college. The father’s hope was that Palden would find a safe job in government, but there would be no such job. Instead, at 23, he was doing as so many Sherpas had done before him, leading tourists into the realm of snow and ice.

Island Peak, four miles due south of Mt. Everest, was supposed to be the apex of Ron and Deborah Plotkin’s Nepal trek. This was the trip of a lifetime for the San Diego couple, experienced hikers and mountaineers who had explored mountains throughout the western United States. So far, it had been a spectacular success--10 days of grand views and beautiful weather. Their typical attire had been shorts and T-shirts.

To Deborah Plotkin, the first snowflakes seemed innocuous enough.

But by 2 a.m., Palden Sherpa had made a decision: The group would have to leave. Sherpa knew what could happen when snow fell hard and heavy on slopes like Island Peak.

He and his five workers packed the luggage on two yaks, but the animals could not budge. Sherpa decided to abandon them--and most of the gear.

He figured they could make it to the nearest village, Chhukhung, in a few hours. They set out, measuring their progress in inches. The cook went first, then the Plotkins, then Sherpa, then the rest of the staff.

The avalanche began as a low distant rumble.

It grew louder as it came, coursing down the mountain, a river of snow.

Then it subsided just as it slid up behind Palden Sherpa, its power spent.

He looked behind. Four men were gone, swallowed by the cascade.

“Oh, God!” Sherpa thought. “They are all dead!”

He spotted some pieces of clothing jutting through the snow. He dug out one man; together, using their hands, they dug out the others. Eventually, everyone was rescued. There was no time to dig out the gear.

“For the next three days and two nights, it was the same story,” Sherpa recalled later. “We will move inch by inch and take shelter at night in snow caves. We had no food whatsoever and nothing to drink.

“The second night, the sky was clear and all of us looked at the moon, the stars and prayed that we be spared and not die.”

*

Not long after Michael Saberman spilled out his story to Malcolm Roberts, the two were joined by four Britons--Charles Wright and his friends, fresh from their spooky flute experience on the Ngozumba glacier.

The six English speakers spent the rest of the storm hunkered down in a wood-and-stone lodge in the village of Na--playing cards and backgammon and talking.

By Friday night, the second day of the storm, they were stir crazy.

Charles Wright awoke before dawn Saturday and was dazzled by what he saw: bright moon, silent snowscape, sky full of stars.

With the break in the weather, the six friends decided to get out and head for the village of Pangka. After two days of being cooped up in a crowded lodge, they were anxious to be moving again. Eventually, they wanted to make their way out of the mountains altogether.

As a first step, Pangka was close enough--maybe 1,000 yards--to seem an easy hike.

The snow made a mockery of that. Part of the way, they crawled, trading positions so the same person wasn’t breaking trail all the time. It was about as easy as slogging through quicksand.

Just colder.

First they worked their way downhill. Then came a grueling climb up a steep slope that looked ripe for an avalanche.

They were scared and tired and did the only thing that made sense, which was to keep going. “C’mon, guys,” Saberman said. “God doesn’t want us to die.”

Not far away, at the top of the slope, the owner of a tourist lodge watched the trekkers’ progress. When they arrived, he greeted them warmly.

There had been an avalanche about 24 hours before, he said. He pointed across the snow, to a field on the other side of a saddle of land. There had been another lodge there, he said, but it was gone now, buried in the avalanche.

Buried with it were 13 Japanese trekkers and their staff--at least 26 people altogether.

Let’s dig them out, Charles Wright said. No--too dangerous, Michael Saberman argued. Jimbo Ryan and Adrian Valley agreed with Wright, and the three young Britons took off for the buried lodge. Saberman stayed behind.

Accompanying the Britons was an experienced German mountaineer, Zbigniew Megneczyk, known to them as Ziggy. The four of them crossed a snowfield, carrying stainless-steel plates from their lodge. There were no shovels. When they reached the site of the avalanche, they began using the plates to dig. It was about 10:30 a.m.

“God, I don’t want to see a dead body,” Wright kept telling himself.

He heard Adrian Valley shout, “I’ve got something here!”

It was a leg, a human leg, jutting out of a pocket in the snow. The foot was clad in black, high-top basketball sneakers. They dug around the contours of the body. It was a young Nepali kitchen assistant; his face bore a beatific look of peacefulness.

After all of Wright’s apprehension, the actual sight of a dead body wasn’t that bad. “Well,” he said to himself, “he’s dead. Let’s look for the next one.”

They soon found him: another cook, still clutching an aluminum pot in both hands.

And then another: a Japanese trekker wearing a bright yellow jacket. His face, too, looked peaceful; his hair, short and black and spiky. Ziggy, the German, began searching through his clothes for some identification. Suddenly, in a calm, clear voice, he said, “I found a radio.”

Now here was something--a two-way radio. Under Nepali law, only climbing expeditions can use such radios. The Japanese had just finished climbing 18,000-foot Gokyo peak.

The companions returned to the lodge, where Michael Saberman was waiting. Back home in California, Saberman did volunteer work with a search and rescue team. He knew how to operate the radio.

“Mayday! Mayday!” Saberman announced. Soon enough, he had his response. Help was on the way.

Saberman, Wright and the others would leave within hours, whisked away on a private helicopter for a fee of $100 each, guaranteed in advance. They were ecstatic to be leaving. And, anyway, there seemed no point in staying.

Beneath that snow, they thought, nothing could be alive.

*

Eighty miles away, Col. Gunja Man Lama strode into his office in Katmandu, the nation’s capital. It was 7:30 a.m., Nov. 11, the first day after the storm.

The storm had been felt in the capital too, but as rain, not snow. Now, with the torrents ebbing, it promised to be a pleasant day, and Lama hoped to slip out for 18 holes of golf in the afternoon.

Lama was considered Nepal’s finest military helicopter pilot. His resume--graduate work in physics, flight training with both the British and French air forces--suggested a sharp mind, a competitive nature and a restless ambition. Since 1980, he had been charged with flying some of Nepal’s most distinguished visitors, including Britain’s Princess Diana.

At 1:45 p.m., a friend called Lama with news from the mountains, some vague business about an avalanche in the Gokyo region.

Lama made some calls. From what he could gather, there might be casualties. Beyond that, it was hard to say. By 4 p.m., he knew he was likely to be heading into the mountains, but not for another day. Under Nepalese law, he was barred from flying at night.

*

After the avalanche, Palden Sherpa continued leading his group toward safer ground. But the snow was heavy and deep and movement almost impossible.

They waded through the snow. They swam through it. Their progress was pathetic--as little as 20 feet per hour at times. After an exhausting, seemingly endless, day, they made a snow cave. There, they spent the night.

The youngest Nepali, an 18-year-old kitchen boy named Shyan Kumar, had been buried the longest in the avalanche. Soon he began showing signs of frostbite.

Like many lowland Nepalese, he was ill-equipped for the severe weather. His canvas sneakers were soaked and freezing. His cloth pants provided little warmth in the chest-deep snow.

Ron Plotkin pulled off his own gloves and gave them to Kumar, who sheathed his frostbitten hands in them.

On the second night of the storm, in another snow cave, he died.

The Plotkins--he is a psychologist, she a teacher of parenting classes--kept themselves going with thoughts of their children back in San Diego. Deborah Plotkin played videotapes in her mind of her children frolicking.

On the first evening after the storm subsided, the group forded a stream. Water coursed into Ron Plotkin’s boots, then froze.

The next day, some trekkers in Chhukhung heard calls for help and began digging their way toward the Plotkins’ group through the snow. The Plotkins and their party slowly waded toward their rescuers. About 5 p.m. that afternoon, the two groups met.

Among the rescuers was Bruce Grossan, a physicist from Berkeley who wrote in his diary: “They are worse off than my worst nightmares. I look with horror at their blue, blistered fingers as I give them my gloves [Ron] and liners [Debbie]. . . . Ron, less athletic, is in worse shape. . . . As I encounter each more miserable, more injured, person, I become really and truly angry. All injuries were preventable with proper clothing and a bit of preparation.”

The Plotkins and their staff were taken into the lodge. Grossan and the other rescuers frantically went to work. They needed to get them warm and dry, and to do it as quickly as possible.

They tore at their boots. Ron’s were especially tough--each wrap of lace was frozen solid.

Finally, with a gigantic pull, the boots came off. Ice clattered to the floor.

*

At 9 a.m. on the second day after the storm, Col. Gunja Man Lama took off in his six-seat French Ecureuil helicopter for some reconnaissance. He flew over the Gokyo area, not far from Mt. Everest, and saw hundreds of people struggling to hike through the deep snow.

A decade ago, Nepal was in no position to respond to a Himalayan catastrophe. Its few helicopters were small and incapable of flying at high mountain altitudes. But the kingdom has since purchased new and better choppers, including a fleet of huge Russian Mi-17s.

Lama was back in Katmandu by noon, in time for a meeting of an emergency task force. They needed to act and act fast, Lama said. And the first thing they would need would be a makeshift morgue.

“I am sure there are dead people,” he said. “We just can’t keep them in the baggage room.”

The next morning, Lama affixed a Bear Paw ski onto his helicopter for snow landings. Flying over the Island Peak base camp--where the Plotkins had nearly been killed four days earlier--he spotted two people, Westerners, who were trying to walk but making little progress in the deep snow.

He flew in close. He could see them waving. He tried to land, but the snow was too soft and too steep. He scanned the landscape. Finally, he spotted a place that looked flat enough to land. He set the chopper down.

He kept the engine running. At this altitude, he didn’t dare shut down. The two trekkers, Germans, tried to walk toward him. But they could scarcely move. They seemed to be making about an inch a minute.

Lama grew worried. Snow was beginning to fall. What if the engine stopped? He had no sleeping bag. He had barely an hour’s worth of oxygen, and wasn’t acclimated to this altitude.

The helicopter began to sink into the snow. He increased power to raise it to the surface. The trekkers were moving so slowly! He couldn’t keep this up forever. Finally, he had to lift off.

He looked down. One of the Germans was holding his head in disbelief. Lama signaled that he’d try again.

He brought the chopper down. Now it was dangling just inches above the snow, about 20 feet from the Germans.

The trekkers mustered all their strength and lurched to the helicopter, but they couldn’t open the door.

Lama had both hands on the helicopter’s controls. He hesitated. But he knew he had no choice. As fast as he could, he reached over and opened the door, then grabbed the controls again. The Germans climbed aboard.

No one spoke as Lama powered the chopper back into the air and took off for the airport at Namche Bazaar.

When they arrived, the Germans hopped out, followed by Lama. Then, and only then, did they speak to him.

Oh, incidentally, they said, we left a Sherpa boy behind.

Lama’s blood ran cold.

Would the Germans have abandoned a German guide? For that matter, would an American abandon an American? There is, in many trekkers’ attitudes toward the Nepalese, a dark residue of colonialism, many people believe.

Hours later, Lama was buzzing over the snow, straining to spot the Sherpa boy. Then he saw him. The boy was in the mouth of a snow cave. On the south of the cave was a steep drop; on the north was a steep and snowy incline. There was no way Lama could land.

He hovered, then gave up.

He flew off on another mission, but he couldn’t get the boy out of his mind.

“Give it another try to save that Sherpa boy,” he told himself.

He returned to the snow cave. There the boy sat, his hands folded in a gesture of thanks. “You must take risks,” Lama told himself. He angled in toward the steep slope. Carefully, he nudged the helicopter down so the right strut was on the steeply sloping snow, the left strut still airborne. He signaled the boy to get in.

The Sherpa boy began crawling. It clearly took all his strength. This time, Lama knew he couldn’t lift a hand from the controls without crashing. The boy would have to open the door by himself.

“And to my amazement he did. And then the unbelievable happened. The boy started going back. I signaled to him to get in. He later told me he was going to collect his baggage.”

*

For more than a week, the helicopters fanned out across the Himalayas, churning up snow along every trail known to be popular among trekkers. The rescuers would pick up 549 people--250 foreigners and 299 Nepalese.

Lama eventually picked up Ron and Deborah Plotkin; they would return to the United States for badly needed medical treatment. Ron Plotkin’s frostbite was especially severe, and would require amputating at least several toes. Several of the Plotkins’ staff suffered frostbite as bad or worse.

“It was,” Deborah Plotkin would later say, “a big vacation from hell.”

*

Forty hours after the avalanche struck the Japanese group at Pangka, a 17-year-old Nepalese boy stirred to consciousness under the snow.

His name was Deepak Pariyar; he was a kitchen aide with the expedition. The last thing he remembered, he was sitting around a fire with three Nepalese colleagues. There had been a loud crashing sound. Blackness.

Now he looked around. All was wreckage and snow. His left leg was buried under a stone; he couldn’t move. He saw his three compatriots lying near him, and reached out to touch one. He was dead.

Then he heard the familiar sound of a helicopter and some thumping noises. Light flooded his icy chamber.

Men were breaking through the snow; they were coming to get him. “I am dead,” Pariyar thought, “and angels have come to take me to heaven.”

*

Charles Wright is living in Australia now, close to the beach, where it’s warm and dry most of the time. He misses the mountains, though. He says he’d go back to Nepal in a minute.

He isn’t one for sentimental claptrap. He hated British newspaper articles that made him out to be a hero. He worries that people will get the wrong idea about his flute story, that they’ll think he’s some kind of nut.

The main thing is, he did OK, he survived, and now he’s getting on with his life. It’s pretty simple, really. Some people died, some people didn’t.

He remembers what Michael Saberman said about God not wanting them to die. And that’s the point, really, isn’t it? “God didn’t want us to die that day.”